Andrew Dickson - The Globe Guide to Shakespeare

THE GLOBE GUIDE TO

Shakespeare

Andrew Dickson is an author, journalist and critic. A former arts editor at the Guardian in London, he writes regularly for the paper and appears as a broadcaster for the BBC and elsewhere. He has contributed to the New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and is currently an honorary fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. He is also the author of Worlds Elsewhere, an exploration of Shakespeares global influence.

A young critic who matches energy and erudition with Elizabethan zest
The Independent

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by

Profile Books

3 Holford Yard, Bevin Way

London WC1X 9HD

www.profilebooks.com

in association with Shakespeares Globe

Copyright Andrew Dickson 2016

An earlier version of this book was published as The Rough Guide to Shakespeare

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

All quoted Shakespeare text is from the second edition of William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford University Press, revised 2005) Oxford University Press.

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Typeset in Minion and TheSans to a design by Henry Iles

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

e-ISBN 9781782832478

THE GLOBE GUIDE TO

Shakespeare

Andrew Dickson

With contributions by Joe Staines

First opened to the public in 1995, the reconstructed Globe in London now welcomes more than 350,000 ticket-buyers annually the closest thing we have to Shakespeares wooden O, raised originally in 1599.

Key topics

Shakespeares sources and reading

Texts and authorship

Shakespeares life and context

Literary forms and genres

Adaptations and alterations

How this book works

T he Globe Guide to Shakespeare is designed to be easy to use. It divides into three sections: Plays, Poems and Contexts. Throughout the text youll also find a series of small essays on key topics.

Plays

Each of the 39 plays gets a chapter to itself, and, for ease of reference, chapters are arranged alphabetically. All conform to the same pattern, beginning with a short introductory paragraph, accompanied by a synopsis, a list of major characters and information about the plays approximate date, sources and textual history. This is followed by an interpretative essay the heart of the chapter that guides you through the play and introduces its crucial themes and ideas, as well as quoting sections from the text. The essay is followed by a stage history, describing the plays life in the theatre from the earliest years to the present day, as globally inclusive as we can make it. At the end of the chapter are a series of reviews. First listed are screen and audio adaptations, highlighting the best and most interesting productions around and the format in which they are currently available.

The final section of each play chapter is devoted to books, with a recommendation of the best individual edition of the play in question, followed by selected works of literary criticism.

Poems

The Poems section follows almost exactly the same pattern as the plays, with individual chapters on A Lovers Complaint, The Rape of Lucrece, the Sonnets and Venus and Adonis. Each contains an interpretative essay and book recommendations, with the obvious difference that there are no performance histories, and only a handful of audio or video versions are currently available.

Contexts

The final section of the book begins with a chapter outlining Shakespeares life, focusing on the documented historical facts but also examining the many myths about him. Its followed by an account of the stages on which Shakespeare worked, with specifics about the major acting companies and playhouses. Then comes an introduction to Shakespeares language, describing the oral and written culture of Shakespeare and his contemporaries as well as the literary techniques they employed, including new words, rhetorical figures and blank verse. An outline of Shakespeares canon what he wrote and when follows.

Quotes and symbols

Quotations

Quotations from the plays and poems are found throughout The Globe Guide to Shakespeare. Each one is followed by a numerical reference identifying precisely where its taken from. The plays are nearly always broken down into acts and scenes, and modern editors usually number the lines too. Following the standardized system, this book cites act numbers first, then the relevant scene number, and finally the line number so 5.2.2332 indicates that the quotation in question is taken from Act Five, scene two, and covers lines 23 to 32 (SD indicates that the text appears in a stage direction).

When referring to the poems, citations provide line numbers. The text used throughout is the second edition of William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford University Press, revised 2005); other editions, including those recommended at the end of each chapter, will in all likelihood number things slightly differently. Text quoted from other writers is generally presented in modernized spelling.

In the review sections of each chapter, publishing information for film and audio versions appears as follows. Each is listed in date order, with cast and director details appearing first, followed by country and date of origin, then current distributor (in the order UK / US where the distributor is different in each territory):

Symbols

DVD =

CD =

Download =

Coriolanus

R. Fiennes, V. Redgrave, B. Cox; Ralph Fiennes (dir.) UK, 2011 > Lionsgate / Weinstein

Macbeth

S. Dillane, F. Shaw, D. Conlan; Fiona Shaw (dir.) UK, 1998 > Naxos /

Book details

Book details follow a similar format throughout, listing author/editor, date of original publication, then current publisher (in the order UK / US where publishers are different). UP stands for university press: