Victor L. Cahn – Bard Games

Analyzing and studying Shakespeare

1) Victor L. Cahn – Bard Games: The Shakespeare Quiz Book
The works of Shakespeare remain a staple of the theatrical and academic worlds, yet even non-experts enjoy his works. On the television program “Jeopardy,” for example, “Shakespeare” is a category at least once a week.

2) Ralph Berry – Changing Styles in Shakespeare
Each of Shakespeare’s plays is in a continuous state of development in performance. This book examines major changes whilst focusing on six plays in detail: Coriolanus, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, Henry V, Hamlet and Twelfth Night.

3) Neema Parvini – Shakespeare’s Moral Compass
This ground-breaking study fearlessly combines latest research in evolutionary psychology, historical scholarship and philosophy to answer a question that has eluded critics for centuries: what is Shakespeare’s moral vision? At a political and cultural moment in which many of us are taking stock and looking for meaning, and in which moral outrage and polarisation seem endemic, this book radically reimagines how we might approach great works of literature to find some answers.

4) Lori Leigh – Shakespeare and the Embodied Heroine: Staging Female Characters in the Late Plays and Early Adaptations
Shakespeare and the Embodied Heroine is a bold new investigation of Shakespeare’s female characters using the late plays and the early adaptations written and staged during the seventeenth and eighteenth century.

5) Curtis Perry, John Watkins – Shakespeare and the Middle Ages
Shakespeare and the Middle Ages brings together a distinguished, multidisciplinary group of scholars to rethink the medieval origins of modernity. Shakespeare provides them with the perfect focus, since his works turn back to the Middle Ages as decisively as they anticipate the modern world: almost all of the histories depict events during the Hundred Years War, and King John glances even further back to the thirteenth-century Angevins; several of the comedies, tragedies, and romances rest on medieval sources; and there are important medieval antecedents for some of the poetic modes in which he worked as well.