Much Ado About Nothing: A Critical Reader
- 280 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
Much Ado About Nothing: A Critical Reader
About this book
This volume offers an accessible and thought-provoking guide to this major Shakespearean comedy, surveying its key themes and evolving critical preoccupations. It also provides a detailed and up-to-date history of the play's rich stage and screen performance, looking closely at major contemporary performances, including Josie Rourke's film starring David Tennant and Catherine Tate, Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones at the Old Vic, and the RSC's recent rebranding of it as a sequel. Moving through to four new critical essays, the guide opens up fresh perspectives, including contemporary directors' deployment of older actors within the lead roles, the play's relationship to Love's Labour's Lost, its presence on Youtube and the ways in which tales and ruses in the play belong to a wider concern with varieties of crime. The volume finishes with a guide to critical, web-based and production-related resources and an annotated bibliography provide a basis for further research.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half-title
- Title
- Copyright
- Contents
- Series Introduction
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Timeline
- Introduction
- 1. The Critical Backstory
- 2. Performance History: Landmarks, Tendencies, Outliers, Recursions and Riffs in the Performance History of Much Ado About Nothing
- 3. The State of the Art
- 4. New Directions: Letting Wonder Seem Familiar – Italy and London in Much Ado About Nothing
- 5. New Directions: Much Ado – Women (and Men) of a Certain Age
- 6. New Directions: Much Ado or Love’s Labour’s Won? – Does It Matter Which?
- 7. New Directions: Much Ado About Nothing and Social Media
- 8. Resources: ‘How Apt It Is to Learn’ – Studying and Teaching Much Ado About Nothing
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index