Shakespeare Guides from Accabonac Press

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Many guides don’t trust readers, especially young readers: they dictate the meanings of Shakespeare’s scenes and translate his rich language into more ordinary speech. In contrast, Maria Franziska Fahey’s Guides to Reading Shakespeare’s Plays give readers, young and old, the tools to envision the plays for themselves.  

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There are two levels available: Guides to Reading Shakespeare and, for less experienced readers, Young Readers’ Guides.

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Guides to Reading Shakespeare

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Designed to give readers the methods and the confidence to arrive at their own interpretations of Shakespeare’s great dramas, a sequence of questions for each scene helps readers grasp the play’s individual lines and larger ideas.  Each guide offers techniques to comprehend Shakespeare’s abundant figurative language and to hear how the meters of Shakespeare’s verse add to the play’s meanings. A description of sixteenth and seventeenth-century play texts illustrates how editors produce current editions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Young Readers’ Guides to Shakespeare

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The guides for young readers are designed to help less experienced readers listen carefully to what characters say and to use their imaginations to see the worlds of the plays for themselves. Introductory materials include key information about Shakespeare’s theater, an explanation of some old-fashioned words common in the plays, and a way to understand the play’s many poetic devices. Readers are guided to understand each scene of the play through a sequence of questions and activities that invite them to envision the characters and plots using writing, illustration, and story-boarding.  An appendix on Shakespeare’s poetry invites young readers to hear how meter and rhythm add to the plays’ meanings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Metaphor and Shakespearean Drama: Unchaste Signification

(Palgrave Macmillan)

 

“This intelligent and penetrating book revisits the study of metaphor in Shakespeare, reading metaphor in the plays neither as imagery or ornament but instead as an unpredictable form of social action.”

 

—Lynne Magnusson, University of Toronto

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                         

                         

 

 

 

Transporting Florimell: The Place of Simile in Book III of The Faerie Queene

(Spenser Studies, University of Chicago Press)

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This article explores the places of Florimell and the place of simile in The Faerie Queene, with particular focus on the third book “Of Chastity.” Whereas the main narrative critically presents chaste/chased Florimell’s indiscriminate flight from all men, a series of epic similes, with extended narratives about alternate places, locate the logic of her motivation to flee and enlarge our understanding of Florimell and of chastity. Although simile and metaphor recently have been characterized as figures that contain the transformations they perform, The Faerie Queene suggests that the narrative transformations within an epic simile are not always cordoned off by the figure’s formal structure and can stake a place in the poem at large.

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The article can be viewed online here.