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Includes fourteen essays on Shakespeare.
Defines "to bodge up" as "to stitch pieces together into a patchwork." Considers Shakespeare's "ingenuity" as a bodger in terms of early modern writing and translation practices. Explores Robert Greene's criticism of Shakespeare and Shakespeare's use of Greene's Pandosto. Suggests that Shakespeare patches Italian sources, including Giulio Romano's work, into Winter's Tale, showing how the play draws on Italian tragicomedy.
Describes Shakespeare's plays and poems as baroque, focusing on melancholy, hyperbole, theatricality, gender, and poetics.
Contends that Cymbeline, Winter’s Tale, Tempest, and Henry VIII offer political insights in a pedagogical manner. Suggests that Shakespeare's late plays emphasize the importance of sovereigns and nobles having patience and integrity.
Situates Shakespeare's plays in context of English and European debates about law, liberty, and government.
Analyzes verbal expression of emotion in King Lear, applying "appraisal theory" and speech act theory. Considers emotion in gender-swapped performances of Queen Lear and Michael Kantor's aboriginal adaptation, The Shadow King (q.v.).
Contends that series of failed messengers across Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra are fundamental to how Shakespeare engages with the play’s genre by negotiating its relationship with classical and neoclassical tragedy. Asserts that Shakespeare employs the nuntius as an aspect of his dramaturgy to imply a larger imagined world beyond what is shown in a staged performance. Concludes with a close reading of the messenger missing from Antony’s death scene, modelled on a messenger missing from Sophocles’s Ajax, whose erasure allows Shakespeare to achieve the generically complicated representation of Antony’s performed death. English summary, 380.
Explores the print-cultural and aesthetic significance of Charles Taylor’s illustrated anthology of Shakespeare’s plays, The Picturesque Beauties of Shakespeare (1783–1787). Analyzes the collection’s illustration, marketing, and reception, highlighting its pioneering role in visual anthologies of Shakespeare as a picturesque compendium. Demonstrates how
Taylor’s publication advanced Shakespeare’s popularization beyond textual plays, engaging the late eighteenth-century readership with Shakespeare visually. English summary, 447.
Explores how, in Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare adapts Ovid, concluding that Ovid's narrative points to remembered and renewed beauty, whereas Shakespeare's emphasizes the end of beauty, love, and life. Describes how F. C. Burnand's Victorian farce Venus and Adonis: Or, the Two Rivals and the Small Boar builds on the Ovidian and Shakespearean tradition. Spanish summary, 169.