{"product_id":"9781851242474","title":"Shakespeare's Dead: Stages of Death in Shakespeare's Playworlds","description":"\u003cbr\u003eFour hundred years after Shakespeare’s death, his plays live on in theater and popular culture, given new life through countless innovative approaches to their performance and interpretation. Just as our enthusiasm for seeing the plays performed—and transformed—affirms their continued life, death scenes in Shakespeare’s plays tend to mark not an ending but a transformation of life.\u003cp\u003ePublished to accompany a major exhibition at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, \u003ci\u003eShakespeare’s Dead\u003c\/i\u003e documents the many ways Shakespeare’s characters meet their demise, from suicide to murder, from death by workaday dagger to the more creative method of being baked and fed to one’s family in a meat pie. Through these examples, Simon Palfrey and Emma Smith show Shakespeare’s mastery at choreographing death as a means of rediscovery. Some characters refuse to go quietly, dying in stages, as in Nick Bottom’s performance as Pyramus killing himself with much flourish in \u003ci\u003eA Midsummer Night’s Dream.\u003c\/i\u003e Others are remembered in elegies, and still others are resurrected or reappear as ghosts. Shakespeare’s death scenes also often speak to the boundaries between theater and everyday life, with funerals and scenes of mourning that are undercut by their staged inauthenticity.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eExtensively illustrated with contemporary drawings and images from stage history,\u003ci\u003e Shakespeare’s Dead\u003c\/i\u003e takes readers through the playwright’s great death scenes and tragic figures, exploring in them the theme of life in death and delineating the cultural, religious, and social contexts.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Bodleian Library, University of Oxford","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47019238916336,"sku":"9781851242474","price":35.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781851242474_p0.jpg?v=1763596392","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781851242474","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}