Essays, Mainly Shakespearean [Paperback]

A wide-ranging collection of essays on Shakespeare and his contemporaries.Anne Barton's essays on Shakespeare and his contemporaries are characterized by their combination of intelligence, humanity and elegance. In this linked but wide-ranging collection she looks at both major and neglected plays and the ongoing dialogue between them.Anne Barton's essays on Shakespeare and his contemporaries are characterized by their combination of intelligence, humanity and elegance. In this linked but wide-ranging collection she looks at both major and neglected plays and the ongoing dialogue between them.Anne Barton's essays on Shakespeare and his contemporaries are characterized by their combination of intelligence, humanity and elegance. In this linked but wide-ranging collection, addressing such topics as Shakespeare's trust--and mistrust--of language, hidden kings in the Tudor and Stuart history play, and comedy and the city, Barton looks at both major and neglected plays of the period and the ongoing dialogue between them.List of illustrations; Preface; Acknowledgements; Part I: 1. 'Wrying but a little': marriage, law and sexuality in the plays of Shakespeare; 2. Love's Labour's Lost (1953); 3. Shakespeare and the limits of language (1971); 4. Falstaff and the comic community (1985); 5. As You Like It and Twelfth Night: Shakespeare's 'sense of an ending' (1972); 6. 'Nature's piece 'gainst fancy': the divided catastrophe in Antony and Cleopatra (1974/1992); 7. Livy, Machiavelli and Shakespeare's Coriolanus (1985); 8. Leontes and the spider: language and speaker in Shakespeare's last plays (1980); 9. 'Enter Mariners wet': realism in Shakespeare's last plays (1986); Part II: 10. The king disguised: Shakespeare's Henry V and the comical history (1975); 11. 'He that plays the king': Ford's Perkin Warbeck and the Stuart history play (1977); 12. Oxymoron and the structure of Ford's The Broken Heart (1980) 13. Shakespeare and Jonson (1983); 14. London comedy and the ethos of thel37