Shakespeare and Masculinity

Oxford Shakespeare Topics (General Editors Peter Holland and Stanley Wells) provide students, teachers, and interested readers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship, including some general anthologies relating to Shakespeare. Shakespeare and Masculinity studies Shakespeare's most memorable male characters in the light of the medical beliefs, ethical ideals, and social realities that shaped masculine identity in his time. Equally, the book explores male self-definition against various sorts of 'others' - women, foreigners, social inferiors, sodomites. It concludes with a transhistorical, multicultural survey of masculinity in international performance and with a challenge to imagine masculinity in fuller and more satisfying ways.