Description
Book SynopsisThe purpose of this book is to honor the scholarly legacy of Charles R. Forker with a series of essays that address the problem of literary influence in original ways and from a variety of perspectives. The emphasis throughout is on the sort of careful, exhaustive, evidence-based scholarship to which Forker dedicated his entire professional life. Although wide-ranging and various by design, the essays in this book never lose sight of three discrete yet overlapping areas of literary inquiry that create a unity of perspective amid the diversity of approaches: 1) the formation of play texts, textual analysis, and editorial practice; 2) performance history and the material playing conditions from Shakespeare’s time to the present, including film as well as stage representations; and 3) the world, both cultural and literary, in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries worked and to which they bequeathed an artistic legacy that continues to be re-interpreted and re-defined by a whole new set of cultural and literary pressures. Eschewing any single, predetermined ideological perspective, the essays in this book call our attention to how the simplest questions or observations can open up provocative and unexpected scholarly vistas. In so doing, they invite us into a subtly re-configured world of literary influence that draws us into new, often unexpected, ways of seeing and understanding the familiar.
Trade ReviewCandido has assembled a remarkably cohesive collection of original essays by distinguished scholars that does justice to Charles R. Forker’s remarkable career. * Renaissance Quarterly *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction Joseph Candido 1.The Ends of Time in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus Rebecca Bushnell 2.Marlowe in Edward II: Lender or Borrower? Brian Vickers 3.Edward II in Performance from the 1980s to the Present David Bevington 4.The Transitory Playhouse: The Theatre, Rose, and Fortune S. P. Cerasano 5.Shakespeare and his Fellows: Honored at Somerset House? Leeds Barroll 6.Richard II on Screens Peter Holland 7.The (Mis)fortunes of Falstaff in Performance James C. Bulman 8.How the Noble Spanish Soldier Describes a Battle Lois Potter 9.The Staging of the Problematic Attempted Rape Scene of The Two Gentlemen of Verona as the Culmination of the Play’s Anti-Romantic Thematic Concerns R. W. Desai 10.Across the Narrow Sea: The 1620 Leipzig Volume of English Plays June Schlueter 11.Shakespearean Comedy and the Boundaries of Europe Michael Dobson 12.George Wither’s Response to Othello David M. Bergeron 13.Jonson’s Epigrams and the Learned Critics Peter E. Medine Appendix: Charles R. Forker: A Bibliography of Published Works (1958-2014) Bibliography List of Contributors Index
