Shakespeare in his Time
Reading List, 2017
The best thing you can do at this stage is to read as wide a selection as possible from
Shakespeare’s plays and poems. You may wish to buy a copy of the Complete Works, or
you may already own one from your undergraduate days. The department recommends
the Riverside Complete Shakespeare, the Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, the
Oxford Complete Shakespeare or the Norton Shakespeare. UCL library has good
holdings both of these and of single-play editions.
For queries about individual reading lists, please contact the tutor whose initials are
shown against the seminar title. Where reading is required for a seminar, the tutor in
question will have indicated as much; otherwise, follow your own instincts as you
browse the list of seminars, and read accordingly.
1. Critical Approaches to Shakespeare in his Time (CS)
Essential reading:
Hoenselaars, Ton, ‘Shakespeare: Colleagues, Collaborators, Co-authors’, in Ton
Hoenselaars, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Contemporary
Dramatists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 97–119.
Taylor, Michael, ‘Shakespeare in History and History in Shakespeare’, in Michael
Taylor, Shakespeare Criticism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001), pp. 163–93.
Further reading:
Berger, Thomas L., ‘Shakespeare Writ Small: Early Single Editions of Shakespeare’s
Plays’, in Andrew Murphy, ed., A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the
Text (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 57–70. (See also Murphy’s introduction, ‘What
Happens in Hamlet?’, pp. 1–14.)
Burrow, Colin, Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013), esp. ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–20.
Cummings, Brian, Mortal Thoughts: Religion, Secularity and Identity in Shakespeare
and Early Modern Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), esp. ‘Hamlet’s
Luck: Shakespeare and the Renaissance Bible’, pp. 207–35.
Gurr, Andrew, The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1996), esp. ‘An Introduction’, pp. 3–18.
A longer reading list will be provided in the seminar.
2. Titus Andronicus and Ovid (CS)
Editions:
Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate, Arden Shakespeare 3 rd series (London:
Arden Shakespeare, 2002).
______________ ed. Eugene M. Waith, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1984, 2008).
Required reading:
Oakley-Brown, Liz, ‘Titus Andronicus and the Sexual Politics of Translation’, in Ovid
and the Cultural Politics of Translation in Early Modern England (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2006), pp. 23–43.
Taylor, Anthony Brian, ‘Animals in “manly shape as too the outward showe”: Moralizing
and Metamorphosis in Titus Andronicus’, in Anthony Brian Taylor (ed.)
Shakespeare’s Ovid: the Metamorphoses in the Plays and Poems (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 66–80.
Suggested reading from:
Bate, Jonathan, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 101–17.
Taylor, Anthony Brian, ‘Melting Earth and Leaping Bulls: Shakespeare’s Ovid and
Arthur Golding’, Connotations 4 (1994–5): 192–206.
Warren, Roger, ‘Trembling Aspen Leaves in Titus Andronicus and Golding’s Ovid’,
Notes and Queries 29.2 (1982): 112.
West, Grace, ‘Going by the Book: Classical Allusions in Shakespeare’s Titus
Andronicus’, Studies in Philology 79.1 (1982): 62–77.
You might also find it useful to look at Arthur Golding’s English translation of Ovid (The
.xv. bookes of P. Ouidius Naso, entytuled Metamorphosis, London: Willyam Seres,
1567):
Shakespeare’s Ovid Being Arthur Golding’s Translation of the Metamorphoses, ed.
William Rouse (New York: Norton, 1966).
Electronic text (from Perseus):
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext%3a1999.02.0074
3. Performing Gender: Twelfth Night and The Roaring Girl (EW)
Essential Reading:
Middleton, Thomas and Thomas Dekker, The Roaring Girl (c.1611), ed. James
Knowles, in The Roaring Girl and Other City Comedies (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001) [or another scholarly edition]
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (c.1601/2) ed. Keir Elam, Arden 3rd Series (London:
Arden Shakespeare, 2008), or any scholarly complete works (Norton; Oxford)
Suggested Reading:
Charles, Casey, 'Gender Trouble in Twelfth Night', Theatre Journal 49.2 (May,
1997), 121-141
Dawson, Anthony B., 'Mistris Hic & haec: Representations of Moll
Frith', SEL 33.2 (Spring, 1993), 385-404
Dowd, Michelle, 'Labours of Love: Women, Marriage and Service in Twelfth Night
and The Compleat Servant-Maid', The Shakespeare International Yearbook 5
(2005), 103-126
Further reading:
Dusinberre, Juliet, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (1975; 2nd edn.,
Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996)
Jardine, Lisa, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of
Shakespeare (1983; 2nd edn, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989)
Shapiro, Michael, Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and
Female Pages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994)
Stage, Kelly J., 'The Roaring Girl's London Spaces', SEL (Spring, 2009), 417-436
Traub, Valerie, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama
(London: Routledge, 1992)
4. The Body in Venus and Adonis and Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (EL)
Recommended editions:
Venus and Adonis in Shakespeare’s Poems, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and H.R.
