Shakespeare: The Roman Plays

by Graham Holderness (Editor), Bryan Loughrey (Editor), Andrew Murphy (Editor)

This introductory text considers the Roman plays of Shakespeare in the light of both traditional and contemporary criticism. The essays reflect the range and impact of modern critical approaches, such as Marxism, feminism, new historicism, cultural materialism, psychoanalytic theory and performance analysis, on the individual plays and on "Roman" drama.

Contents:
Introduction: Shakespeare dragged into politics : inner story of strange conflict --
"Is this a holiday?" : Shakespeare's Roman Carnival / Richard Wilson --
'Fashion it thus' : Julius Caesar and the politics of theatrical representation / John Drakakis --
Theaters of war : Caesar and the vandals / Alan Sinfield --
Antony and Cleopatra / Leonard Tennenhouse --
Making defect perfection / Janet Adelman --
Antony and Cleopatra (c. 1607) : Virtus under erasure / Jonathan Dollimore --
'Speak, speak!' : the popular voice and the Jacobean state / Annabel Patterson --
Lenten butchery : legitimization crisis in Coriolanus / Michael D. Bristol --
Shakespeare and the general strike / Terence Hawkes --
Cymbeline : beyond Rome / Paul A. Cantor.

191 pages, Paperback

First published August 28, 1996

About the author

Writer and critic Graham Holderness has published over 40 books, many on Shakespeare, and hundreds of chapters and articles of criticism, theory and theology. He was one of the founders of British cultural materialism, and is acknowledged as a formative contributor to a number of branches of Shakespeare criticism and theory. He has published pioneering studies in Arabic adaptations of Shakespeare, culminating in The Arab Shakespeare Trilogy by Sulayman Al Bassam (Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama, 2014).

His more recent work has pioneered methods of critical-creative writing, exemplified by his innovative factual-fictional biography Nine Lives of William Shakespeare (Bloomsbury/Arden Shakespeare, 2011). Extending these methods, and published in 2014, are Tales from Shakespeare: Creative Collisions (Cambridge University Press, June 2014) and Re-writing Jesus: Christ in 20th Century Fiction and Film (Bloomsbury, November 2014). His latest book is The Faith of William Shakespeare (Lion Hudson, 2016).

He is also a novelist, poet and dramatist. Graham Holderness has published two Shakespearean novels: The Prince of Denmark (University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001), and the historical fantasy novel Black and Deep Desires: William Shakespeare Vampire Hunter (Top Hat Books, 2015). His poetry collection Craeft: poems from the Anglo-Saxon received a Poetry Book Society award in 2002; and his play Wholly Writ was in 2011 performed at Shakespeare’s Globe, and by Royal Shakespeare Company actors in Stratford-upon-Avon.