Romeo and Juliet: A Critical Reader

by Lupton, Julia Reinhard; Hiscock, Andrew; Hopkins, Lisa

• ISBN13: 9781474216364
• ISBN10: 1474216366
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2016-01-28
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare

Summary

Uniquely, this guide analyses the play's critical and performance history and recent criticism, as well as including five essays offering radically new paths for contemporary interpretation.

The subject matter of these essays is rich and diverse, ranging across the play's philosophical identification of sexual love with self-realization, the hermeneutic implications of an editor's textual choices, the minor characters of the play in relation to Renaissance performance traditions, Romeo and Juliet in opera and ballet, and the play's Italian sources and afterlives.

The guide also contains a chapter on the key resources available, including scholarly editions and easily available DVDs, and discusses the ways in which they can be used in the classroom to aid understanding and provoke further debate.

Edited by leading scholar Julia Reinhard Lupton, this is an essential guide for both students and scholars of Shakespeare.

Author Biography

Julia Lupton is Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, USA.

Table of Contents

Series Introduction
Romeo and Juliet Timeline
Introduction (Julia Reinhard Lupton,University of California, Irvine, USA)
The Critical Backstory (Naomi Conn Liebler, Montclair State University, USA)
The State of the Art (Rebeca Helfer, The University of California, Irvine, USA)
Traffic of Our Stage: A Performance History of Romeo and Juliet (Ian Munro, The University of California, Irvine, USA)
New Directions:
How Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet Has Helped Us to Understand Ourselves (Paul Kottman, The New School for Social Research, USA)
Lord Capulet's Lost Compromise: Editing and the Binary Dynamics of Romeo and Juliet (Robert Watson, UCLA, USA)
Romeo and Juliet's Understudies (William West, Northwestern University, USA)
Romeo and Juliet in Other Media (Joseph Campana, Rice University, USA)
The Names of the Rose: Romeo and Juliet in Italy (Shaul Bassi, University of Venice, Italy)
Resources for Teaching (M. Barbara Mello, California State University, Long Beach, USA)
Bibliography
Index