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...
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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
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 ShakespeareClose 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 GalleryClose 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
