Before her death in September 2001, Susan Snyder collected a number of her essays that she felt represented some of her best work in Shakespearean criticism over a period of about three decades. Many of them were written for specific occasions or specific reasons having to do with teaching or with panel discussions before diverse audiences, which she entered into along with others. In the process she contributed some of the best work on Shakespeare that was then extant, as this collection demonstrates.
Searching for a principle of organization, Professor Snyder decided that it would be best to arrange the essays in chronological order. The result was a kind of "intellectual autobiography," as she calls it in her Preface, and the title she chose was Shakespeare: A Wayward Journey, since it reflects her travels over the various avenues of Shakespearean criticism.

Act by act, scene by scene, each Shakespeare Explained guide creates a total immersion experience in the plot development, characters, and language of the specific play. As companion to the students' edition of the actual text of the play, each provides an exploration of the themes, motifs, symbols, and interpretations of the work. an introduction discusses the play's historical and social context, and each guide concludes with suggested essay topics and a quiz to help readers review the play and connect with Shakespeare's work on the page and with the world he created on stage for his audience.

Inexorably poisoned against the woman he loves by his trusted friend Iago, Shakespeare's Othello is a timeless tragic figure. This Penguin Shakespeare edition is edited by Kenneth Muir with an introduction by Tom McAlindon.

'O! beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.'

A popular soldier and newly married man, Othello seems to be in an enviable position. And yet, when his supposed friend Iago sows doubts in his mind about his wife Desdemona's fidelity, and his friend Cassio's true intentions, he is gradually consumed by suspicion. In this powerful tragedy, innocence is corrupted and trust is eroded as every relationship is drawn into a tangled web of jealousies.

This book contains a general introduction to Shakespeare's life and Elizabethan theatre, a separate introduction to Othello, a chronology, suggestions for further reading, an essay discussing performance options on both stage and screen, and a commentary.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was born to John Shakespeare and Mary Arden some time in late April 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon. He wrote about 38 plays (the precise number is uncertain), many of which are regarded as the most exceptional works of drama ever produced, including Romeo and Juliet (1595), Henry V (1599), Hamlet (1601), Othello (1604), King Lear (1606) and Macbeth (1606), as well as a collection of 154 sonnets, which number among the most profound and influential love-poetry in English.

If you enjoyed Othello, you might like Richard III, also available in Penguin Shakespeare.

'Uncannily brilliant ... truly fascinating because it makes evil specific and precise and human'
Sam Mendes, director of American Beauty

One of the four great tragedies—alongside Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth—Othello is among the darkest of Shakespeare’s plays, illumining the shadows of the gloomiest recesses of the human psyche and serving as a damning indictment of the world in which it was written. A cautionary tale of the destructiveness of sin and the ruinous consequences of bad philosophy, Othello seems to express Shakespeare’s rage at the cynicism and brutality of the age in which he lived. From the Machiavellian menace of Iago to the blind and prideful jealousy of Othello, this classic of world literature shows us the shadow falling over a society that has turned its back on the light and life of virtue.

The Ignatius Critical Editions present a tradition-oriented approach to reading Western classics. While many critical editions view literature through the lens of modernism and post-modernism, this series offers critical examinations informed by the Judeo-Christian heritage as passed down through the ages—the same heritage that provided the crucible in which the great authors formed these classic works.

Edited by acclaimed literary biographer Joseph Pearce, the Ignatius Critical Editions provide essays and footnotes that analyze works in light of the Western tradition, allowing the reader to meet the authors in their element.

The series is ideal for academic study and for anyone wishing to understand the great literary works of Western civilization in the company of some of the finest literature professors alive today.

A comprehensive collection of the best writing about this Shakespearian play, both as dramatic literature and theatrical performance, this book is an excellent resource companion to the text. This collected wisdom was originally published in 1986. It contains pieces of commentary from as far back as the late 18th Century but also highly acclaimed critical pieces from more recent years, organised into six general themes.

Originally published in 1984. With selections organised chronologically, this collection presents the best writing on one of Shakespeare’s most studied plays. The structure displays the changing responses to the play and includes a wide range of criticism from the likes of Coleridge, Hazlitt, Moulton, Granville-Barker, Orwell, Levin, Stampfer, Gardner and Speaight interspersed with short entries from Keats, Raleigh, Freud and others. The final chapter by the editor elucidates his own thoughts on Lear, building on his commentary in the Introduction which puts the collection in context.

