Review
'Foregrounding dramaturgy (the staging of bodies, audience, the materiality of performance) in Twelfth Night, King Lear, and The Tempest rather than ideas voiced in speeches, and deploying a different philosopher — Whitehead, Bergson, Spinoza — for each play, Witmore builds a compelling vision of Shakespeare as a metaphysician of immanence...Lucid and original.' - Brian Rotman, Professor, Department of Comparative Studies, Ohio State University, USA
Mention —Book News, February 2009
'Witmore's literary analyses of the plays' dramatic details are generally excellent...and his prose in most explications is supple, lucid, and often nicely poetic.' (English Studies, Vol 91, No 6)
'Foregrounding dramaturgy (the staging of bodies, audience, the materiality of performance) in Twelfth Night, King Lear, and The Tempest rather than ideas voiced in speeches, and deploying a different philosopher — Whitehead, Bergson, Spinoza — for each play, Witmore builds a compelling vision of Shakespeare as a metaphysician of immanence…Lucid and original.' - Brian Rotman, Professor, Department of Comparative Studies, Ohio State University, USA
Mention –Book News, February 2009
Reviewed in Routledge ABES
About the Author
Michael Witmore is Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, USA. His book, Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England (Stanford, 2001) was the co-winner of the Perkins Prize for the Study of Narrative Literature in 2003. He is also the author of Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cornell, 2007)
Ewan Fernie is Professor and Chair of Shakespeare Studies at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK. He is the author of Shame in Shakespeare, the editor of Spiritual Shakespeares and general editor (with Simon Palfrey) of the Shakespeare Now! series.
Simon Palfrey is a Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford University. His books include Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words (Oxford, 1997); Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford, 2007), written with Tiffany Stern and awarded the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society's David Bevington Prize for best new book; Romeo and Juliet (Short Books, 2011); and the novel Dunsinane, written with Ewan Fernie. He is the founding editor (with Fernie) of Continuum's innovative series of 'minigraphs', Shakespeare Now! His new work includes a book on possible worlds in early modern drama and philosophy, and a play inspired by Spenser's Faerie Queen. His book Doing Shakespeare was published by Arden Shakespeare in 2005, reissued 2011. 
