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Here Mary Thomas Crane considers the brain as a site where body and culture meet to form the subject and its expression in language. Taking Shakespeare as her case study, she boldly demonstrates the explanatory power of cognitive theory--a theory which argues that language is produced by a reciprocal interaction of body and environment, brain and culture, and which refocuses attention on the role of the author in the making of meaning. Crane reveals in Shakespeare's texts a web of structures and categories through which meaning is created. The approach yields fresh insights into a wide range of his plays, includingThe Comedy of Errors, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Measure for Measure,andThe Tempest. Crane's cognitive reading traces the complex interactions of cultural and cognitive determinants of meaning as they play themselves out in Shakespeare's texts. She shows how each play centers on a word or words conveying multiple meanings (such as \"act,\" \"pinch,\" \"pregnant,\" \"villain and clown\"), and how each cluster has been shaped by early modern ideological formations. The book also chronicles the playwright's developing response to the material conditions of subject formation in early modern England. Crane reveals that Shakespeare in his comedies first explored the social spaces within which the subject is formed, such as the home, class hierarchy, and romantic courtship. His later plays reveal a greater preoccupation with how the self is formed within the body, as the embodied mind seeks to make sense of and negotiate its physical and social environment.

The nature of Renaissance allegory has been the subject of much investigation, notably by Spenserian scholars. The subject is now enlarged through a study of the plays of the Elizabethan Court dramatists of the 1580's and early 1590's, particularly the comedies of John Lyly. Mr. Saccio rejects the older \"topical readings\" of Lyly; by extensive interpretation of particular plays he describes three distinct kinds of allegorical operation apparent in successive phases of Lyly's career and suggests that they form an important paradigm of the development of English drama itself. Originally published in 1969. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

[...]I shall argue that, by taking classical drama out of familiar theatrical environments into urban spaces, street theatre challenges the place of the spectator in a performance as well as that of the author. According to Olivier Jeudy, the aim of street theatre is to make audiences look at urban spaces differently and thus to cause its transformation.2 This redefinition of the space of performance was largely inspired by the structuralist and poststructuralist critiques of ideologies associated, among others, with the work of Barthes, Louis Althusser, and Etienne Balibar.

Deng argues that the interactions between literary representations and the malleability of coinage inform the complex dynamic interrelations between state formation and economy.4 Landreth, on the other hand, contends that the interaction of material qualities and socially determined values in gold and silver coins enables the intrusion of these objects into the discursive debate over \"the contested relations among poetics, human institutions, and material substance. [...]early modern coins could be stored and circulated just like any other material goods as unique objects that embodied memories and intimate relations, and monetary value, as Craig Muldrew points out, \"remained enmeshed with other values.

According to Lodge's dedicatory epistle, he wrote his romance while sailing to foreign lands-''voyaging to the Islands of Terceras & the Canaries''and the title page describes the book as ''Fetcht from the Canaries by T. L. Gent. Rosader has to slay Saladyne's dinner guests and endure a military siege brought by Saladyne in order to escape his elder brother's house; Saladyne and Rosader are later reconciled and slay forest ruffians who have kidnapped Aliena; and the reunited broth- ers must fall to arms again at the end of the tale to regain the rights of the exiled Gerismonde to the throne of France.

Structurally, Measure for Measure repeatedly lures its audiences into predestinarian presumptions that it then undermines. Since the play's most prominent potential reprobate is the subject of multiple theatrical reversals of spiritual expectation, the cumulative effect is not to show playgoers' as- sessments of Angelo's soul to be wrong, but to render all such judgments uncertain. On the one hand, God's judgments were secret, not bound by earthly reason, therefore human attempts to arrogate knowledge of an individual's election or reprobation were an affront to God's inscrutable sovereignty. [...]it would be dangerous as well as uncharitable to presume that the godly (those who appeared holy, specifically puritans) and the elect (those whom God has actually chosen to save) or the wicked (people who sin) and reprobates (people going to Hell) were coterminous groups.

The jukebox musical All Shook Up challenges current definitions of what constitutes an adaptation. Not only have most productions refrained from announcing the musical as an adaptation, but the question of what All Shook Up is an adaptation of is almost infinitely contestable, given the sheer number of potential combinations of source texts that any one audience member is capable of recognizing. This essay argues that All Shook Up engages with the unstable identities of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night by playing with its own status as an unannounced adaptation: by inviting audiences to recognize All Shook Up's status as an adaptation—not only of Twelfth Night, but of multiple other works—as the work unfolds itself, the musical reveals the queer potential of adaptation, its potential to destabilize categories of identity. All Shook Up, ostensibly a light-hearted Elvis Presley vehicle, carries out quiet political work, harnessing this queer potential and expanding on Twelfth Night's unstable identities in order to destabilize various forms of modern identity-markers, including gender, sexuality, race, class, region, and age. All Shook Up thus makes a claim for the adaptation as an art form in itself, with its own particular aesthetic and political strengths and values.

[...]spices do little to cure spoiling meat, compared with salting, smoking, or pickling. Having cured ''the hateful imperfection of her eyes,'' Oberon is also able to cure Titania's longing for monsters and marvels (4.1.60). [...]it is that their famed ''debate'' or ''dissension'' comes to an end and the play moves swiftly towards its comic resolution (2.1.116).

In the case of Jaques, this makes sense, for the experience of the outsider is an important component of lesbian and gay identity and queer theater; it follows that stressing such experiences might also prove a useful strategy for staging Shakespeare in ways that connote queerness. Since the turn of the millennium, interest in cross-gender-cast Shakespeare has increased exponentially; to point, three British professional theatrical companies have presented Twelfth Night with all- male casts: [...]queer Shakespeare can reflect the local concerns of the lesbian and gay community-whether Gay Liberation, homophobic responses to AIDS, or the drive for marriage equality.

Recent work in the philosophy of theater has center-staged actors and acting. Zamir examines the implications of such a performance-centered view of theater to an understanding of the literature that is written for the stage. He asserts that watching an actor releases several abstract concerns relating to subjective experience and its limitations, and such concerns may percolate into the written role that is being enacted.