A young beauty defies bigotry to marry a heroic warrior of a different race, but a false friend poisons her husband's mind with jealousy, "the green-eyed monster." This gripping drama of romance and treachery unfolds amid the Renaissance splendor of Venice and Cyprus, centering on a soldier's plot to exact revenge by exploiting the weaknesses of others. An eloquent tale of betrayal and racism, Shakespeare's seventeenth-century tragedy continues to resonate for today's audiences. A definitive survey, this Dover Thrift Study Edition offers the drama's complete and unabridged text, plus a comprehensive study guide. Created to help readers gain a thorough understanding of Othello's content and context, the guide includes: • Scene-by-scene summaries
• Explanations and discussions of the plot
• Question-and-answer sections
• Shakespeare biography
• List of characters and more
Dover Thrift Study Editions feature everything that students need to undertake a confident reading of a classic text, as well as to prepare themselves for class discussions, essays, and exams.

This is a revised version of the book which was privately published by the author in 1982. At the time, the book was widely welcomed by Shakespearean scholars as a trenchant, scholarly and highly orginal contribution to the field of Shakespearean studies. The book's argument is that a full response to Shakespearean tragedy has to take account of the fate of the victims as well as of the tragic heroesl and this thesis is illustrated and developed by a consideration of Lavinia, Lucrece and the children in Richard III, Macbeth and King John; and to the thee principal Shakespearean tragic victims, Ophelia, Desemona and Cordelia.

It is almost as if Shakespeare had deliberately adapted this brutal murder tale to dare himself to find sympathy in the farthest extreme of human error. The three chief characters do grave - the gravest - wrong; and yet, plunged as they are into an atmosphere of sensuality, betrayal, and terror, to murder, lie, and scheme, they have yet persistently commanded the involvement and pity of their audiences. Herein would lie a crucial question for critics and actors seeking the true images of these characters: how can - and for the critics, why should - three such wrongdoers as Othello, Desdemona, and Iago win, so surely, so much care and compassion?
Beginning here, the author sets out to discover how the complex, troubled characters of the play were interpreted by actors and critics from Shakespeare's time to the present. Starting with Burbage, Shakespeare's own "grieved Moor," Rosenberg re-creates the historic stage interpretations of Othello - by Betterton in the Restoration, by Booth, Quin, Garrick, Barry, and Kemble in the eighteenth century, by Kean, Macready, Irving, Booth, Forrest, and Salvini in the nineteenth, and by prominent actors of our own time. The great Iago characterizations are also here, and the Desdemonas in a line that includes Mrs. Siddons, Ellen Terry, and Sarah Bernhardt. The theater record is supplemented with comments on the characters provided by distinguished modern actors of the play.
Then the author compares the acting interpretations with those of the critics, from old Rymer - who called Othello a "bloody farce" - to the most significant modern commentators. In some of the wittiest parts of the book, Rosenberg defends in turn Iago, Othello, Desdemona, and the play (and even Thomas Bowdler) from the attacks of their severest critics; but he finds it possible to reconcile the best critical characterizations with the best acting conceptions, and to propose a synthesis based on his own study and experience of the play.
The author's study of the successive stage editings of the play - some of them to reduce playing time, others demanded by the taste and moral sense of each new age - provides a running commentary of social and cultural history, and shows how these cuttings affected, as well as revealed, the actors' concepts of the characters. Othello is the most erotic, the most sensual in language and imagery of the great tragedies, and its heavily sexual atmosphere, so suitable to the seventeenth century, offended later cultures: the eighteenth century tried to "refine" it, and the nineteenth - particularly the age of Victoria - to "refine refinement" - but the essential form of the play survived.

First published in 1972.

The emphasis of this book is that each of Shakespeare's tragedies demanded its own individual form and that although certain themes run through most of the tragedies, nearly all critics refrain from the attempt to apply external rules to them. The plays are almost always concerned with one person; they end with the death of the hero; the suffering and calamity that befall him are exceptional; and the tragedies include the medieval idea of the reversal of fortune.