A Companion to Shakespeare's Works the Histories: The Histories: 2 (Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture)

"Whether for the student wishing for an overview of critical approaches or anxious to fill in the gaps in his Shakespearean culture, for those wishing to catch up on the diversity of literary theories, or for the inquisitive browser, this set of volumes assuredly charts the map of current criticism." Cahiers Elisabethains

This four-volume Companion to Shakespeare's Works, compiled as a single entity, offers a uniquely comprehensive snapshot of current Shakespeare criticism. This book brings together new essays from a mixture of younger and more established scholars from around the world - Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It examines each of Shakespeare's plays and major poems, using all the resources of contemporary criticism, from performance studies to feminist, historicist, and textual analysis. Volumes are organized in relation to generic categories: namely the histories, the tragedies, the romantic comedies, and the late plays, problem plays and poems. Each volume contains individual essays on all texts in the relevant category, as well as more general essays looking at critical issues and approaches more widely relevant to the genre. This book offers a provocative road map to Shakespeare studies at the dawning of the twenty-first century. This companion to Shakespeare's histories contains original essays on every history play from Henry VI to Henry V as well as fourteen additional articles on such topics as censorship in Shakespeare's histories, the relation of Shakespeare's plays to other dramatic histories of the period, Shakespeare's histories on film, the homo erotics of Shakespeare's history plays, and nation formation in Shakespeare's histories.