Imagining Shakespeare

'As ever, Orgel writes with verve and piercing intelligence. He tackles familiar material and brings it up gleaming bright, fresh and new...All in all, the read is a real delight...' - Professor Peter Holland, Director and Professor of Shakespeare Studies, University of Notre Dame, USA

Stephen Orgel has arguably been the single most important voice shaping

the research agenda of English Renaissance literary studies for the past

thirty years. Imagining Shakespeare shows Orgel at his best - lucid, incisive, lively, learned, and always surprising as he teases out the implications of 'what we mean by Shakespeare', as well as how and what Shakespeare can mean. The essays are each subtle, supple, and always wonderfully alert. They are dense and complex but beautifully clear. Orgel is indeed master of all he surveys here, moving almost effortlessly through fields of textual scholarship, performance study, social history, history of art, and impressive local readings of the plays. No one working in the field could fail to take notice of this book. No one who reads it could fail to be, in almost equal measure, instructed and delighted.' - David Kastan, Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University

'The author elegantly... explores the changeable natures of [Shakespeare] and the ways in which his dramatic output has been interpreted....This would book would repay, with dividends, careful study by actors, directors and other teachers of literature and drama. Highly recommended. ' - Larry Schwartz, Library Journal

'[An] excellent new collection of essays...Orgel provides a history of attempts by 18th and 19th-century artists to produce a likeness more worthy of Shakespeare.' - London Review of Books

Orgel is celebrated for his work on the masques of the Stuart court and other visual aspects of Renaissance staging. These elegant and witty chapters return to those concerns but treat a considerable variety of different topics, nearly all lending themselves to vivid illustration. One chapter deals with the now familiar point that Elizabethan plays were necessarily the products of collaboration. More enlivening are a valuable study of the Shakespeare portraits and a brilliantly clever chapter on the sexual undertones of A Midsummer Night's Dream. A study of Shylock gives ample evidence of Orgel's highly individual scholarship.' - Frank Kermode, The New York Times