Excerpt: "When the rule limiting speeches to an hour was adopted by Congress, which was before most of you were born, an eminent but somewhat discursive person spent more than that measure of time in convincing me that whoever really had anything to say could say it in less. I then and there acquired a conviction of this truth, which has only strengthened with years. Yet whoever undertakes to lecture must adapt his discourse to the law which requires...

Touching on everyone from Marlowe to Middleton, Essays on Elizabethan Drama is a rigorous collection of Eliot's works on the great dramatists of the 16th century.

"Exploring the racially white 'others' whom Shakespeare illustrates in characters like Hamlet, Antony and the Macbeths - figures who are never quite 'white enough' - this urgent, compelling work shows how such racial categorisation begets anti-Blackness and sustains white supremacy. An essential contribution to Shakespeare and critical race studies"--

In this book, Knapp draws on an extraordinary array of historical evidence to reconstruct Shakespeare's authorial identity as Shakespeare and his contemporaries understood it. He argues that Shakespeare tried to adapt his own singular talent and ambition to the collaborative enterprise of drama by imagining himself as uniquely embodying the diverse, fractious energies of the popular theater.--[book jacket].

Shakespeare was an astute observer of contemporary life, culture, and politics. The emerging practice of territory as a political concept and technology did not elude his attention. In Shakespearean Territories, Stuart Elden reveals just how much Shakespeare's unique historical position and political understanding can teach us about territory. Shakespeare dramatized a world of technological advances in measuring, navigation, cartography, and surveying,...

Pt. 1. The making of Elizabethan drama. Introduction -- Popular drama : the traffique of the stage -- The learned tradition 1560-1580 : the language of comedy and the drama of the schools -- The decorum of the scene. The author traces the development and sets out to form a critical estimate of Elizabethan comedy's various forms, taking account of recent scholarly work on Elizabethan critical theory.