Extra Credit Book List

for

Shakespeare’s Comedies (ENGL 2520)
&
Shakespeare’s Tragedies & Histories (ENGL 2530)

Reading any of the titles on this list (except, of course, the required texts for the class), writing a 100 word reaction to it, and discussing it with me is worth 5 points (unless it is marked otherwise). Writing a 500 word paper is worth 5 points for the paper, plus 5 points for the book, and no discussion is necessary. You may earn up to 20 points of extra credit in this way. In addition, you may earn extra credit by writing a one-scene screenplay from one of Shakespeare's plays, using the computer text available in the library. Each such scene is worth 5 points. Another extra-credit possibility which uses the computer text is examining Shakespeare's use of a word or phrase in one play or several. You would then write a 500 word summary of what you found; this is worth 10 points (or if you examine 3 or more plays, it is worth 15 points). All extra credit must be in two weeks before the quarter ends.

Plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries (you may also read other Elizabethan plays, but check with me first):

• The Shoemaker's Holiday—Thomas Dekker
• Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay—Robert Greene
• The Alchemist—Ben Jonson
• Volpone—Ben Johnson
• The Jew of Malta—Christopher Marlowe
• The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus—C. Marlowe
• The Duchess of Malfi—John Webster

Plays by Shakespeare (you may read any play by Shakespeare, but I especially recommend those listed below):

Histories:

• 1 Henry IV
• 2 Henry IV
• Henry V
• Henry VIII
• King John
• Richard II
• The Tragedy of Richard the Third (See also The Daughter of Time.)

Comedies:

• All's Well That Ends Well
• As You Like It
• The Comedy of Errors
• Love's Labour's Lost
• Measure for Measure
• The Merchant of Venice
• The Merry Wives of Windsor
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• Much Ado About Nothing
• The Taming of the Shrew
• Twelfth Night
• The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Tragedies:

• Antony and Cleopatra
• Coriolanus
• Hamlet
• Julius Caesar
• King Lear
• Macbeth
• Othello
• Titus Andronicus

Romances:

• Cymbeline
• The Tempest
• The Winter's Tale

Biographies of Shakespeare and Others:

Shakespeare

• By Me, William Shakespeare—Robert Payne (10 points), 1980
• The Life and Times of William Shakespeare—Peter Levi (10 points), 1988
• Like to the Lark—Fredrick J. Pohl, 1972
• Shakespeare: A Life in Drama—Stanley Wells (10 points), 1995
• Shakespeare: His Life, Work, and Era—Dennis Kay (10 points), 1992
• Shakespeare of London—Marchette Chute (10 points), 1949
• Shakespeare’s Lives—S. Schoenbaum, 1991
• Shakespeare, the King’s Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court, 1603-1613—Alvin Kernan, 1995
• Shakespeare: The Man and His Achievement—Robert Speaight (10 points), 1977
• William Shakespeare—A.L. Rowse (10 points), 1963
• William Shakespeare: The Extraordinary Life of the Most Successful Writer of All Time—Andrew Gurr, 1995

Francis Bacon

• Francis Bacon: The Temper of a Man—Catherine Drinker Bowen, 1963
• The Man Who Saw Through Time—Loren Eiseley, 1973
• The Winding Stair: Sir Francis Bacon, His Rise and Fall—Daphne du Maurier, 1976

Francis Drake

• Drake: England’s Greatest Seafarer—Ernle Bradford, 1965
• Sir Francis Drake—John Sugden, 1990
• Sir Francis Drake—George Malcolm Tomson, 1972

Elizabeth I

• Elizabeth I—Rosalind K. Marshall, 1991
• Elizabeth I—Anne Somerset, 1991
• Elizabeth I: The Shrewdness of Virtue—Jasper Ridley, 1987
• Elizabeth the Great—Elizabeth Jenkins, 1958
• Elizabeth Tudor—Lacey Baldwin Smith, 1975
• Marriage With My Kingdom—Alison Plowden, 1977
• Queen Elizabeth I—J.E. Neale (10 points), 1934
• The Virgin Queen: Elizabeth I, Genius of the Golden Age—Christopher Hibbert, 1991

