Shakespeare's Late Plays - by Jennifer Richards & James Knowles (Paperback)

About the Book

This new collection reflects a resurgence of interest in Shakespeare's plays performed between 1608 and 1613.

Book Synopsis

This new collection reflects a resurgence of interest in Shakespeare's plays performed between 1608 and 1613: Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, All is True (Henry VIII), The Two Noble Kinsmen, and Cardenio. It offers a broad range of new, historicist approaches, touching upon key topics in current Shakespearean studies, such as kinship relations, manliness, magic, medico-politics, nationalism, rhetoric, schism, sexuality and staging conventions. The plays are explored both individually and within generic, thematic and chronological groups. Each author combines new research with their experience of teaching the plays, offering innovative approaches to some well-known works, as well as encouraging readers to explore less familiar dramas such as Pericles, Cymbeline, All is True and The Two Noble Kinsmen. The volume is unusual in its coverage of the lost 'late' play Cardenio, and considers its significance for our conception of the 'lateness' of these plays. This book will fill a large gap in the market for a broad-ranging critical introduction to this important and increasingly popular area in Shakespeare's work, and is suitable as a textbook for undergraduate, graduate and more general readers.

Review Quotes

There is a real need for a book of this sort...[it] is set to make a very valuable contribution to the study of the Late Plays."

About the Author

Jennifer Richards is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at Newcastle University. Her books include Rhetoric (Routledge 2007) and Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge 2003; 2007), and collections of essays for Edinburgh University Press, Routledge, and Palgrave Macmillan. She is currently working on a new monograph on the history of reading aloud in the English Renaissance, for which she has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship.

James Knowles ia a Lecturer in English at the University of Newcastle.