Paul Innes

United Arab Emirates University | UAEU · College of Humanities and Social Sciences

A venerable critical tradition has long flavoured the reception of Shakespeare’s plays with psychology. Characters are read as real people, and as a consequence, the plays are ana- lysed from the starting point of an individual character’s inward personality. However, this literary reading of the plays fails to take into account not only the perfor...

This essay contextualises Shakespeare as product of a field of forces encapsulating national identity and relative cultural status. It begins by historicising the production of national poets in Romantic and Nationalist terms. Lefevere’s conceptual grid is then used to characterise the system that underpins the production of Shakespeare as British...

One of the consequences of the growth of academic interest in Reception has been an increased focus on the thoughts and opinions of theatre practitioners. However, because of the ephemeral nature of theatre production and the general sparseness of production documentation, traditional methodological approaches do not generate the evidence needed fo...

The beginning of Shakespeare's 2 Henry IV takes the form of an address to the audience, as a single figure enters the stage and speaks a choric prologue directly to the auditorium. The performance technique that is enacted here is familiar enough from many other plays in the period, especially those that deal with history. However, this one is not...

Rome was a recurring theme throughout Shakespeare's career, from the celebrated Julius Caesar, to the more obscure Cymbeline. In this book, Paul Innes assesses themes of politics and national identity in these plays through the common theme of Rome. He especially examines Shakespeare's interpretation of Rome and how he presented it to his contempor...

Shakespeare’s treatment of Richard III has long been the cause of debates about Tudor defamations of the last Yorkist king. Within this context, some attention has been paid to the play’s extreme compression of events that in fact took place over a period of seven years, from the death of George, Duke of Clarence in 1478 to the Battle of Bosworth F...

Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV (c.1597) is the second play in a group of four that deals with the first two Lancastrian kings of England, Henry IV and his son Henry V. This loosely connected series is known as the Second Tetralogy because even though the events portrayed precede the four plays that deal with Henry VI and Richard III, Shakespeare wrote th...

This is a special issue, including seven critical articles, partly based on the work of the CCLA/ACLC research group on multi-/translingualism.

This article aims to restore the pairing of Claudio and Hero to prominence. The positioning of Hero by Claudio and the play’s other powerful men is central to the plotline, especially in terms of the “nothing” of Hero’s supposed sexual incontinence, as well as being dramatically pivotal to the play’s meanings and structure. The fact that the scene...

Early modern tragedy was a glorious hybrid, a variegated collection of texts and performances reflecting a wide range of models and influences—some classically inspired, emerging from learned traditions and mythological adaptations; some native-born out of folktales, biblical narratives, ballads, legends, and other forms from popular culture—and so...

Arden Early Modern Drama Guides offer students and academics practical and accessible introductions to the critical and performance contexts of key Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Essays from leading international scholars give invaluable insight into the text by presenting a range of critical perspectives, making the books ideal companions for stu...

Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy: The Twilight of the Ancient World . Paul A. Cantor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. 302 pp. $30. - Volume 71 Issue 4 - Paul Innes

In Much Ado About Nothing, characters repeatedly stage moments designed to confuse other figures, a good example being the machinations aimed at Beatrice and Benedick. However, the play contains many more instances in which misrepresentation plays with truth. The supposed offstage seduction of Hero signals the audience that what this unseen (to the...

Tracing epic from its ancient and classical roots through postmodern and contemporary examples this volume discusses a wide range of writers including Homer, Vergil, Ovid, Dante, Chaucer, Milton, Cervantes, Keats, Byron, Eliot, Walcott and Tolkien. Offering new directions for the future and addressing the place of epic in both English-language text...

Featuring contributions by established and upcoming scholars, Shakespeare and the Translation of Identity in Early Modern England explores the ways in which Shakespearean texts engage in the social and cultural politics of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century translation practices. Framed by the editor's introduction and an Afterword by Ton Hoe...

The Continuum Shakespeare Dictionaries provide authoritative yet accessible guides to the principal subject-areas covered by the plays and poetry of Shakespeare. The dictionaries provide readers with a comprehensive guide to the topic under discussion, its occurrence and significance in Shakespeare's works, and its contemporary meanings. Entries ra...

The article discusses the use of minor characters in the theatrical production "Cymbeline" by William Shakespeare as a silent chorus for the events of the story. Editors have speculated that a Spaniard and Dutchman present in a scene in the play were intended to be more important characters. The author suggests the nationality of the characters may...

This book makes Shakespeare accessible to a new generation of students as well as general readers interested in the subject. It makes no assumptions about prior knowledge of the plays and poems and places them in their historical context, thus making it easier for the reader to understand what the Bard meant in his works.

This book is an analysis of the sonnet in the English Renaissance. It especially traces the relations between Shakespeare's sonnets and the ways in which other writers use the form. It looks at how the poetry fits into the historical situation at the time, with regard to images of the family and of women. Its exploration of these issues is informed...

The disjunctions I traced in Chapter 1 criss-cross the terrain of the sonnet, making it a site of contestation. Familial ideology and the place of the woman in relation to sonnets led me to a questioning of practices of representation. This area itself needs further exploration, and so I shall now touch upon the relations between Renaissance theori...

In this chapter I intend to trace the relations between the friend, whose unstable position was traced out in the previous chapter, and the poetic persona of the sonnets. I do not want to reinscribe authorial presence in the poems. Far from it; what I will be looking at is the way in which the persona is socially constructed, through associations w...

The two previous chapters should be taken as the context within which Shakespeare’s sonnets are produced. The term ‘context’ is actually rather weak here: it is hardly adequate to the complex ways in which his poems interact with the various issues I have traced in relation to the sonnet. This movement is not simply an intertextual phenomenon, in a...

It has not been possible in this book for me to pay attention to all of the possible permutations of the use of the sonnet in the English Renaissance. This is why I have concentrated on Shakespeare’s sonnets, as a way of suggesting further investigations into what is a very difficult area, to say the least. I have not included sections on writers s...

The ideal sonnet practitioner strove to achieve a balance between innovation and the constraints imposed by a tight form. Or at least, this is how it tended to be seen in the English Renaissance. In this respect it should not be surprising that the form is inscribed with a potential for change in many different ways, although it may start out with...