A look at Romeo and Juliet where the characters who traditionally fill the background take front and center. Valentine, the reclusive stepson of Prince Escalus, is enlisted to quietly keep an eye on his younger brother Mercutio. Mercutio's association with his friend Romeo is upsetting the balance of Verona politics. Soon Valentine finds himself at the center of the most complex problems that are poised to shake the entire city to the ground. All the secrets of Verona's most notable citizens are exposed, as the story of the star crossed lover's is turned on it's head.

Why does Shakespearean tragedy continue to move spectators even though Elizabethan philosophical assumptions have faded from belief? Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double seeks answers in the moment-by-moment dynamics of performance and response, and the Shakespearean text signals those possibilities. Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double investigates the poetics of audience response. Approaching tragedy through the rhythms of spectatorial engagement and detachment ("aesthetic distance"), Kent Cartwright provides a performance-oriented and phenomenological perspective. Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double analyzes the development of the tragic audience as it oscillates between engagement--an immersion in narrative, character, and physical action--and detachment--a consciousness of its own comparative judgments, its doubts, and of acting and theatricality. Cartwright contends that the spectator emerges as a character implied and acted upon by the play. He supports his theory with close readings of individual plays from the perspective of a particular element of spectatorial response: the carnivalesque qualities of Romeo and Juliet; the rhythm of similitude, displacement, and wonder in the audience's relationships to Hamlet; aesthetic distance as scenic structure in Othello; the influence of secondary characters and ensemble acting on the Quarto King Lear; and spectatorship as action itself in Antony and Cleopatra. Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double treats the dramatic moment in Shakespearean tragedy as uncommonly charged, various, indeterminate, always negotiating unpredictably between the necessary and the spontaneous. Cartwright argues that, for the audience, the very dynamism of tragedy confers a certain enfranchisement, and the spectator's experience emerges as analogous to, though different from, that of the protagonist. Through its own engagement and detachments the audience becomes the final performer creating the play's meaning.

Over the past fifteen years, Jonathan Goldberg's wide-ranging essays have been among the most sophisticated, influential, and controversial writing about Shakespeare. He challenges the critical orthodoxy, provoking scholars to reassess both their own assumptions and those underpinning the field of Shakespeare studies. Collected in one volume for the first time, these essays offer a sustained, energetic, and rigorous examination of issues of gender and sexuality that pervade Shakespeare's plays, as well as a road map of the shifts during the past two decades in our understanding of English literature's most canonical figure. Central to these essays are concerns about textuality as considered from a number of vantage points, including deconstructionist, psychoanalytic, and historicist. Goldberg studies most of Shakespeare's plays, giving particular emphasis to Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, and to Romeo and Juliet; he focuses throughout on the relationship between the text as material object and the reality created or reflected by that text. Among the issues he considers are the textual instability of Shakespeare's plays and the historical instabilities of gender and sexuality depicted in those plays, the construction of gender and the dehumanization implicit in treating characters as a textual production, the function of letters and other documents within the Shakespearean texts, and the correlation of sexual politics and textual desire. Tracing a path from characters in the scriptive sense to their embodiment in characters marked by gender and sexuality, Shakespeare's Hand provides a brilliant set of inquiries into the production, critical reception, and conditions of Shakespearean texts.

Although psychoanalytic criticism of Shakespeare is a prominent and prolific field of scholarship, the analytic methods and tools, theories, and critics who apply the theories have not been adequately assessed. This book fills that gap. It surveys the psychoanalytic theorists who have had the most impact on studies of Shakespeare, clearly explaining the fundamental developments and concepts of their theories, providing concise definitions of key terminology, describing the inception and evolution of different schools of psychoanalysis, and discussing the relationship of psychoanalytic theory (especially in Shakespeare) to other critical theories. It chronologically surveys the major critics who have applied psychoanalysis to their readings of Shakespeare, clarifying the theories they are enlisting; charting the inception, evolution, and interaction of their approaches; and highlighting new meanings that have resulted from such readings. It assesses the applicability of psychoanalytic theory to Shakespeare studies and the significance and value of the resulting readings.

Analyzes Mercutio from historical and cultural standpoints, and considers his brief role in Romeo and Juliet in terms of the Renaissance era

Études sur la pré-renaissance et la renaissance anglaises.