Woudhuysen (Arden)
Marlowe, Christopher, Hero and Leander in The Complete Poems and Translations,
ed. Stephen Orgel (Penguin Classics)
Required reading:
Please read ONE of the following introductory chapters:
Hodges, Devon L., ‘Chapter One: Of Anatomy,’ Renaissance Fictions of Anatomy
(Amherst: Massachusetts UP, 1985), pp. 1-19
Paster, Gail, ‘Introduction: Civilizing the Humoral Body,’ The Body Embarrassed:
Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell
UP, 1993), pp. 1-22
Sawday, Jonathan, ‘Chapter Two: The Renaissance Body: From Colonization to
Invention,’ The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in
Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 16-38
Suggested reading:
Craik, Katharine, Reading Sensations in Early Modern England (Palgrave, 2007)
Gallagher, Lowell, and Shankar Raman (eds.), Knowing Shakespeare: Senses,
Embodiment and Cognition (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
Hillman, David, Shakespeare's Entrails: Belief, Scepticism, and the Interior of the
Body (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007)
____________, and Carla Mazzio (eds.), The Body in Parts: Fantasies of
Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 1997)
Keach, William, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives: Irony and Pathos in the Ovidian
Poetry of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Their Contemporaries (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1977)
Stanivukovic, Goran V. (ed.), Ovid and the Renaissance Body (Toronto: UTP, 2001)
5. Shakespeare and Renaissance Economics: The Merchant of Venice (EL)
Recommended edition:
The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Drakakis (London: Arden, 2011)
Required reading:
Jonathan Gil Harris, ‘Taint and Usury: Gerard Malynes, The Dutch Church Libel, The
Merchant of Venice,’ in Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in
Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004),
pp. 52-82
Suggested reading:
Simmel, Georg, The Philosophy of Money (London: Routledge Classics, 2011)
Shell, Marc, Money, Language and Thought: Literary and Philosophic Economies
from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1982)
Ingram, Jill Phillips, Idioms of Self-Interest: Credit, Identity, and Property in Engish
Renaissance Literature (New York: Routledge, 2006)
Essays by Darcy, Mentz, Spencer, and Netzloff in Linda Woodbridge (ed.), Money
and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)
[Reading Week]
6. King Lear and Value (RW)
Recommended editions:
King Lear, ed. Reginald Foakes (Arden Shakespeare, 1997); King Lear, ed. Stanley
Wells (Oxford, 2000: the Quarto text); King Lear: a Parallel Text Edition, ed. René
Weis, 2nd edn (Harlow: Longman, 2010).
Suggested reading:
Brayton, Dan. ‘Angling in the Lake of Darkness: Possession, Dispossession, and the
Politics of Discovery in King Lear’, ELH, 70:2 (2003): 399–426.
De Grazia, Margreta, ‘The Ideology of Superfluous Things: King Lear as Period
Piece’, in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia,
Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), pp.17–42.
Elton, William, King Lear and the Gods (Lexington: Kentucky University Press,
1966)
Heilman, Robert, This Great Stage (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1948).
Scott, William O, ‘Contracts of Love and Affection: Lear, Old Age, and Kingship’,
Shakespeare Survey, 55 (2002): 36–42.
7. Shakespeare and Visual Culture: The Rape of Lucrece and Cymbeline (SH)
Recommended editions:
Lucrece, in The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford
Shakespeare, 2002).
Cymbeline, ed. Martin Butler (New Cambridge Shakespeare, 2005).
Required reading:
Heffernan, James A.W., Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to
Ashbery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), Chapter 2: ‘Weaving
Rape’, pp. 47–52; 74–90.
Frye, Susan, ‘Staging Women’s Relations to Textiles in Othello and Cymbeline’, in
Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, Empire in Renaissance
England, ed. Peter Erickson and Clark Hulse (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2000), pp. 215–50.
Suggested reading:
Smuts, Malcolm, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2016) [UCL e-book available], Section V: ‘Architecture,
Visual Culture, and Music’, esp. Elizabeth Goldring, ‘Art Collecting and Patronage
in Shakespeare’s England’.
