Richard III: A Norton Critical Edition (Norton Critical Editions) - Softcover

Shakespeare, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393929590 ISBN 13: 9780393929591

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008

Synopsis

In The Tragedy of King Richard III, Shakespeare chronicles the rise and fall of one of history’s most repellent, and the theater’s most mesmerizing, figures.

This Norton Critical Edition of Richard III is based on the First Quarto (1597) edition of the play with interpolations from the First Folio (1623). The play is accompanied by a preface, explanatory annotations, A Note on the Text, a list of Textual Variants, and eighteen illustrations of seminal scenes from major dramatic productions and film versions of the play.

“Contexts” provides readers with the sources and analogues that informed Shakespeare’s composition of Richard III. These include excerpts from Robert Fabyan’s New Chronicles of England and France, Thomas More’s The History of King Richard III, Edward Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York, A Mirror for Magistrates, and The True Tragedy of Richard III. A selection from Colley Cibber’s eighteenth-century adaptation records the compromised form in which Richard III held the stage for approximately two hundred years before twentieth-century editors brought it back into recognizable shape. A representative selection of commentary on stage and film reproductions of Richard III is also provided, ranging from reviews of nineteenth-century productions by William Hazlitt and George Bernard Shaw, a survey of stage performances by Scott Colley, and in-depth analyses of twentieth-century film adaptations by Saskia Kossak, Barbara Hodgdon, and Peter S. Donaldson.

“Criticism” collects eight major pieces of scholarship, including early accounts of the play’s major themes by William Richardson and Edward Dowden, modern critical assessments by Wilbur Sanders, Elihu Pearlman, Linda Charnes, Katherine Maus, and Ian Moulton, and an essay by Harry Berger Jr. especially commissioned for this volume.

A Selected Bibliography is also included.

18 illustrations

About this title

About the Author

Thomas Cartelli is professor of English and Film Studies at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations; Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Economy of Theatrical Experience, and coauthor of New Wave Shakespeare on Screen. His essays appear in The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe; Shakespeare the Movie II; and A Blackwell Companion to Shakespeare, among others.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0393929590
• ISBN 13: 9780393929591
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 448
• Editor: Cartelli Thomas