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The authors of this anthology would answer that question with an emphatic "yes!" Battenhouse's anthology brings together writings from an important school of Shakespearean criticism which holds that the Bard's works exemplify traditional Christian teachings as mediated by such thinkers as Boethius and, especially, St. Augustine. It is sometimes called the Augustinian school. A critic's assumptions can greatly influence his or her interpretation of a work. For example, Romantic critics, such as Coleridge and Bradley, hold that the character Hamlet's main problem is his vacillation in carrying out his father's ghost's demand that Hamlet revenge his murder. The Augustinians disagree. They believe there are numerous signs in the play that the ghost is actually a demonic hallucination intent on deceiving Hamlet. Horatio and Marcellus suspect this and tell Hamlet not to follow the ghost. Hamlet's decision to follow the ghost anyway, say the Augustinians, is the first of many errors he makes which result in the "accidental judgments, casual slaughters" with which he ends so many lives, including his own. In fact, Hamlet's whole ethic of revenge is very dubious morally, as are the suicides of Romeo, Juliet, and Othello. Shakespeare's Christian Dimension challenges many widely-held assumptions about the meaning of the plays. These critics anchor their interpretations firmly in the moral and theological writing of Elizabethan and earlier times. Battenhouse has assembled a fine group of critics here. His book is well-organized and easy to use. One need not read the whole book to get the Augustinian view of a particular play. The book is a feast for lovers of Shakespeare.

While great tomes have been printed about Shakespeare and his plays, this book offers the reader an insightful discussion of the plays AS WORKS OF ART. The plays are not studied as a part of the life of Wm. Shakespeare, but as individual and complete works of human creativity. Each chapter can be read as an individual essay before seeing, or reading, a play.

As a student of Dr. Loggins, I can testify that the text reflects his articulate, yet gentel, style. I have learned more form Dr. Loggins than any other teacher I have known.

A must read for all fans of Shakespeare's plays.

I thought this was going to be some refined story of the Bard through the eyes of his dog. Instead, I got a randy romp of domestic fights and love, told in "canine Elizebethan" form. Wow what fun ! Some of the lines Mr Hooker (Bill's dog) I still like to use. This is a fun book

This book is nothing short of amazing. It will alter the way you look at the tragedies of Shakespeare. Dr. Liebler draws from diverse fields of study such as anthropology, sociology, history, linguistics, new historicism and many other modern critical schools to pull together an all-encompasing theory explaining the world contained in these tragedies and what happens when the social order comes under pressure and starts to crack and the tragic hero must be the sacrifice of the community in order to attempt to maintain stabiliity and tradition. The demise of the tragic hero is a necessay function to ensure the survival of the community even though it's necessarily changed after the hamartia (totally new conception of this than you've most likely been taught) of the hero leads to his tragic fate. Hamartia is not the usual tragic flaw that you are born with, but something you do; you miss the mark. It can be correctly translated (as opposed to the wrongly translated typical "tragic flaw" as Dr. Liebler points out) and defined as the attempt to do a right thing in a context or circumstances that will not allow the right thing to be done. [it's bad] to be in that situation when you're a Hamlet or a Brutus or a Coriolanus.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough. This book made Titus Andronicus an important work amongst Shakespeare's plays and development of tragedy and community before Taymor's movie version made people think twice about it. You'll also find yourself wanting to read Coriolanus again or for the first time. Pick this book up along with Rene Girard's Theater of Envy and a whole new world of Shakespeare will open up to you.
Now if only Dr. Liebler would write a book on the comedies or the romances.....

I am grasping this chance to sing the praises of this book, as I buy it again! I had a copy that I showed around to students and other interested people so much that the poor thing fell apart! Anyone interested in the Elizabethan stage as space and as a platform for performance should love this book. It informs the reader about the research that went into the rebuilding of the Globe, and thus, uniquely, gives possibility for insights into the Shakespearean playing space, multiple staging possibilities, multiple sightlines, etc. Rereading any Shakesperean play after a thorough encounter with this book opens possibilities for a whole new and enriched experience! It is richly illustrated, which helps too! Try it -- but leave another copy for me! This new one is bound to go to bits too.

