Shakespeare’s Neighbors

By Rocco Coronato

Shakespeare's Neighbors focuses on what lay next door to Shakespeare- the theoretical context that, while partially lost on us, was quite likely to inform the perception that Shakespeare's contemporaries (his "neighbors") had of his works. In this series of alternative readings, the primacy of the literary text is set against the backdrop of unexpected or largely ignored theories whose enormous diffusion renders them inescapable terms of comparison. Rocco Coronato advocates the likely as a viable backdrop to literary analysis. The inference has it that the presence of such widely disseminated theories may allow for the study of the literary works through their own codes and imagery, without implying a rigidly ideological transmission between social and literary domains. While written with literary criticism in mind, Coronato manages to avoid convoluted jargon, striving in the process to translate the terms of otherwise esoteric discourses into a generally accessible language form, for the benefit of a non-specialist audience as well.

Chapter 1 Copyrights Chapter 2 References and Abbreviations Chapter 3 Forward Chapter 4 Preface Chapter 5 Acknowledgments Chapter 6 A Descent into Richard Chapter 7 What the Matter is with Barabas Chapter 8 The Invention of Perdita Chapter 9 Inducting Pocahontas Chapter 10 The Likes of Viola Chapter 11 A Poem on the Tube Chapter 12 Shakespeare in Laughter Chapter 13 Notes Chapter 14 Bibliography Chapter 15 Index