Ann Thompson Knihy

A "freeze frame" volume showcasing the range of current debate and ideas surrounding one of the most familiar of Shakespeare's tragedies. Each chapter has been carefully selected for its originality and relevance to the needs of students, teachers and researchers. Key themes and topics covered include: The Text and its Status History and Topicality Critical Approaches and Close Reading Adaptation and Afterlife All the essays offer new perspectives and combine to give readers an up-to-date understanding of what's exciting and challenging about Macbeth. The approach based on an individual play, unlike that of topic-based series, reflects how Shakespeare is most commonly studied and taught.

One of the most frequently read and performed of all stage works, Shakespeare's Hamlet is unsurpassed in its complexity and richness. Now the most extensively annotated version of Hamlet to date makes the play completely accessible to readers in the twenty-first century. It has been carefully assembled with students, teachers, and the general reader in mind.Eminent linguist and translator Burton Raffel offers generous help with vocabulary and usage of Elizabethan English, pronunciation, prosody, and alternative readings of phrases and lines. His on-page annotations provide readers with all the tools they need to comprehend the play and begin to explore its many possible interpretations. This version of Hamlet is unparalleled for its thoroughness and adherence to sound historical linguistics. In his introduction, Raffel offers important background on the origins and previous versions of the Hamlet story, along with an analysis of the characters Hamlet and Ophelia. And in aconcluding essay, Harold Bl

The Taming of the Shrew is one of the most famous and controversial of Shakespeare's comedies.

At a time when the military gave women no respect, a single mother copes with her transformation to Army officer and daily demands of a military in the throes of transition. The military allows her to compete with men only because of her sex and draws her into a trap.

The harrowing narrative follows Ann, who, at just two months old, enters a Catholic orphanage in Christchurch, New Zealand, where she endures severe physical and sexual abuse at the hands of both religious and lay staff. Forced into grueling labor on the orphanage farm and in laundries, her story sheds light on the dark realities of abuse within New Zealand's Catholic institutions, making it a groundbreaking account that seeks to expose and confront these painful truths.

The core of the ground-breaking, three text edition, this self-contained, free-standing volume gives readers the Second Quarto text (1604-5) and includes in its Introduction, notes and Appendices all the reader might expect to find in any standard Arden edition. As well as a full, illustrated Introduction to the play?s historical, cultural and performance contexts and a thorough survey of critical approaches to the play, an appendix contains the additional passages found only in the 1623 text. The core of the ground-breaking, three text edition, this self-contained, free-standing volume gives readers the Second Quarto text (1604-5) and includes in its Introduction, notes and Appendices all the reader might expect to find in any standard Arden edition. As well as a full, illustrated Introduction to the play?s historical, cultural and performance contexts and a thorough survey of critical approaches to the play, an appendix contains the additional passages found only in the 1623 text.