It started out amusing, in a way, but now it’s getting ugly—the little-noticed battle over The New York Times’ Shakespeare coverage. Earlier this month, invocations of creationism and Holocaust denial were injected into the debate by no less an authority than Harvard’s Stephen Greenblatt, author...

It started out amusing, in a way, but now it’s getting ugly—the little-noticed battle over The New York Times’ Shakespeare coverage.Earlier this month, invocations of creationism and Holocaust denial were injected into the debate by no less an authority than Harvard’s Stephen Greenblatt, author of...

A word in the deaf ears of Oscar Eustis, the new artistic director of the Public Theater: When you produced Macbeth in Central Park last summer, your claim that it was a timely war play for “our divided and war-torn nation” was made, I can...

The signs are there. Maybe it's too early, but I'd suggest we're on the verge of a new aesthetic dispensation, a tendency I'd call "The Return of the Singular." That's what I'm calling it, anyway. And, no, not just the "single" as in popular songs,...

Kathryn Schwarz, Vanderbilt University

The quene perswaded and encoraged by these meanes, toke upon her and her husbande, the high power and aucthoritie ouer the people and subiectes. And although she ioyned her husbande with hir in name, for a countenaunce, yet she did all, she saied all, and she bare the whole swynge, as the strong oxe doth, when he is yoked in the plough with a pore silly asse.

In the following essay, Meron compares Shakespeare's treatment of war to medieval and Renaissance legal, religious, and chivalric doctrines of “just war.” Focusing on the English histories and Troilus and Cressida, the critic contends that characters in these plays articulate a message that is essentially pacifist.

In the following essay, Caldwell analyzes Henry VI, Part 2 and Henry V in the context of French and English historians' and artists' representations of the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453).

Essay about life in Elizabethan England and how Shakespeare's plays both shaped and were shaped by societal pressures during that time.

Compares the writing style of Elizabethan playwrights William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. Describes how their plays are similar in themes, mood, and characters.