Bøker i Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures-serien

This compact, engaging book puts Shakespeare's originality in historical context and looks at how he worked with his sources: the plays, poems, chronicles and romances on which his own plays are based.

Contrary to the view that Shakespeare was careless with plot details, Circumstantial Shakespeare reveals how he actually used circumstance to imply offstage actions, times, and places in terms of the motives and desires of his characters, thus creating coherent dramatic worlds and a sense of the feelings of characters inhabiting them.

A Will to Believe is a revised version of Kastan's 2008 Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures, providing a provocative account of the ways in which religion animates Shakespeare's plays.

In distracted times like the present, Shakespeare too has been driven to distraction. Shakespeare | Cut considers contemporary practices of cutting up Shakespeare in stage productions, videogames, book sculptures, and YouTube postings, while also exploring how Shakespeare's texts have been cut apart beginning in Shakespeare's own time.

For almost two centuries, Shakespeare had no biography. Neither did his life have a timeline, and historians and archivists did not have the materials to make one. Does this mean that Shakespeare was not valued or understood until after 1800? This book focuses on a critical absence in the unfolding of Shakespeare's story.