Imagining Shakespeare A History of Texts and Visions [Hardcover]

In this beautifully illustrated book, one of the foremost Shakespeareans of our time explores the ways in which Shakespeare has been imagined from his time to ours. Drawing on performance history, textual history and the visual arts (including a fascinating chapter on portraiture), Imagining Shakespeare displays throughout the cultural versatility, elegance, lucidity and wit which have become the hallmarks of Stephen Orgel's style.Imagining Shakespeare Staging Clio History and Biography Magic and History The Pornographic Ideal Imagining Shylock Index

'As ever, Orgel writes with verve and piercing intelligence. He tackles familiar material and brings it up gleaming bright, fresh and new...All in all, the read is a real delight...' - Professor Peter Holland, Director and Professor of Shakespeare Studies, University of Notre Dame, USA

Stephen Orgel has arguably been the single most important voice shaping

the research agenda of English Renaissance literary studies for the past

thirty years. Imagining Shakespeare shows Orgel at his best - lucid, incisive, lively, learned, and always surprising as he teases out the implications of 'what we mean by Shakespeare', as well as how and what Shakespeare can mean. The essays are each subtle, supple, and always wonderfully alert. They are dense and complex but beautifully clear. Orgel is indeed master of all he surveys here, moving almost effortlessly through fields of textual scholarship, performance study, social history, history of art, and impressive local readings of the plays. No one working in the field could fail to take notice of this book. No one who reads it could fail to be, in almost equal measure, instructed and delighted.' - David Kastan, Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University

'The author elegantly... explores the changeable natures of [Shakespeare] and the ways in which his dramatic output has been intlã*