UpDate - Vol. 12, No. 30, Page 5
May 6, 1993
University Press announces release of eight new titles

     The University of Delaware Press announces eight new publications, all
of which are available at the University Bookstore.
     The period of Irish politics and drama covered in The Years of
O'Casey, 1921-1926: A Documentary History, by Robert Hogan and Richard
Burnham, had an impact not only on the nation, but on the world as well.
The importance of these years goes far beyond Ireland itself because the
Irish masterpieces of Sean O'Casey--The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the
Paycock and The Plough and the Stars--affected world drama nearly as
profoundly as the plays of Luigi Pirandello and Eugene O'Neill. The book
includes a full bibliography and cast listings of all the significant new
plays produced or published during this period.
     Hogan is a member of the University's English department and Burnham
is professor of English at Dominican College of San Raphael, Calif.
     In The Masks of "Hamlet," Marvin Rosenberg insists that only the
individual reader or actor can determine Shakespeare's design of Hamlet's
character, and that of the play. Moreover, to interpret Hamlet's words and
actions at the many crises, the reader needs to double in the role of
actor, imagining the character from the inside as well as observing it from
the outside.
     Every reader is encouraged by the author to be an actor-reader,
invited to participate in Hamlet's mystery. The critical moments are
examined, the options and ambiguities discussed and the decisions left to
individual judgment and intuition.
     Rosenberg is professor of dramatic art at the University of
California, Berkeley. The Press recently reissued his companion books The
Masks of "Othello," The Masks of "King Lear" and The Masks of "Macbeth,"
all of which are available either in cloth or paperback.
     Marco Mincoff's Things Supernatural and Causeless: Shakespearean
Romance sets out to show that romance is "an inherently inferior genre" and
no matter what dramatic skills Shakespeare lavished on it, the conventions
of a romance could never yield great drama. Mincoff discovers that because
of the attention Shakespeare gave to the creation of a sense of wonder, his
romances diverge sharply from their sources and analogues and from other
drama of the period.
     Mincoff was head of the Department of English Philology at the
University of Sofia from 1951 to 1975. This book was published in Bulgaria
in July 1987, just before his death.
     In Shakespeare's Courtly Mirror: Reflexivity and Prudence in "All's
Well That Ends Well," David Haley's leading argument is that modern
psychological constructs are inadequate for understanding the courtly
humanism dramatized by Shakespeare down to 1604.
     Beginning with a prologue on the problems raised by structural and
theatrical interpretations of Bertram's role, Haley goes on to introduce
his concept of reflexivity by way of an exchange with the new literary
historicism.
     Haley teaches English at the University of Minnesota.
     Shakespeare's Midwives: Some Neglected Shakespeareans by Arthur Sherbo
discovers that 18-century commentators on Shakespeare, largely forgotten by
19th- and 20th-century criticism, have added a valuable new perspective to
Shakespeare studies. He proves that much of modern Shakespearean
scholarship had been anticipated by these 18th-century forerunners.
     Sherbo is an Emeritus Distinguished Professor at Michigan State
University.
     Reid Barbour's Deciphering Elizabethan Fiction studies the interwoven
case histories of Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe and Thomas Dekker, exploring
their favorite tropes and figures. In response to one another, the three
writers attempted to define, liberate and question the boundaries of prose.
     With these popular English authors as his focus, Barbour reassesses
the question of how (or whether) Elizabethan fiction is an ancestor of the
novel.
     Barbour teaches English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill.
     The Piozzi Letters: Correspondence of Hester Lynch Piozzi, 1784-1821
(formerly Mrs. Thrale): Vol. 3, 1799-1804, is part of a six-volume edition
in which editors Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom have gathered most of
the hitherto unpublished letters of Hester Lynch Piozzi to a large group of
correspondents--friends, children, scholars, actresses, servants, lawyers
and business acquaintances.
     The letters in this volume further an account begun in 1784 with her
second marriage to the Italian musician Gabriel Piozzi and discuss the fate
of her chef d'oeuvre,
     Retrospection, an epic history of the Western world from the time of
Christ to the beginning of the 19th-century.
     Edward A. and Lillian D. Bloom are Huntington Research Scholars at the
Huntington Library, San Marino, Cal.
     Levitating the Pentagon: Evolutions in the American Theatre of the
Vietnam War Era by J. W. Fenn examines the evolution of the American
theatre of the Vietnam War era and studies the dramatic scripts and
productions that emerged from this period.
     The plays, which portray the magnitude of the war and its immediate
and long-lasting effects on both the individual and the collective American
psyche, illustrate how the theatre eventually managed to come to terms with
the devastating experience of Vietnam.
     Fenn presently teaches at the University of Calgary.
                                        -Claire Capuzzi