Henry IV

• Henry IV of England—J. L. Kirby, 1970
• The Usurper King: Henry of Bolingbroke 1366-99—Marie Louise Bruce, 1986

Henry V

• Agincourt—Christopher Hibbert, 1992
• Henry V—Christopher Allmand, 1992
• Henry V as Warlord—Desmond Seward, 1987
• Henry V: The Cautious Conqueror—Margaret Wade Labarge, 1975
• King Henry V: A Biography—Harold F. Hutchinson, 1967
• The Reign of Henry the Fifth (3 vols.)—James Hamilton Wylie (5 points per vol.), 1914-1929

Henry VIII

• Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Wives of Henry VIII—Karen Lindsey, 1995
• Henry VIII and the Invasion of France—Charles Cruickshank, 1990
• Henry VIII: The Mask of Royalty—Lacey Baldwin Smith, 1982
• Henry VIII: The Politics of Tyranny—Jasper Ridley, 1985
• Henry the Eighth—Francis Hackett, 1929
• The Making of Henry VIII—Marie Louise Bruce, 1977
• The Six Wives of Henry VIII—Alison Weir, 1991
• The Wives of Henry VIII—Antonia Fraser, 1992

James I

• James I—David Mathew, 1967
• King James VI & I—David Harris Willson, 1956

Macbeth

• Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot—Antonia Fraser, 1996
• Heroes and Warriors: Macbeth: Scotland’s Warrior King—Bob Stewart, 1988
• Macbeth: High King of Scotland, 1040-1057—Peter Berresford Ellis, 1980

Christopher Marlowe

• Christopher Marlowe: The Man in His Time—John Bakeless, 1937
• A Dead Man in Deptford (novel)—Anthony Burgess, 1993
• The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe—Charles Nicholl, 1992

Thomas More

• Statesman and Saint: Cardinal Wolsey, Sir Thomas More and the Politics of Henry VIII—Jasper Ridley, 1982

Philip II

• Philip of Spain—Henry Kamen, 1997

Walter Ralegh

• Sir Walter Ralegh—Robert Lacey, 1973
• That Great Lucifer: A Portrait of Sir Walter Ralegh—Margaret Irwin, 1960

Richard II

• Richard II—Nigel Saul, 1997

Richard III

• The Princes in the Tower—Elizabeth Jenkins, 1978
• The Princes in the Tower—Allison Weir, 1992
• Richard III—Charles Ross, 1981
• Richard III and the Princes in the Tower—A. J. Pollard, 1991
• Richard III: England's Black Legend—Desmond Seward, 1983
• The Wars of the Roses—Robin Neillands, 1992
• The Wars of the Roses: A Concise History—Charles Ross, 1976

Mary Stuart

• Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles—Stefan Zweig, 1935
• Mary Queen of Scots—Antonia Fraser, 1969

Histories:

