The Routledge guide to William Shakespeare / Robert Shaughnessy.

Part I: Life and contexts -- 1 Introduction -- Son of Stratford -- Shakespeare's biographies -- 2 Shakespeare's early years -- Schooling -- Religion and resistance -- 3 A life in writing -- Early sightings -- Making a name -- Plays in print -- Poetry and patronage -- Making history -- Poet and player -- The Lord Chamberlain's Men -- Dangerous games: Falstaff and Essex --
Courting comedy -- Everyday entertainments -- This distracted Globe -- Little eyases -- The King's Men -- Court dramatists -- Jacobean tragedy -- Blackfriars -- Collaborations and departures -- 4 Final years -- Welcombe -- Will and testament -- Two monuments -- Chronology: 1564-1644 -- Part II: Works A catalogue Henry VI, Parts 1, 2 and 3 -- Alarums and excursions -- Let's kill all the lawyers -- To catch the English Crown -- A Talbot -- The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labour's Lost and
The Comedy of Errors The letter very orderly -- Too long for a play -- Like brother and brother ICQ -- Titus Andronicus -- A wilderness of tigers -- Baked in that pie -- The Taming of the Shrew -- Richard III -- Venus and Adonis and Lucrece -- Desire sees best of all -- Graver labour -- A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet -- A dream past the wit of man -- Death-marked love -- The Merchant of Venice -- King John and Richard II -- Beginnings -- Endings -- Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 -- A double man -- Chimes at midnight -- Twelfth Night, Much Ado about Nothing and As You Like It -- Cakes and ale -- A kind of merry war -- No clock in the forest -- Much virtue in 'if -- The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry V -- Ashore at Windsor -- Star of England -- Julius Caesar -- Hamlet -- Who's there? -- Hamlet's transformations -- Revenge -- Mad in craft -- The readiness is all -- Troilus and Cressida, All's -- Well that Ends Well and Measure for Measure -- Bifold authority -- All yet seems well -- Like doth quit like, and measure still for measure -- Shakespeare's Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint -- Beauty's rose -- Master-mistress -- Nothing like the sun -- Rich in Will -- This double voice -- Othello -- Othellophobia -- Othellophilia -- Timon of Athens -- King Lear -- Ye gods -- Monsters of the deep -- Every inch a king ---The terrors of the earth -- The division of the kingdom(s) -- Macbeth -- The milk of human kindness -- Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra -- O me alone -- Body politics -- The wide arch -- Past the size of dreaming -- Immortal longings -- The Tempest -- This island's mine -- Thing of darkness -- Plantation of this isle -- The Winter's Tale -- Things dying -- Things new-born -- Pericles, Cymbeline and The Two Noble Kinsmen -- To sing a song that old was sung ... -- Dreams and visions -- Two cousins and a daughter -- Henry VIII, or All Is True -- Part III: Criticism -- Prologue: a critical century -- 1 Histories -- Ruling ideas -- In all line of order: E. M. W. Tillyard's historicism -- Tillyard's legacy --Questioning authority: the 1960s -- Shakespeare their contemporary -- Refashioning the Renaissance -- Subversion and containment -- Dreams of power -- Connections, locations, intersections -- Cultural materialism -- Tragically radical, radically tragic -- Eminent Shakespeareans --
After theory: history bites back -- Materialities -- Presentism -- Spiritualities -- 2 Languages -- Close reading -- Words and images -- Post-structuralism --
Truth's true contents -- Language in history -- Rhetorics, metrics, linguistics -- Speaking the speech -- 3 Subjectivities -- Character building -- Bradley and Freud -- Women's parts -- The patriarchal Bard -- Changing the subject -- The boy actress -- Broadening the field -- What becomes a man -- Queer reading -- Characters reunited -- Children too -- Part IV: Screen and stage -- 1 Film -- Stage, page and screen -- The theatrical, the realist and the filmic -- Differences in view -- Textualities and sexualities -- World pictures -- A cinema for a new century -- Jump cuts -- 2 Performance --The complete Shakespeare -- Five decades of performance criticism -- The exemplary RSC -- Revolution and after -- Staging history -- The reinvention of Shakespeare's Globe -- Enter theory --- From theory to practice -- Beyond Shakespeare -- Beyond words