Arts and Humanities Commons^™

"Bring Out Your Dead!": Cashing In On Shakespeare In The First Folio, John M. Bowers

Special Collections Events

William Shakespeare wrote his plays for box-office profits at the theater, not for a reading public. When his old colleagues John Hemings and Henry Condell published his plays seven years after his death, they too were looking for financial profit and "packaged" the dramas -- as well as the dramatist himself -- to boost income by appealing to a new market of readers, thus making Shakespeare the subject of literary studies ever since.

21st Century Shakespeare, Evelyn Gajowski

Special Collections Events

Why do Shakespeare's texts resonate so powerfully for us at the outset of the twenty-first century? Why is Shakespeare more popular today than ever before? What are the various ways in which we consume Shakespeare's texts 400 years after he produced them? Professor Gajowski aims to suggest answers to these questions by elucidating the current state of the art of analyzing Shakespeare

A Natural History Of Teasing: British Women Writers And The Shakespearean Courtship Narrative, 1677-~1818, Mary Vance

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This dissertation considers the complex roles that nascent Bardolatry, the rise of women

writers, and the persistence of satiric impulses played in engineering the teasing relationships of eighteenth-century courtship fiction. I argue that in a period reputedly dominated by sentiment, women’s comedy largely hinged on anti-sentiment, particularly in its appropriation of the antithetical wooing practices so pervasive in Shakespeare’s romantic comedies. Such a perspective endows female authors (and their protagonists) to assume control of the discursive field and resituates the love story into a love game. I begin by tracing the continued influence of the Elizabethan culture of jest, aligning …