• The Armada—Garrett Mattingly (10 points), 1959
• Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381—Rodney Hilton, 1973
• The Book of Courtly Love: Medieval Stories and Songs—Robert Yagley, Editor, 1997
• The Book of Courtly Love: The Passionate Code of the Troubadours—Andrea Hopkins, 1994
• The Elizabethan Underworld—Gamini Salgado, 1992
• England Under the Tudors—G. R. Elton, 1991
• A Feast of Words: Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance—Michael Jeanneret, 1991
• Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization—Richard Sennett, 1994
• A Freeborn People: Politics and the Nation in Seventeenth-Century England—David Underdown, 1996
• The History of England—Jasper Ridley, 1981
• History of England: The Tudors—G.M. Trevelyan, 1926
• A History of Scotland—J. D. Mackie, 1964
• The History of Scotland—Peter and Fiona Somerset Fry, 1982
• A History of the English Speaking Peoples: The Birth of Britain—Winston Churchill, 1956
• A History of the English Speaking Peoples: The New World—Winston Churchill, 1956
• Honor—Frank Henderson Stewart, 1994
• Invisible Power: The Elizabethan Secret Service, 1570-1603—Alan Haynes, 1992
• Law, Family, and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy—Thomas Kuehn, 1991
• Murder Under Trust, or, The Topical Macbeth and Other Jacobean Matters—Arthur Melville Clark, 1981
• Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others—Gary Tomlinson, 1993
• The Pelican History of England: Stuart England—J.P. Kenyon, 1985
• The Pelican History of England: Tudor England—S. T. Bindoff, 1950
• The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe 1500-1800—Olwen Hufton, 1996
• Reading Holinshed's Chronicles—Annabel Patterson, 1994
• This Realm of England (7th edition)—Lacey Baldwin Smith, 1996
• The Stewart Kingdom of Scotland 1371-1603—Caroline Bingham, 1974
• The Story of Scotland—Nigel Tranter, 1987
• The Tudor Age—Jasper Ridley, 1988
• The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men—Moderata Fonte (Modesta Pozzo), 1600 (Trans. Virginia Cox, 1997)

General Introductions and Criticism:

• Approaches to Macbeth—Jay L. Halio, 1966
• Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare—Isaac Asimov, 1970
• A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sexual Puns and Their Significance—Frankie Rubinstein, 1984
• The Elizabethan Hamlet—Arthur McGee, 1987
• Falstaff—ed. by Harold Bloom, 1992
• Hamlet and the Acting of Revenge—Paul Mercer, 1987
• Hamlet: Enter Critic, ed. by Claire Sacks and Edgar Whan, 1960
• Hamlet's Absent Father—Avi Erlich, 1977
• Introducing Shakespeare—G.B. Harrison, 1947
• King Henry IV Parts 1 & 2: A Selection of Critical Essays—ed. by G. K. Hunter, 1970
• The Learning, Wit, and Wisdom of Shakespeare's Renaissance Women—John W. Crawford, 1997
• The Lost Garden: A View of Shakespeare’s English and Roman History Plays—John Wilders, 1982
• Macbeth: A Selection of Critical Essays—ed. by John Wain, 1968
• The Masks of Hamlet—Marvin Rosenberg, 1992
• The Masks of King Lear—Marvin Rosenberg, 1972
• The Masks of Macbeth—Marvin Rosenberg, 1978
• The Masks of Othello—Marvin Rosenberg, 1961
• Naughty Shakespeare: The Lascivious Lines, Offensive Oaths, and Politically Incorrect Notions of the Baddest Bard of All—Michael Macrone, 1997
• A New Mimesis—A. D. Nuttall, 1983
• The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600—Roland Mushat Frye, 1984
• Shakespeare—Mark Van Doren, 1939
• Shakespeare and Ovid—Jonathan Bate, 1993
• Shakespeare A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Plays, His Poems, His Life and Times, and More—Charles Boyce, 1990
• Shakespeare: Henry V: A Casebook—ed. by Michael Quinn, 1983
• Shakespeare: Macbeth: A Casebook—ed. by John Wain, 1982
• Shakespeare Our Contemporary—Jan Kott, 1966
• Shakespeare’s English Kings—Peter Saccio, 1977
• Shakespeare Survey 45: Hamlet and its Afterlife—ed. by Stanley Wells, 1993
• Shakespeare the Actor and the Purposes of Playing—Meredith Anne Skura, 1993
• Shakespeare: The Comedies—ed. by Kenneth Muir, 1965
• Shakespeare: The Histories—ed. by Eugene M. Waith, 1965
• Shakespeare: The Tragedies—ed. by Alfred Harbage, 1964
• Twentieth Century Interpretations of Macbeth—Terence Hawkes, 1977
• When Honour’s at the Stake: Ideas of Honour in Shakespeare’s Plays—Norman Council, 1973
• William Shakespeare’s Macbeth—ed. by Harold Bloom, 1987
• William Shakespeare: The Anatomy of an Enigma—Peter Razzell, 1990
• Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s Macbeth—Garry Wills, 1995
• Young Hamlet: Essays on Shakespeare’s Tragedies—Barbara Everett, 1989
• Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure?—A. D. Nuttall, 1996

