Professor Schlueter approaches this early comedy as a parody of two types of Renaissance educational fiction: the love-quest story and the test-of-friendship story, which by their combination show high-flown human ideals as incompatible with each other and with human nature. A thoroughly researched, illustrated stage history reveals changing conceptions of the play, which nevertheless often fail to come to terms with its subversive impetus. Since the first known production at David Garrick's Drury Lane Theatre, it has tempted major directors and actors, including John Philip Kemble, William Charles Macready and Charles Kean, who established a tradition of understanding which cast its shadow even on such modern productions as Denis Carey's famous staging for the Bristol Old Vic and Robin Phillips's for the Royal Shakespeare Company. This updated edition includes a new introductory section by Lucy Munro on recent stage and critical interpretations, bringing the performance history completely up to date.

Author: William Shakespeare
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 05/28/2012
Series: New Cambridge Shakespeare
Pages: 180
Weight: 0.65lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.80w x 0.40d
ISBN: 9780521181693
2nd Revised Edition

About the Author
Munro, Lucy: - Lucy Munro is a lecturer in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama Studies at King's College London. Her research focuses on the performance and reception of Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline drama, on editing, book history and textual scholarship, on literary style and genre, and on dramatic representations of childhood and ageing. Her books include Children of the Queen's Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Archaic Style in English Literature, 1590-1674 (Cambridge University Press, 2013). She is editor of Edward Sharpham's The Fleer (2006), Shakespeare and George Wilkins' Pericles, in William Shakespeare: Complete Works (ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, 2007), Richard Brome's The Queen and Concubine and The Demoiselle, in Richard Brome Online (gen. ed. Richard Allen Cave, 2009), and John Fletcher's The Tamer Tamed (2010). Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Huntington Library Quarterly, Modern Philology, Shakespeare Bulletin, Shakespeare and Ageing and Society, and in collections such as The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre (ed. Richard Dutton, 2009), Performing Early Modern Drama Today (ed. Kathryn Prince and Pascale Aebischer, Cambridge University Press, 2012) and The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England (ed. Andy Kesson and Emma Smith, 2013). Her stage history of The Alchemist appears in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, electronic edition (gen. ed. David Bevington, Martin Butler and Ian Donaldson, Cambridge University Press, 2014).