Shakespeare and his contemporaries

This volume brings together some of the best critical work produced by Eastern and Central European scholars. The lead-off essay is an extended study that was first published in 1947, "The Baroque in English Literature" by Marco Mincoff, Professor of English at Sofia University in Bulgaria until his death in 1987. An essay on More's Utopia (a chapter from Artur Blaim's book, Early English Utopian Fiction) follows. "The Genesis of the Double Time in Pre-Shakespearean and. Shakespearean Drama" was the first of Zdenek Stribrny's essays on Shakespeare's use of double-time, the others appearing in Shakespeare Jahrbuch: East. Many essays focus almost entirely upon Shakespeare's plays and cover such topics as the development of Shakespearean tragedy (Henryk Zbierski), a Hungarian reading of Measure for Measure (Istvan Geher), subjectivity and dramatic discourse in The Tempest (Martin Prochazka), Georg Lukacs' Shakespeare criticism (Laszlo. Kery), and Czech theatrical criticism of Shakespeare (Jan Mukarovsky). Three younger scholars contribute essays on Hamlet and the volume includes an essay by the Czech historian Josef Polisensky on England and Bohemia in Shakespeare's day that illuminat