A Companion to Shakespeare's Works, Volume II The Histories

by Dutton, Richard; Howard, Jean E.

• ISBN13: 9780631226338
• ISBN10: 0631226338
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-06-02
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

This four-volume Companion to Shakespeare's Works, compiled as a single entity, offers a uniquely comprehensive snapshot of current Shakespeare criticism. Complementing David Scott Kastan's A Companion to Shakespeare (1999), which focused on Shakespeare as an author in his historical context, these volumes examine each of his plays and major poems using all the resources of contemporary criticism from performance studies to feminist, historicist, and textual analyses. Scholars from all over the world - Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and United States - have joined in the writing of new essays addressing virtually the whole of Shakespeare's canon from a rich variety of critical perspectives. A mixture of younger and more established scholars, their work reflects some of the most interesting research currently being conducted in Shakespeare studies. Arguing for the persistence and utility of genre as a rubric for teaching and writing about Shakespeare's works, the editors have organized the four volumes in relation to generic categories: namely, the tragedies, the histories, the comedies, and the poems, problem comedies and late plays. Each volume thus contains individual essays on all texts in the relevant category as well as more general essays looking at critical issues and approaches more widely relevant to the genre. This ambitious project offers a provocative roadmap to Shakespeare studies at the dawning of the twentieth-first century. This companion to Shakespeare's histories contains original essays on every history play from Henry VI to Henry V as well as fourteen additional articles on such topics as censorship in Shakespeare's histories, the relation of Shakespeare's plays to other dramatic histories of the period, Shakespeare's histories on film, the homoerotics of Shakespeare's history plays, and nation formation in Shakespeare's histories.

Author Biography

Jean E. Howard is William E. Ransford Professor of English at Columbia University and a past president of the Shakespeare Association of America. She is an editor of The Norton Shakespeare, and author of, among other works The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (1994) and, with Phyllis Rackin, of Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (1997).

Richard Dutton is currently Professor of English at Lancaster University, author of Mastering the Revels: the Regulation and Censorship of Renaissance Drama (1991) and Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England:Buggeswords (2000). He is editor of the Palgrave Literary Lives series. From 2003, he will be Professor of English at Ohio State University.

Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors	vii
Introduction	1	(3)
1 The Writing of History in Shakespeare's England	4	(22)
Ivo Kamps
2 Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists of History	26	(22)
Richard Helgerson
3 Censorship and the Problems with History in Shakespeare's England	48	(22)
Cyndia Susan Clegg
4 Nation Formation and the English History Plays	70	(24)
Patricia A. Cahill
5 The Irish Text and Subtext of Shakespeare's English Histories	94	(31)
Willy Maley
6 Theories of Kingship in Shakespeare's England	125	(21)
William C. Carroll
7 "To beguile the time, look like the time": Contemporary Film Versions of Shakespeare's Histories	146	(24)
Peter J. Smith
8 The Elizabethan History Play: A True Genre?	170	(24)
Paulina Kewes
9 Damned Commotion: Riot and Rebellion in Shakespeare's Histories	194	(26)
James Holstun
10 Manliness Before Individualism: Masculinity, Effeminacy, and Homoerotics in Shakespeare's History Plays	220	(26)
Rebecca Ann Bach
11 French Marriages and the Protestant Nation in Shakespeare's History Plays	246	(17)
Linda Gregerson
12 The First Tetralogy in Performance	263	(24)
Ric Knowles
13 The Second Tetralogy: Performance as Interpretation	287	(21)
Lois Potter
14 1 Henry VI	308	(17)
David Bevington
15 Suffolk aid the Pirates: Disordered Relations in Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI	325	(19)
Thomas Cartelli
16 Vexed Relations: Family, State, and the Uses of Women in 3 Henry VI	344	(17)
Kathryn Schwarz
17 "The power of hope?" An Early Modern Reader of Richard III	361	(18)
James Siemon
18 King John	379	(16)
Virginia Mason Vaughan
19 The King's Melting Body: Richard II	395	(17)
Lisa Hopkins
20 1 Henry IV	412	(20)
James Knowles
21 Henry IV, Part 2: A Critical History	432	(19)
Jonathan Crewe
22 Henry V	451	(17)
Andrew Hadfield
Index	468