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Shakespeare, Blackface and Race: Different Perspectives (Elements in Shakespeare Performance)
by Coen HeijesThis Element addresses the topical debate on blackface, race and Othello. With Shakespeare performance studies being rather Anglo-centric, the author explores how this debate has taken a radically different course in the Netherlands, a country historically perceived as tolerant and culturally close to the UK. Through several case studies, including the Van Hove Othello of 2003/2012 and the latest, controversial 2018/2020 Othello, the first main house production with a black actor as Othello, the author analyses the interaction between blackface and (institutional) racism in Dutch society and theatre and how Othello has become an active player in this debate.
Shakespeare, Brecht, and the Intercultural Sign
by Antony TatlowIn Shakespeare, Brecht, and the Intercultural Sign renowned Brecht scholar Antony Tatlow uses drama to investigate cultural crossings and to show how intercultural readings or performances question the settled assumptions we bring to interpretations of familiar texts. Through a "textual anthropology" Tatlow examines the interplay between interpretations of Shakespeare and readings of Brecht, whose work he rereads in the light of theories of the social subject from Nietzsche to Derrida and in relation to East Asian culture, as well as practices within Chinese and Japanese theater that shape their versions of Shakespearean drama. Reflecting on how, why, and to what effect knowledges and styles of performance pollinate across cultures, Tatlow demonstrates that the employment of one culture's material in the context of another defamiliarizes the conventions of representation in an act that facilitates access to what previously had been culturally repressed. By reading the intercultural, Tatlow shows, we are able not only to historicize the effects of those repressions that create a social unconscious but also gain access to what might otherwise have remained invisible. This remarkable study will interest students of cultural interaction and aesthetics, as well as readers interested in theater, Shakespeare, Brecht, China, and Japan.
Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages: Maimed Rights (The New Middle Ages)
by Alfred ThomasWhereas traditional scholarship assumed that William Shakespeare used the medieval past as a negative foil to legitimate the present, Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages offers a revisionist perspective, arguing that the playwright valorizes the Middle Ages in order to critique the oppressive nature of the Tudor-Stuart state. In examining Shakespeare’s Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and The Winter’s Tale, the text explores how Shakespeare repossessed the medieval past to articulate political and religious dissent. By comparing these and other plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries with their medieval analogues, Alfred Thomas argues that Shakespeare was an ecumenical writer concerned with promoting tolerance in a highly intolerant and partisan age.
Shakespeare, Cinema and Desire
by Simon RyleShakespeare, Cinema and Desire explores the desires and the futures of Shakespeare's language and cinematographic adaptations of Shakespeare. Tracing ways that film offers us a rich new understanding of Shakespeare, Simon Ryle highlights issues that are central to both Shakespeare and film: media technologies, narrative territories and flows, mourning and loss, the voice, the body, sexuality and gender. The recirculation of Shakespearean ideas in the critical theory of modernity, especially figures such as Jacques Lacan, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze, parallels the negotiations of film adaptation. By focusing on the dialogue between Shakespeare and modernity, this study explores how Shakespeare film adaptation raises broad questions concerning the emancipatory potential of aesthetics. Shakespeare is the source of more movie screenplays than any other writer in history, and negotiations between Shakespeare and developing cinematic technologies have been influential across the history of cinema. This book contributes a much needed analysis of the relation of Shakespeare's language to film form, providing in-depth studies of major Shakespeare adaptations from directors such as Akira Kurosawa, Peter Greenaway, Joseph Mankiewicz, Grigori Kozintsev, Svend Gade, Jean-Luc Godard, and Laurence Olivier.
Shakespeare, Cinema, Counter-Culture: Appropriation and Inversion (Routledge Studies in Shakespeare #17)
by Ailsa Grant FergusonAddressing for the first time Shakespeare’s place in counter-cultural cinema, this book examines and theorizes counter-hegemonic, postmodern, and post-punk Shakespeare in late 20th and early 21st century film. Drawing on a diverse range of case studies, Grant Ferguson presents an interdisciplinary approach that offers new theories on the nature and application of Shakespearean appropriations in the light of postmodern modes of representation. The book considers the nature of the Shakespearean inter-text in subcultural political contexts concerning the politicized aesthetics of a Shakespearean ‘body in pieces,’ the carnivalesque, and notions of Shakespeare as counter-hegemonic weapon or source of empowerment. Representative films use Shakespeare (and his accompanying cultural capital) to challenge notions of capitalist globalization, dominant socio-cultural ideologies, and hegemonic modes of expression. In response to a post-modern culture saturated with logos and semiotic abbreviations, many such films play with the emblematic imagery and references of Shakespeare’s texts. These curious appropriations have much to reveal about the elusive nature of intertextuality in late postmodern culture and the battle for cultural ownership of Shakespeare. As there has yet to be a study that isolates and theorizes modes of Shakespearean production that specifically demonstrate resistance to the social, political, ideological, aesthetic, and cinematic norms of the Western world, this book expands the dialogue around such texts and interprets their patterns of appropriation, adaptation, and representation of Shakespeare.
