Description
Shakespeare's history plays have been performed in recent years more than ever before throughout Britain, North America, and Europe. This volume is an accessible introduction to Shakespeare's historical and classical plays. Comprehensive in scope, it offers chapters on the individual plays and accounts of the genre of the history play, Renaissance theories of history, and masques and pageants. It compares them with other European history plays, and includes an account of women's roles, genealogical tables and a list of principal and recurrent characters.
About the Author
Hattaway, Michael: - Michael Hattaway was educated in New Zealand and at Cambridge. He has taught at the Universities of Kent, British Columbia, Massachusetts, and Sheffield. He is the author of Elizabethan Popular Theatre (1982) and Hamlet: The Critics Debate (1987) and is the editor of A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture (2000); with A. R. Braunmuller, of The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama (1990), and, with Derek Roper and Boika Sokolova, of Shakespeare in the New Europe (1994). For the New Mermaids he has edited Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle, for the New Cambridge Shakespeare 1-3 Henry VI and As You Like It, and for the Revels Series Jonson's The New Inn.