Much Ado About Nothing and the Taming of the Shrew

by Wynne-Davies, Marion

• ISBN13: 9780333657904
• ISBN10: 033365790X
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2001-04-07
• Publisher: Red Globe Pr

Summary

Much Ado About Nothing and The Taming of the Shrew are two of Shakespeare's most exciting and challenging comedies and the essays collected here offer various ways of interpreting them. The range of approaches covers traditional close reading, feminism, New Historicism, deconstruction, and Marxism, as well as essays on both stage and film productions of the plays. The plays are thus contextualized both historically and in terms of Shakespeare's canon. The introduction discusses the key concepts focused on by the specific essays and offers a way of negotiating the wide array of insightful and scholarly material collected in this new casebook.

Author Biography

Marion Wynne-Davies is Reader in English at the University of Dundee.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	vii
General Editors' Preface	ix
Introduction: Marion Wynne-Davies	1	(12)
Much Ado About Nothing
Against the Sink-a-Pace: Sexual and Family Politics in Much Ado About Nothing	13	(18)
Harry Berger
Half a Dozen Dangerous Words	31	(20)
S. P. Cerasano
Much Ado About Nothing: The Unsociable Comedy	51	(18)
Barbara Everett
Much Ado About Nothing: A Kind of Merry War	69	(34)
Penny Gay
Antitheatricality Staged. The Workings of Ideology in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing	103	(20)
Jean E. Howard
The Taming of the Shrew
The Turn of the Shrew	123	(25)
Joel Fineman
Renaissance Family Politics and Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew	148	(18)
Karen Newman
Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman's Unruly Member	166	(26)
Lynda E. Boose
Household Kates: Domesticating Commodities in The Taming of the Shrew	192	(34)
Natasha Korda
A Shrew For the Times	226	(25)
Diana E. Henderson
Further Reading	251	(3)
Notes on Contributors	254	(2)
Index	256