Shakespeare, Computers, and The Mystery of Authorship
by Arthur F. Kinney Hugh CraigCraig, Kinney and their collaborators confront the main unsolved mysteries in Shakespeare's canon through computer analysis of Shakespeare's and other writers' styles. In some cases their analysis confirms the current scholarly consensus, bringing long-standing questions to something like a final resolution. In other areas the book provides more surprising conclusions: that Shakespeare wrote the 1602 additions to The Spanish Tragedy, for example, and that Marlowe along with Shakespeare was a collaborator on Henry VI, Parts 1 and 2. The methods used are more wholeheartedly statistical, and computationally more intensive, than any that have yet been applied to Shakespeare studies. The book also reveals how word patterns help create a characteristic personal style. In tackling traditional problems with the aid of the processing power of the computer, harnessed through computer science, and drawing upon large amounts of data, the book is an exemplar of the new domain of digital humanities.
Shakespeare, Dissent, and the Cold War
by Alfred ThomasShakespeare, Dissent and the Cold War is the first book to read Shakespeare's drama through the lens of Cold War politics. The book uses the Cold War experience of dissenting artists in theatre and film to highlight the coded religio-political subtexts in Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth and The Winter's Tale.
Shakespeare, Dramatic Poetry and Value (Routledge Studies in Shakespeare)
by MacDonald P. JacksonThis book redirects attention to a truth largely ignored by recent criticism—that Shakespeare’s excellence as a playwright is inextricable from his excellence as a poet. It explores the diverse means by which Shakespeare’s poetry enriches his drama, illustrating how particular words in a particular order render his dialogue distinctive and create supreme literary and dramatic value. By examining many passages, long and short and from a variety of Shakespeare’s plays—comedies, histories, tragedies, later plays—the author aids understanding of the poetic effects that make Shakespeare preeminent. His analyses, alert to textual variants and cruxes, are illuminated by comparisons: Shakespeare’s early verse is compared with his later verse and samples of Shakespearean dialogue are compared with versions in later adaptations, in modernizations, and inferior quarto texts, as well as with contributions by his co-authors to collaborative plays. The contrasts throw into relief the surpassing vitality and expressiveness of Shakespeare’s own language. Since the rhythmic vitality of Shakespeare’s verse is essential to how and what it communicates, an appendix on the principles of iambic pentameter is included to support those aspects of the analyses that refer to acoustic subtleties.
Shakespeare, Education and Pedagogy: Representations, Interactions and Adaptations (Literature and Education)
by Pamela Bickley Jenny StevensThis volume captures the diverse ways in which Shakespeare interacts with educational theory and practice. It explores the depiction of learning and education in the plays, the role of Shakespeare as pedagogue, and ways in which the teaching of Shakespeare can facilitate discussion of some of the urgent questions of modern times. The book offers a wide range of perspectives – historical, theoretical, theatrical. The Renaissance humanist learning underpinning Shakespeare’s own work is explored in essays that consider how the complexity of Shakespeare’s drama challenges early-modern pedagogical orthodoxies. From close analysis of individual, solitary reflection on Shakespeare’s writing, the book moves outward to engage with contemporary social issues around inclusivity, society, and the planet, demonstrating the many educational contexts in which Shakespeare is currently appropriated. Engaging with current questions of the value of literary study, the book testifies to the potentialities of an empowering Shakespearean pedagogy. Bringing together voices from a variety of institutions and from a wide range of educational perspectives, this volume will be essential reading for academics, researchers and post-graduate students of Shakespeare, literature in education, pedagogy and literary theory.
Shakespeare, In Fact
by Thomas Mann Irvin Leigh Matus"Written with wit and panache, this erudite tome dismantles the arguments claiming that someone other than Shakespeare wrote his plays."--Publishers Weekly"The definitive study of the controversy."--The Shakespeare Newsletter"Of interest to anyone fascinated by this master of word-music and stage-action."--Washington Post Book WorldHow could the son of a glove-maker, born and bred in an Elizabethan backwater, have developed into the immortal William Shakespeare? How is it possible that someone with no formal education beyond grammar school wrote the world's most read and performed plays? This captivating exploration of the mysteries surrounding Shakespeare's life and work offers a persuasive case for the authenticity of his authorship.Scholarly but readable, the study rests upon the surviving evidence of the playwright's family life and career, from his humble beginnings to the triumphant presentations of his dramas before commoners and royalty alike. Author Irvin Leigh Matus discusses the publication and dating of the plays, their performance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the arguments favoring the Earl of Oxford as the true author. Reproductions of Elizabethan engravings, manuscript pages, and other illustrations complement this fascinating and accessible survey.
