Click here to read the excellent reviews for the series and individual books!
Highlights include:
‘An innovative new series … Series editors Simon Palfrey and Ewan Fernie have rejected the notion of business as usual in order to pursue a distinctive strategy that aims to put "cutting-edge scholarship" in front of a broad audience. With its insistent appeal to the contemporary, this is fresh Shakespeare for readers turned off by the prospect of dry-as-dust scholarship’ Shakespeare Quarterly
[Praise for Nine Lives of William Shakespeare] 'The nine Shakespeares on show here - writer, player, butcher boy, businessman, husband, friend, lover, Catholic and portrait - are each lovingly dissected before being painstakingly reassembled.... he draws on wit and wordplay to flesh out a fiction more palatable than the po-faced fantasies of the scholarly biographers' Times Higher Education
[Praise for At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean] ‘Mentz is an eloquent and incisive critic who convincingly demonstrates the degree to which the plays are saturated with oceanic language and terms of reference. He brilliantly matches the tone of his critical prose to that of the plays under discussion, which illustrates his profound comprehension of them’ Times Higher Education
[Praise for At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean] ‘Shakespeare might seem much more of a landlubber than sea-obsessed writers, but as Steve Mentz eagerly points out, "there's more salt in his plays than you might expect"… This study certainly does a good job of opening up Shakespeare to a new — and welcome — critical discourse’ Times Literary Supplement
[Praise for The King and I] ‘In The King and I, Philippa Kelly, compelling Shakespeare scholar and dramaturge, stages a new Lear for us. She reads its dramatic themes into the landscape of an Australian life, and via that landscape, re-sculpts our own ways of encountering Lear. A rare and precious achievement.’ Victoria McGeer, University Center for Human Values, Princeton, USA
[Praise for The Life in the Sonnets] ‘This is a passionate book: a book about passion in literature, passion for literature, and passion in critical writing… This book will deepen the reader's engagement not just with Shakespeare's sonnets but with all kinds of art — written, acoustic and visual — as Fuller shows us how to bring personal experience to bear on critical analysis.’ Laurie Maguire, Professor of English Literature at at Magdalen College, University of Oxford, UK
[Praise for Shakespeare Thinking] ‘Philip Davis's Shakespeare Thinking proposes that Shakespeare's poetry functions like a 'Renaissance brain scanner': his line-endings are a 'form of slow-motion eye-map for actors ' voices that offer deep insight into the working of the human brain.' This may sound fanciful, but Davis is such a gifted close reader of the ebb and flow of Shakespearean language that he persuades us he is really on to something.’ The Sunday Telegraph
[Praise for Shakespearean Metaphysics] ‘Witmore's literary analyses of the plays' dramatic details are excellent … and his prose in most explications is supple, lucid, and often nicely poetic.’ English Studies
[Praise for Shakespearean's Modern Collaborators] ‘This witty, elegant and lucid book gives centre stage to the people who have interpreted and analysed Shakespeare before we read him: the editors. On page after page, Erne's carefully chosen textual examples illustrate not just the purpose but the *value* of editing. A joy to read, this is also an important contribution to our understanding of the way Shakespeare has been mediated to us in the past — and in the present.’ Tiffany Stern, Oxford University, UK
[Praise for Godless Shakespeare] ‘Always intriguing, usually provocative and occasionally infuriating, Godless Shakespeare is a brilliant meditation on Shakespeare's ways with his characters and the systems of moral values in which we place them… Thinking about Shakespeare and religion has never seemed such fun.’ Professor Peter Holland, Notre Dame University, USA
