Mario DiGangi

Through expert guidance on understanding, interpreting, and writing about Shakespeare's language, this book makes The Winter's Tale accessible and exciting for students. It demonstrates that careful attention to Shakespeare's complex dramatic language can clarify the structure and concerns of the play, as well as provide deep and satisfying engagement with the social, political and ethical questions Shakespeare raises. Each chapter features a 'Writing Matters' section designed to connect analysis of Shakespeare's language to students' development of their own writing strategies. The book examines topics in the play such as tragicomic genre; women's assertion of social and political agency; obedience and resistance to rulers; the virtues and risks of following festivity, and disputes over the proper forms of religious devotion.

Building on feminist and queer scholarship, this book demonstrates how sexual types on the early modern stage—such as the sodomite, the tribade (a woman-loving woman), the narcissistic courtier, the citizen wife, the bawd, and the court favorite—function as sites of ideological contradiction. On the one hand, these sexual types are vilified and disciplined for violating social and sexual norms; on the other hand, they can take the form of dynamic, resourceful characters who expose the limitations of the categories that attempt to define and contain them. In bringing sexuality and character studies into conjunction with one another, Sexual Types provides illuminating new readings of familiar plays, such as Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Winter's Tale, and of lesser-known plays by John Fletcher, Thomas Middleton, and James Shirley.

The Winter's Tale was one of the very last plays Shakespeare wrote, a moving romance whose themes are sin, forgiveness, death, rebirth, and the power of Time and Nature to heal all wounds. This edition of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale reprints the Bevington edition of the play accompanied by five sets of thematically arranged primary documents and illustrations designed to facilitate many different approaches to Shakespeare. The text includes tracts on childbirth, jealousy, women's speech, rural festivities, and bears; royal proclamations and statutes about vagabonds and peddlers; popular ballads on marriage and monsters; treatises about monarchy, Catholic and Protestant theological debates, farm labor, and art collecting; a transcription of the trial of Anne Boleyn; and accounts of performances of the statue scene since the 19th century. The primary documents contextualize the dramatic genres of romance and tragicomedy; gender and family relations; political authority and resistance; country work and play; and the social, religious, and erotic uses of art. 

Barnes & Noble's Shakespeare Series features newly edited texts prepared by leading scholars from America and Great Britain, in collaboration with one of the world's foremost Shakespeare authorities, David Scott Kastan of Columbia University. Together they have produced texts as faithful as possible to those that Shakespeare wrote, providing contemporary scholarship, contextualizing essays, better notes, and an annotated bibliography of titles for further reading. Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare's hilarious though often unnerving story of desire, confusion, and magic has delighted audiences for four hundred years. The editor, Mario DiGangi, provides a set of notes rich in insight into the play's many literary and cultural points of reference. 

Barnes & Noble's Shakespeare Series features newly edited texts prepared by leading scholars from America and Great Britain, in collaboration with one of the world's foremost Shakespeare authorities, David Scott Kastan of Columbia University. Together they have produced texts as faithful as possible to those that Shakespeare wrote, providing contemporary scholarship, contextualizing essays, better notes, and an annotated bibliography of titles for further reading. When Romeo and Juliet was first performed, its two title characters would have seemed like very unlikely tragic heroes, since they possess no historical importance or political status. The editor, Mario DiGangi, restores the play to its original context, demonstrating in detail how Shakespeare elevated his teenage characters' plight to make them the most famous tragic couple in literature.