Shakespeare and Multiplicity

In this 1993 book, Gibbons presents multiplicity as a way of understanding the form of Shakespeare's plays.

Brian Gibbons (Author)

9780521444064, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 September 1993

256 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.9 cm, 0.48 kg

'In this continuously stimulating book … studies … are all richly argued, informed by a strong sense of the plays in the theatre, and of the ways in which they can be remade in a contemporary context … This is a consistently readable book, free from jargon, but not therefore from subtlety.' David Lindley, Shakespeare Survey

Brian Gibbons presents the idea of multiplicity as a way of understanding the form and style of Shakespeare's plays: composed of many different codes, woven together in a unique pattern for each play, rather than variations on fixed notions of comedy or tragedy. Selecting from different phases of Shakespeare's career, the book's method is comparison, using an imaginative range of texts and new approaches; there is also lively discussion of modern staging. Comparison with major works by Spenser, Sidney and Marlowe is complemented by a demonstration of Shakespeare's re-use of his own previous plays and poems. Far from reducing the plays to a formula, Brian Gibbons shows how criticism articulates what popular audiences have always known, that the plays' sheer abundance and variety is their strength. This 1993 book is scholarly, yet straightforward, on an issue of central interest.

Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
2. Fabled Cymbeline
3. A speechless dialect: interpreting the human body in Shakespeare's plays
4. Shakespeare's 'road of excess': Titus Andronicus, The Taming of the Shrew, King Lear
5. Always topical: Measure for Measure
6. Amorous fictions in As You Like It
7. Unstable Proteus: Marlowe and Antony and Cleopatra
8. Multiplicity
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Shakespeare studies & criticism [DSGS]