The tragedy is done, the tyrant Macbeth dead. The time is free. But for how long? As Macduff pursues dreams of national revival, smaller lives are seeding. In the ruins of Dunsinane, the Porter tries to keep his three young boys safe from the nightmare of history. In a nunnery deep in Birnam Wood, a girl attempts to forget what she lost in war. Flitting between them, a tortured clairvoyant shakes with the knowledge of what's to come.
An unprecedented collaboration between two leading Shakespeareans, Macbeth, Macbeth sparks a whole new world from the embers of Shakespeare's great tragedy.
Shakespeare's Dead
April 2016
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Book
Pyramus: `Now die, die, die, die, die.' [Dies] A Midsummer Night's Dream 'Shakespeare's Dead' reveals the unique ways in which Shakespeare brings dying, death, and the dead to life. It establishes the cultural, religious and social contexts for thinking about early modern death, with particular reference to the plague which ravaged Britain during his lifetime, and against the divisive background of the Reformation. But it also shows how death on stage is different from death in real life. The dead come to life, ghosts haunt the living, and scenes of mourning are subverted by the fact that the supposed corpse still breathes. Shakespeare scripts his scenes of dying with extraordinary care. Famous final speeches - like Hamlet's `The rest is silence', Mercutio's `A plague o' both your houses', or Richard III's `My kingdom for a horse' - are also giving crucial choices to the actors as to exactly how and when to die. Instead of the blank finality of death, we get a unique entrance into the loneliness or confusion of dying. 'Shakespeare's Dead' tells of death-haunted heroes such as Macbeth and Hamlet, and death-teasing heroines like Juliet, Ophelia, and Cleopatra. It explores the fear of `something after death', and characters' terrifying visions of being dead. But it also uncovers the constant presence of death in Shakespeare's comedies, and how the grinning jester might be a leering skull in disguise. This book celebrates the paradox: the life in death in Shakespeare.
Poor Tom: living King Lear
September 2014
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Book
One of the most memorable and affecting Shakespearean characters is Edgar in King Lear. He has long been celebrated for his faithfulness in the face of his father's rejection, and the scene in which he saves his blinded father from suicide is regarded as one of the most moving in all of Shakespeare. In Poor Tom, Simon Palfrey asks us to rethink all those received ideas - and thus to experience King Lear as never before. He argues that Edgar is Shakespeare's most radical experiment in characterization - and also his most exhaustive model of both human and theatrical possibility. The key to the Edgar character is that he spends most of the play disguised, much of it as "Poor Tom of Bedlam," and his disguises come to uncanny life. The Edgar-role is always more than one person; it animates multitudes, past and present and future, and gives life to states of being beyond the normal reach of the senses-undead, or not-yet, or ghostly, or possible rather than actual. And because the Edgar - role both connects and retunes all of the figures and scenes in the play, a close attention to this particular part can shine new light on how the whole play works. The ultimate message of Palfrey's bravura analysis is the same for readers or actors or audiences as it is for the characters in the play: see and listen feelingly; pay attention, especially when it seems as though there is nothing there.
DRAMA
Shakespeare's Possible Worlds
May 2014
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Book
New methods are needed to do justice to Shakespeare. His work exceeds conventional models, past and present, for understanding playworlds. In this book, Simon Palfrey goes right to the heart of early modern popular drama, revealing both how it works and why it matters. Unlike his contemporaries, Shakespeare gives independent life to all his instruments, and to every fraction and fragment of the plays. Palfrey terms these particles 'formactions' - theatre-specific forms that move with their own action and passion. Palfrey's book is critically daring in both substance and format. Its unique mix of imaginative gusto, thought experiments, and virtuosic technique generates piercing close readings of the plays. There is far more to playlife than meets the eye. Influenced by Leibniz's visionary original model of possible worlds, Palfrey opens up the multiple worlds of Shakespeare's language, scenes, and characters as never before.
Attending to Tom
January 2014
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Journal article
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Shakespeare Quarterly
Formactions
December 2013
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Chapter
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Early Modern Theatricality
Early Modern Theatricality brings together some of the most innovative critics in the field to examine the many conventions that characterized early modern theatricality.
Literary Criticism
The Weird Sisters
May 2013
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Chapter
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Reinventing the Renaissance Shakespeare and his Contemporaries in Adaptation and Performance
Renaissance. Tragedy. and. the. Detective. Novel. Esme. Miskimmin. Now to anyone who reads the Poetics with an unbiased mind, it is evident that Aristotle was not so much a student of his own literature, as a prophet of the future.
Literary Criticism
The Weird sisters (from the Life and Death of the Brothers Macbeth)
January 2013
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Chapter
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Reinventing the Renaissance: Shakespeare and His Contemporaries in Adaption and Performance
Ghostly Selections
April 2012
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Chapter
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Shakespeare and I
Drama
New Approaches to Character
January 2012
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Chapter
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21st Century Approaches: Early Modern Theatricality
The Connell Guide to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet
January 2012
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Book
Doing Shakespeare
January 2011
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Book
From Dunsinane
January 2011
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Chapter
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Crrritic!:
Sighs, Cries, Lies, Insults, Outbursts, Hoaxes, Disasters, Letters of Resignation, and Various Other Noises Off in These the First and Last Days of Literary Criticism, Not to Mention the University
Middleton's Presence
January 2011
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Chapter
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Thomas Middleton in Context
What does the cued part cue?
April 2008
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Chapter
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A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance
Taken as a whole, the volume productively redraws the boundaries of Shakespeare performance studies.
Literary Criticism
Shakespeare in Parts
September 2007
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Book
Early Modern Professional Parts Much uncertainty has arisen from the erroneous
assumption that there is only one surviving early modern written 'part' from which
all knowledge of actors' texts must be gleaned. But in fact there are a handful of ...
Literary Criticism
The Rape of Marina
January 2007
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Journal article
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Shakespeare International Yearbook
The Rape of Marina
January 2007
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Chapter
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Shakespeare International Yearbook
Macbeth and Kierkegaard
January 2004
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Journal article
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Shakespeare Survey
Late Shakespeare A New World of Words
January 1999
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Book
But the critical tradition has been too decorous. Neither neo-Christian pieties nor high-political allegory can account for the works' audacity and surprise, or the popular investment in both their form andmeaning.