The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Description

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. In this second edition of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Kurt Schlueter approaches Shakespeare's early comedy as a parody of two types of Renaissance educational fiction: the love-quest story and the test-of-friendship story, which in combination show high-flown human ideals as incompatible with each other and with human nature. Since the first known production at David Garrick's Drury Lane Theatre, the play has tempted major directors and actors, though changing conceptions of the play often fail to recognise its subversive impetus. This updated edition includes a new introductory section by Lucy Munro on recent stage and critical interpretations, bringing the thoroughly researched, illustrated performance history up to date.

Lucy Munro is a lecturer in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama Studies at King's College London. Her research focuses on the performance and reception of Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline drama, on editing, book history and textual scholarship, on literary style and genre, and on dramatic representations of childhood and ageing. Her books include Children of the Queen's Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Archaic Style in English Literature, 1590-1674 (Cambridge University Press, 2013). She is editor of Edward Sharpham's The Fleer (2006), Shakespeare and George Wilkins' Pericles, in William Shakespeare: Complete Works (ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, 2007), Richard Brome's The Queen and Concubine and The Demoiselle, in Richard Brome Online (gen. ed. Richard Allen Cave, 2009), and John Fletcher's The Tamer Tamed (2010). Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Huntington Library Quarterly, Modern Philology, Shakespeare Bulletin, Shakespeare and Ageing and Society, and in collections such as The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre (ed. Richard Dutton, 2009), Performing Early Modern Drama Today (ed. Kathryn Prince and Pascale Aebischer, Cambridge University Press, 2012) and The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England (ed. Andy Kesson and Emma Smith, 2013). Her stage history of The Alchemist appears in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, electronic edition (gen. ed. David Bevington, Martin Butler and Ian Donaldson, Cambridge University Press, 2014).