Hulse, S.C., ‘“A Piece of Skilful Painting” in Shakespeare’s Lucrece’, Shakespeare
Survey, 31 (1978), 13–22.
Thorne, Alison, Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare: Looking through Language
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999).
Gilman, Ernest B., The Curious Perspective: Literary and Pictorial Wit in the
Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978).
O’Connell, Michael, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early-Modern
England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. Chapter 5, ‘“Let the
Audience Look to Their Eyes”: Jonson and Shakespeare’.
Olson, Rebecca, ‘Hamlet’s Dramatic Arras’, Word & Image, 25 (2009), 143–53.
8. The Sonnets: Poetic Tradition and Intimacy (RW)
Recommended edition:
Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Arden Shakespeare, 2010)
Suggested reading:
Ferry, Anne, The ‘Inward’ Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare,
Donne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 31–70.
Fineman, Joel, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in
the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 49–85.
Innes, Paul, Shakespeare and the English Renaissance Sonnet: Verses of Feigning
Love (London: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 18–38.
Schiffer, James, ‘Reading New Life into Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Survey of
Criticism’, in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, ed. James Schiffer (New
York: Garland, 1999), pp. 3–71.
Roche, Thomas, Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (New York: AMS
Press, 1989), pp. 380–461.
Wells, Stanley, and Paul Edmondson, Shakespeare's Sonnets (Oxford: Oxford UP,
2004).
9. Shakespeare and Textual History: Unediting Hamlet (SH)
Recommended editions:
Hamlet [Q2] and Hamlet: The Texts of 1603 and 1623 [Q1 & F], ed. Ann Thompson
and Neil Taylor (Arden Shakespeare, 2016) [Two-volume edition containing all
three early texts].
Required reading:
Marcus, Leah S., Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton
(London: Routledge, 1996), Introduction: ‘The Blue-Eyed Witch’, pp. 1-37.
Arden 3 Hamlet, ed. Thompson and Taylor [as above], Introduction: ‘The
Composition of Hamlet, pp. 76-96); Appendix: ‘The Nature of the Text’, pp. 504-15
& ‘Modern Editors at Work’, pp. 516-54.
Suggested reading:
Jowett, John, Shakespeare and Text [Oxford Shakespeare Topics] (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007).
Taylor, Gary, and Michael Warren, eds, The Division of the Kingdoms:
Shakespeare’s Two Versions of King Lear (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).
Stern, Tiffany, Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page, (London: Routledge,
2004).
Kastan, David Scott, Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2008).
Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance, Chapter 5: ‘Bad Taste and Bad Hamlet’, pp.
132-76.
10. Shakespeare and Co-authorship: Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen (HH)
Recommended editions:
King Henry VIII, ed. Gordon McMullan (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2000)
The Two Noble Kinsmen, ed. N.W. Bawcutt, introd. Peter Swaab (London: Penguin,
2009)
Suggested reading:
Dalya Alberge, ‘Christopher Marlowe credited as one of Shakespeare’s co-writers’,
The Guardian, 23 Oct 2016,
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/oct/23/christopher-marlowe-creditedas-one-of-shakespeares-co-writers
David Carnegie and Gary Taylor (eds), The Quest for Cardenio: Shakespeare,
Fletcher, Cervantes, and the Lost Play (OUP, 2012)
Gregory Doran, Shakespeare’s Lost Play: In Search of Cardenio (London: Nick Hern
Books, 2012)
Double Falsehood, ed. Brean Hammond (London: Arden, 2010)
John Fletcher and William Shakespeare, The Two Noble Kinsmen, ed. Lois Potter
(London: Arden, 1997)
Jonathan Hope, The Authorship of Shakespeare’s Plays: A Socio-linguistic Study
(CUP, 1994)
Gordon McMullan, ‘A rose for Emilia: collaborative relations in The Two Noble
Kinsmen’, in Renaissance Configurations: Voices/Bodies/Spaces, 1580-1690
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 129-50
Jennifer Richards and James Knowles (eds), Shakespeare’s Late Plays: New
Readings (Edinburgh UP, 1999)
William Shakespeare and Others, Collaborative Plays, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric
Rasmussen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative
Plays (OUP, 2002)
Tutors
HH – Prof. Helen Hackett; SH – Dr Sarah Howe; EL – Dr Eric Langley; CS – Dr Chris
Stamatakis; EW – Dr Emma Whipday; RW – Prof. René Weis.