Romances and Poems

The Norton Shakespeare

by Stephen Greenblatt (Editor), William Shakespeare

A vibrant Shakespeare that brings readers closer than ever before possible to Shakespeare's plays as they were first acted. The Norton Shakespeare, Based on the Oxford Edition invites readers to rediscover Shakespearethe working man of the theater, not the universal bard-and to rediscover his plays as scripts to be performed, not works to be immortalized. Combining the freshly edited texts of the Oxford Edition with lively introductions by Stephen Greenblatt and his co-editors, glossaries and annotations, and an elegant single-column page (that of the Norton Anthologies), this edition of Shakespeare invites contemporary readers to see and read Shakespeare afresh. Greenblatt's full introduction creates a window into Shakespeare world-the culture, demographics, commerce, politics, and religion of early-modern EnglandShakespeare's family background and professional life, the Elizabethan industries of theater and printing, and the subsequent centuries of Shakespeare textual editing.

Genres: Shakespeare, Poetry, Classics, Drama, Plays, Literature, Historical

797 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2000

About the author

Stephen Greenblatt (Ph.D. Yale) is Cogan University Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. Also General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eighth Edition, he is the author of nine books, including Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; Hamlet in Purgatory; Practicing New Historicism; Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World; Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture; and The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. He has edited six collections of criticism, is the co-author (with Charles Mee) of a play, Cardenio, and is a founding coeditor of the journal Representations. He honors include the MLA's James Russell Lowell Prize, for Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation, the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Vermont.

Stephen Jay Greenblatt is a Pulitzer Prize winning American literary critic, theorist and scholar.

Greenblatt is regarded by many as one of the founders of New Historicism, a set of critical practices that he often refers to as "cultural poetics"; his works have been influential since the early 1980s when he introduced the term. Greenblatt has written and edited numerous books and articles relevant to new historicism, the study of culture, Renaissance studies and Shakespeare studies and is considered to be an expert in these fields. He is also co-founder of the literary-cultural journal Representations, which often publishes articles by new historicists. His most popular work is Will in the World, a biography of Shakespeare that was on the New York Times Best Seller List for nine weeks.

Reviews

[Cynda Reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have studied Shakespeare in editions published by Riverside and edited by David Bevington, and I decided to add an edition published by Norton. What I liked about this edition: 1) Typeface easy to read, 2) extra historical information about society and plays highly accessible.
Why I did not finish reading this edition of Poems and Romances: I found -Pericles- and -Two Nobel Kinsmen- as being less than. I am not a scholar of Shakespeare, merely an admirer, so I find no need for me to trudge through plays than are not very much Shakespeare plays, just plays to which Shakespeare contributed.
I am still giving this edition 3 1/2 stars for the reasons stated above, particularly the extra information.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

Greenblatt's Norton Shakespeare anthologies are my favorites! Even though you have to get a few books (Unless you get the giant one-volume), his paperback anthologies are very portable and contain great information. Highly recommended.

[Angie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just not as good as the tragedies, but I suppose it isn't Norton's fault. Poor creatures. There isn't as much here as in the tragedies either.

[William Herbst · Rating 5 out of 5]

See my notes under comedies for my thoughts on this series.