As Shewmaker points out, the reader of Shakespeare is often stymied by unfamiliar, archaic, or confusing words in the texts of the great master, and if footnotes are given, they are often at the rear of the book, disrupting the reader's concentration and making difficult what should be a pleasure.
The editor/compiler has consulted the leading texts and interpreters to provide 15,000 of these words and phrases to include the definition, the quote placing it in context, geographical references, foreign-language expressions, and the mythological allusions which are so much a part the richness of Shakespeare's works and our cultural heritage.
Highly recommended as the essential companion for anyone seeking the immeasurable pleasures of Shakespeare.
(The numerical rating above is a default setting within Amazon's format. This reviewer does not employ numerical ratings.)

This book really helped me to find a good audition Shakespeare piece. There is so much stuff by the Bard that its difficult knowing where to look. I highly recoomend this book.

This is a marvelous book for anyone into Shakespeare and a MUST for anyone whether a reader, actor, student or scholar. Very comprehensive and user-friendly... Pronounciations are given in U.S. and British varieties. The author, Mr. Colaianni has certainly done his research well and it shows in this book. A real MUST for anyone into Shakespeare.

Back-stage pass in hand, Richard Halpern offers an excruciatingly funny close-reading of selected moments in Shakespeare, Sade, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan. But this is rough intellectual going for anyone not initiated in the finer pleasures of literary criticism. Readers should begin with an awareness, for example, of the commonplace that the diminutive, perfect perfume bottle in Shakespeare's Sonnet 5 "is the male womb of Shakespearean verse." Halpern proposes that the image of the perfume bottle replaces the strange process of baby-making with "the even more mysterious process whereby the young man's sexual substance - his semen - is distilled into poetry." If, for Shakespeare, the proper 'use' of semen isn't the creation of life but the creation of beauty, then perhaps we should conclude that "Shakespearean homosexuality is the aesthetic sublimate of sodomy." What, you will ask, about the dark remainder? The waste? It is there in the poem, living in "the half-light of wordplay, implication, and insinuation." In other words, "The Shakespearean sonnet gives off a perfume that contains just the slightest hint of feces." Halpern clarifies this subtle point with an account of the Sadean sublime: is there really any difference between sex with an old woman of indifferent personal hygiene and a brisk mountain walk in rugged terrain? Who can say?

The three remaining chapters recapitulate and strengthen Halpern's thesis that in poetry, sodomy and the sublime are, perhaps not at all paradoxically, related. A brisk rehearsal of the the old Derrida-Foucault debate about reason and madness appears in a reading of Oscar Wilde's "The Portrait of Mr. W.H." Here, Halpern teases out the sexual subtext of Derrida's 1996 anniversary tribute to his late teacher, in which he (Derrida) confesses to feeling intense, multiple repercussions deep inside. These must be "the aftershocks of theoretical sodomy," Halpern writes. After all, Derrida "is nothing if not a pushy bottom." In a stunning chapter on Freud's reading of Leonardo da Vinci's "St. Anne with Two Others," Halpern draws on Lacan's analogy of the map in his "Seminar on the Purloined Letter" to note that the infamous vulture on Anne's lap "does not occupy the representational depth of the painting but rather is splayed flatly across the surface of the canvas, at once obvious and invisible." It persists, Halpern writes, as a dead leftover - presumably a smelly one at that. In a strangely sober analysis of Lacan's reading of an icky, twelfth-century poem by Arnaut Daniel (involving the proposed ingesting of bodily waste as part of a test to win a fair lady's hand....whatever), Halpern concludes that as a vessel, the anus is considered "improper" because it can't hold seed. In the discourse of sodomy, he continues, "the anus is the paradigmatically empty space, the vessel as absolute void."

Halpern's point, finally, is that poets and sodomites share a creative process that is something quite different from a procreative process. I was left wondering what T.S. Eliot would say about this and turned to "The Waste Land" (which covers much the same rugged terrain as Halpern's book); I imagine he would simply cry "Jug jug" to dirty ears.