Shakespeare on Film:

• Five and Eighty Hamlets—J. C. Trein, 1987
• Focus on Shakespearean Films—ed. by Charles W. Eckert, 1972
• Hamlet by William Shakespeare: Screenplay, Introduction, and Film Diary—Kenneth Branagh, 1996
• Hamlet: Text and Performance—Peter Davison, 1983
• Henry the Fourth Parts 1 & 2: Text and Performance—T. F. Wharton, 1983
• Henry V by William Shakespeare: Screen Adaptation by Kenneth Branagh—Kenneth Branagh, 1989
• Macbeth: Text and Performance—Gordon Williams, 1985
• Measure for Measure: Text and Performance—Graham Nicholls, 1986
• Put Money in thy Purse:The Filming of Orson Welles's Othello—Micheál MacLiammóir, 1952
• Richard II: Text and Performance—Malcolm Page, 1987
• Screening Shakespeare from Richard II to Henry V—Ace G. Pilkington, 1991
• Shakespeare and the Moving Image: The Plays on Film and Television—ed. by Anthony Davies and Stanley Wells, 1994
• Shakespearean Films / Shakespearean Directors—Peter S. Donaldson, 1990
• Shakespeare in Performance—ed. by Keith Parsons and Pamela Mason, 1995
• Shakespeare in Performance: Hamlet—Anthony B. Dawson, 1995
• Shakespeare in Performance: King Lear—Alexander Leggatt, 1991
• Shakespeare in Performance: King Richard III—Hugh M. Richmond, 1989
• Shakespeare in Performance: Romeo and Juliet—Jill L. Levenson, 1987
• Shakespeare in Performance: The Taming of the Shrew—Graham Holderness, 1991
• Shakespeare in Production: Whose History?—H. R. Coursen, 1996

Modern Plays and Novels on Shakespearean and Elizabethan Themes:

• A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury (novel)—Edith Pargeter, 1972
• Coriolanus, The Chariot!—Alan Yates (a science fiction novel in which "the Word of Shakespeare is Law"), 1978
• The Daughter of Time—Josephine Tey (a murder mystery about Richard III), 1951
• Elizabeth R—(a six-part BBC production starring Glenda Jackson, available in the Dixie College Library—5 points per 90 min. segment) Part 1—The Lion's Cub; Part 2—The Marriage Game; Part 3—Shadow in the Sun; Part 4—Horrible Conspiracies; Part 5—The Enterprise of England; Part 6—Sweet England's Pride
• Falstaff (novel)—Robert Nye, 1976
• House of Cards—Michael Dobbs (a modern novel about a murderous politician based on Richard III), 1990
• I Hate Hamlet—Paul Rudnick, 1991
• The King's Minion—Rafael Sabatini (a novel about James I), 1930
• Macbeth the King (novel)—Nigel Tranter, 1978
• A Man For All Seasons—Robert Bolt, 1960
• The Players' Boy is Dead (novel)—Leonard Tourney, 1980
• The Quality of Mercy (novel)—Faye Kellerman, 1989
• The Queen's Head (novel)—Edward Marston, 1988
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead—Tom Stoppard, 1967
• The Silent Woman (an Elizabethan theater mystery)—Edward Marston, 1994
• A Thousand Acres—Jane Smiley (Pulitzer-Prize winning update of King Lear), 1991
• To Play the King—Michael Dobbs (sequel to the BBC version of House of Cards), 1992
• Weird Tales from Shakespeare—ed. by Katherine Kerr and Martin H. Greenberg (a collection of science fiction stories about Shakespeare and his characters), 1994
• The Wisest Fool—Nigel Tranter (a novel about James I), 1974