Shakespeare Up Close: Reading Early Modern Texts

✍ Scribed by Russ McDonald; Nicholas D. Nace; Travis D. Williams (editors)

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama
• Year: 2012
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 414
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This landmark collection of newly-commissioned essays by leading international scholars, offers expert close readings of Shakespeare and other early modern authors. The book is an intervention into current critical methodology as well as an invaluable tool for all students of the literature of the period, exemplifying the possibilities of close reading in the hands of a range of gifted practitioners. Chapters cover a range of key texts from Shakespeare and other major writers of the period such as Milton, Donne, Jonson and Sidney.
This is a unique collection as no other book offers such a rich variety of self-contained, short-form close readings. As such it can be used in the undergraduate classroom as well as by scholars and post-graduates and will also appeal to literary readers with an enthusiasm for Shakespeare. Contributors include leading Shakespeareans Stanley Wells, Stanley Fish, Coppelia Kahn and Lukas Erne.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
CONTENTS
PREFACE
LIST OF CONTRIBUTION
INTRODUCTION
A NOTE ON TEXTS
Close Reading Beginnings
1 Editorial Emendation and the Opening of A Midsummer Night’s Dream
2 The Story of O: Reading Letters in the Prologue to Henry V
3 The Sense of a Beginning
Close Reading Experiences
4 Spenser Up Close: Temporality in The Faerie Queene
5 ‘at heaven’s gate’
6 On Shakespeare’s Sonnet 60
7 Balthasar’s Song in Much Ado About Nothing
8 The Persistence of the Flesh in Deaths Duell
9 The Syntax of Understanding: Herbert’s ‘Prayer (I)’
10 The Real Presence of Unstated Puns: Herbert’s ‘Love (III)’
Close Reading Both Ways
11 ‘Hardly they heard’
12 Having It Both Ways in Juliet’s ‘Gallop apace’ Speech
13 ‘To Celia’: Not Too Close
14 Marvell’s ‘Mourning’
15 On the Value of the Town-Bayes
16 Pointless Milton: A Close Reading in Negative
Close Rereading
17 Marlowe’s Will, Marlowe’s Shall
18 Reading Intensity: Sonnet 12
19 ‘Against’ Interpretations: Rereading Sonnet 49
20 The Chimney-Sweepers Conceit in the Song for Fidele in Cymbeline
21 Mille viae mortis
22 Donne the Time Traveller: Reading ‘The Relic’
23 Fletcher’s Mad Lover and the Late Shakespeare
Close Reading Techniques
24 ‘And Ten Low Words Oft Creep in One Dull Line’: Sidney’s Perfection of a Sonnet Device
25 The Fox and His Pause: Punctuating Consciousness in Jonson’s Volpone
26 Some Similes in Paradise Lost, Book 9
27 Telling Stories
28 Richard’s Soliloquy: Richard II, 5.5.1–49
29 Virtual Presence and Vicarious Identity in the First Tetralogy
30. Unmuffling Isabella
Close Reading Hamlet
31 Hamlet’s ‘Serious Hearing’: ‘Sound’ vs. ‘Use’ of ‘Voice’
32 Hamlet’s Couplets
33 The Dumb Show in Hamlet
34 Claudius On His Knees
35 Gertrude’s Gallery
Close Reading Endings
36 The Fool’s Promised Exit
37 How Can Act 5 Forget Lear and Cordelia?
38 Exits without Exiting
39 Playing Prospero Against the Grain
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W