King Richard II

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The New Cambridge Shakespeare appeals to students worldwide for its up-to-date scholarship and emphasis on performance. The series features line-by-line commentaries and textual notes on the plays and poems. Introductions are regularly refreshed with accounts of new critical, stage and screen interpretations. For this second edition of King Richard II Andrew Gurr has added a new section to the introduction, in which he discusses a number of important theatrical productions as well as the scholarly criticism of recent years. Gurr foregrounds the growing interest in re-historicising and re-politicising the play, emphasising that, to Shakespeare's contemporaries, King Richard II was a balanced dramatisation of the central political and constitutional issue of the day: how to reign-in an unjust ruler. The Introduction provides a full context for both contemporaneous and modern views of King Richard's fall. An updated reading list completes the edition.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction, with new section on recent stage and critical interpretations
• Note on the text
• List of characters
• The play
• Textual analysis
• Appendixes: Shakespeare's use of Holinshed
• 'An Homilie Against Disobedience'
• Extracts from England's Parnassus
• Reading list