Cover: The Bedford Shakespeare, 1st Edition by Russ McDonald; Lena Cowen Orlin

The Bedford Shakespeare

First Edition ©2015 Russ McDonald; Lena Cowen Orlin

Finally, the collected works you’ve been waiting for: visual, historical, contextualized. Based on the New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of the text, The Bedford Shakespeare gathers the 25 most frequently taught plays and augments them with the rich historical and contextual materials you

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ISBN:9780312439637

Cover: The Bedford Shakespeare, 1st Edition by Russ McDonald; Lena Cowen Orlin

Revolutionize the way your students read Shakespeare

Finally, the collected works you’ve been waiting for: visual, historical, contextualized. Based on the New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of the text, The Bedford Shakespeare gathers the 25 most frequently taught plays and augments them with the rich historical and contextual materials you expect from Bedford/St. Martin’s. Thoughtful, provocative analysis by eminent scholars Russ McDonald and Lena Cowen Orlin offers students concrete entry points into the plays and creates opportunities for lively classroom discussion. A lavish collection of images throughout the book features production shots, paintings, film stills, Renaissance woodcuts, maps, and more, to help students visualize what they are reading.

Features

Helpful, informative apparatus by Russ McDonald and Lena Cowen Orlin frames each play to enrich student understanding.

  • The "Preview" introduces just what students need to know before they read the play, including background on Shakespeare’s sources and a brief plot summary.

  • Throughout the play, "Asides" illuminate significant moments in the text. Vivid images, brief commentaries on Shakespeare’s language, and striking quotations from actors, directors, and critics help students better understand what they are reading.

  • After each play, the "View" offers a more extended critical approach.

  • An annotated "Afterlife" highlights productions, films, television broadcasts, operas, adaptations, and paintings to emphasize the continuing cultural relevance of the play.

22 brief, illustrated, thematic "Contexts" interspersed with the plays provide essential information on key historical, literary, and performance issues ("Discovery," "Playhouses," "Bodies," "London," etc.)

3 instructional essays guide students on the fundamentals: "Reading Shakespeare" helps them decode and appreciate Shakespeare’s language; "Staging Shakespeare" enables them to imagine the plays in performance; and "Screening Shakespeare" helps them analyze Shakespeare on film.

A striking and functional design with a rich second color enhances the student experience of reading the plays.

New to This Edition

"An exhilaratingly modern edition, clearly designed for contemporary readers, but offering a keen sense of historical context."

—Kim F. Hall, Barnard College

"The editors elaborate without condescending and are well attuned to the status of the plays as poetry, as cultural artifacts, and as the artistic achievements that continue to generate productions on the stage, in film, and in other kinds of writing. These are editors I trust."

—Timothy Billings, Middlebury College

"I love the Asides. They do what footnotes can’t do—they draw attention to cruxes and issues that might be obscured for 21st-century readers—without enforcing a reading of the play. For the instructor, this is great: it will stimulate real discussion."

—Karen Raber, The University of Mississippi

"This is an ambitious, original, and exciting concept. Like all mold-breakers it prompts the question, ‘Why has no-one thought of this before?’ . . . The Bedford Shakespeare is a project designed for the Internet generation."

—Laurie Maguire, Oxford University

Digital Options

Table of Contents

PREFACE

READING SHAKESPEARE

The Comedy of Errors

Biography

Titus Andronicus

Bodies

The Taming of the Shrew

Discovery

Richard III

Empire

Romeo and Juliet

Gender

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Genealogy

Richard II

Genre

The Merchant of Venice

Households

1 Henry IV

Language

Much Ado about Nothing

Law

2 Henry IV

London

As You Like It

Monarchy

Henry V

Nature

Julius Caesar

Players

Hamlet

Playhouses

Twelfth Night

Race

Othello

Religion

Troilus and Cressida

Renaissance

Measure for Measure

SCREENING SHAKESPEARE

King Lear

Society

Macbeth

Sources

Coriolanus

STAGING SHAKESPEARE

Antony and Cleopatra

Texts

The Winter’s Tale

World

The Tempest

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

Works Cited

Index
Headshot of Russ McDonald

Russ McDonald

Russ McDonald is Professor of English Literature at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Having taught at five American universities, he is the winner of multiple awards for distinguished teaching, including North Carolina Professor of the Year. For a decade he helped to direct the NEH-sponsored Teaching Shakespeare Institute for secondary teachers at the Folger Library, and his pedagogical commitment led to his publishing the widely-adopted Bedford Companion to Shakespeare. A specialist in Shakespeare’s poetic language, he has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Mellon Foundation. His scholarly works include Shakespeare’s Late Style, Shakespeare and the Arts of Language, and other books and articles on Shakespeare and early modern writing and culture. In 2010-11 he served as President of the Shakespeare Association of America. He also writes regularly for Opera magazine.

Headshot of Lena Cowen Orlin

Lena Cowen Orlin

Lena Cowen Orlin is Professor of English at Georgetown University and Executive Director of the Shakespeare Association of America. She serves on the editorial boards of two Shakespeare journals, is co-editor of the Arden Shakespeare Critical Currents Series, and sits on executive committees for the International Shakespeare Association and the International Shakespeare Conference of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon. As Executive Director of the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library, she developed many programs for college teachers of Shakespeare. She has co-edited Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide and is editor of A Sourcebook for English Studies: The Renaissance. She also publishes on the social, economic, and architectural history of Shakespeares times and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the Folger Library, the Huntington Library, and the Yale Center for British Art. Her books include Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England and Locating Privacy in Tudor London.

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Notes on the Text for The Bedford Shakespeare