Shakespeare, Italy, and Transnational Exchange: Early Modern to Present (Routledge Studies in Shakespeare)
by Enza De Francisci Chris StamatakisThis interdisciplinary, transhistorical collection brings together international scholars from English literature, Italian studies, performance history, and comparative literature to offer new perspectives on the vibrant engagements between Shakespeare and Italian theatre, literary culture, and politics, from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. Chapters address the intricate, two-way exchange between Shakespeare and Italy: how the artistic and intellectual culture of Renaissance Italy shaped Shakespeare’s drama in his own time, and how the afterlife of Shakespeare’s work and reputation in Italy since the eighteenth century has permeated Italian drama, poetry, opera, novels, and film. Responding to exciting recent scholarship on Shakespeare and Italy, as well as transnational theatre, this volume moves beyond conventional source study and familiar questions about influence, location, and adaptation to propose instead a new, evolving paradigm of cultural interchange. Essays in this volume, ranging in methodology from archival research to repertory study, are unified by an interest in how Shakespeare’s works represent and enact exchanges across the linguistic, cultural, and political boundaries separating England and Italy. Arranged chronologically, chapters address historically-contingent cultural negotiations: from networks, intertextual dialogues, and exchanges of ideas and people in the early modern period to questions of authenticity and formations of Italian cultural and national identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. They also explore problems of originality and ownership in twentieth- and twenty-first-century translations of Shakespeare’s works, and new settings and new media in highly personalized revisions that often make a paradoxical return to earlier origins. This book captures, defines, and explains these lively, shifting currents of cultural interchange.
Shakespeare, Jonson, and the Claims of the Performative: Shakespeare, Jonson, And The Claims Of The Performative (Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture #22)
by Mark Robson James LoxleyThis book will constitute an original intervention into longstanding but insistently relevant debates around the significance of notions of ‘performativity’ to the critical analysis of early modern drama. In particular, the book aims to: show how the investigation of performativity can enable readings of Shakespeare and Jonson that challenge the dominant methodological frameworks within which those plays have come to be read; demonstrate that the thought of performativity does not come to rest in the simplicity of method or instrumentality, and that it resists its own claim that language and action might be understood as unproblematically instrumental; demonstrate that this self-resistance occurs or takes place as a moment in the process of articulating the claims of the performative, and that this process is itself in an important sense dramatic.
Shakespeare, Love and Language
by David SchalkwykWhat is the nature of romantic love and erotic desire in Shakespeare's work? In this erudite and yet accessible study, David Schalkwyk addresses this question by exploring the historical contexts, theory and philosophy of love. Close readings of Shakespeare's plays and poems are delivered through the lens of historical texts from Plato to Montaigne, and modern writers including Jacques Lacan, Jean-Luc Marion, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Derrida, Alain Badiou and Stanley Cavell. Through these studies, it is argued that Shakespeare has no single or overarching concept of love, and that in Shakespeare's work, love is not an emotion. Rather, it is a form of action and disposition, to be expressed and negotiated linguistically.
Shakespeare, Music and Performance
by David Lindley Bill BarclayMusic has been an essential constituent of Shakespeare's plays from the sixteenth century to the present day, yet its significance has often been overlooked or underplayed in the history of Shakespearean performance. Providing a long chronological sweep, this collection of essays traces the different uses of music in the theatre and in film from the days of the first Globe and Blackfriars to contemporary, global productions. With a unique concentration on the performance aspects of the subject, the volume offers a wide range of voices, from scholars to contemporary practitioners (including an interview with the critically acclaimed composer Stephen Warbeck), and thus provides a rich exploration of this fascinating history from diverse perspectives.
Shakespeare, Objects and Phenomenology: Daggers of the Mind (Palgrave Shakespeare Studies)
by Susan SachonThis book explores ways in which Shakespeare’s writing strategies shape our embodied perception of objects – both real and imaginary – in four of his plays. Taking the reader on a series of perceptual journeys, it engages in an exciting dialogue between the disciplines of phenomenology, cognitive studies, historicist research and modern acting techniques, in order to probe our sentient and intuitive responses to Shakespeare’s language. What happens when we encounter objects on page and stage; and how we can imagine that impact in performance? What influences might have shaped the language that created them; and what do they reveal about our response to what we see and hear? By placing objects under the phenomenological lens, and scrutinising them as vital conduits between lived experience and language, this book illuminates Shakespeare’s writing as a rich source for investigation into the way we think, feel and communicate as embodied beings.
Shakespeare, Origins and Originality (Shakespeare Survey vol. #68)
by Peter Holland1. Shakespeare's anecdotal character Margreta de Grazia 2. What is a source? Or, how Shakespeare read His Marlowe Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith 3. Imitation or collaboration? Marlowe and the early Shakespeare canon Gary Taylor and John V. Nance 4. 'O Jephthah, judge of Israel': from original to accreted meanings in Hamlet's allusion Péter Dávidházi 5. The elephants' graveyard revisited: Shakespeare at work in Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet and All's Well That Ends Well Catherine Belsey 6. 'Every like is not the same': translating Shakespeare in Spanish today Alfredo Michel Modenessi 7. Reading originals by the light of translations Tom Cheesman 8. 'My name is Will': Shakespeare's sonnets and autobiography Stanley Wells 9. Tracings and data in The Tempest: author, world and representation Janet Clare 10. Shakespearean gesture: narrative and iconography Farah Karim-Cooper 11. The origin of the late Renaissance dramatic convention of self-addressed speech James Hirsh 12. Reading in their present: early readers and the origins of Shakespearian appropriation Jean-Christophe Mayer 13. Shakespeare out of time (or, