This landmark collection of newly commissioned essays by leading international scholars, offers expert close reading of Shakespeare and other early modern authors.
Russ McDonald is Professor of English Literature at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Nicholas D Nace is Assistant Professor at the State University of New York, Binghamton. Travis D Williams is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Rhode Island.
Shakespeare up Close is a collection of scholarly essays by experts
who examine Shakespeare and other early modern texts from a range
of perspectives. Spot on, I think, for drama students wanting to
gather as much information and as many insights as possible into
writing that really does respond to close reading.
*The Stage*
Shakespeare Up Close: Reading Early Modern Texts warmly convey the
authors' faith that close textual readings unlock greater pleasure
in his work...Shakespeare Up Close is a more scholarly collection,
clearly meant for the classroom use, with the majority of essays by
academics engaged in detailed textual analysis. But this sort of
analysis can be extremely useful in performing Shakespeare... It's
a brilliant example of how close reading can inspire staging that
reinforces Shakespeare's themes...A number of these academic essays
suggest stimulating possibilities for performance...Highly
intellectual.
*American Theatre*
The quality of the close reading throughout the volume is extremely
high…very few people who buy this book will be disappointed.
*Around the Globe*
An outstanding UK publisher with worldwide reach, Bloomsbury is
renowned for their range of Shakespeare publications with a special
imprint - The Arden Shakespeare. One of the recent books of The
Arden Shakespeare - Shakespeare Up Close - is a collection of short
essays by esteemed and well-known researchers in Shakespeare
scholarship affiliated with various (primarily) UK and USA
universities ... Shakespeare Up Close targets students, researchers
and scholars but can be of great interest to everyone else
interested in snappy-yet-in-depth intellectual quests into
Shakespeare's and other authors' well-loved and well-known creative
outputs.
*The Huffington Post*
There are a great many merits to this collection of essays – not
only the focus, precision and detail of some of the essays but also
the many various and sometimes conflicting approaches they present.
Under the auspice of the close reading we encounter the text
through the divergent perspectives of materialism, historicism,
feminism, performance, formalism – to name but a few. And one of
the great achievements here, I think, is not only the quality and
range of many of the essays themselves but the renewed and vigorous
claim that you can have your text and context, or cake and eat
it.
*Shakespeare Survey*
Like the portrait miniatures and brief lyrics so popular in the
period, the essays in Shakespeare Up Close are small gems:
practical, valuable, and, in some cases, quite lovely. At often
fewer than ten pages each, they will make convenient readings for
instructors keen to help students develop the vocabulary and
techniques of reading closely, but they will also delight more
experienced readers. Effective close reading requires skill as well
as patience and focus, and there is a great deal of erudition,
dexterity, and thoughtfulness to show in this volume. ... [The]
essays collected in Shakespeare Up Close are important not only as
participants in a timely reinvigoration of close reading, but also
as concise models of good academic writing. The historically alert
and culturally sophisticated versions of close reading in the
volume offer valuable new perceptions about familiar texts, and
they do so in pleasing ways. These tightly focused essays contain
some wonderfully intense writing about literature, as though their
precision lent them an urgency and a decisiveness sometimes missing
from scholarly prose. ... Maybe getting up close to literature
again will encourage not only a healthy attention to detail but
also more experimentation, speculation, and productive uncertainty
in early modern studies.
*Shakespeare Quarterly*
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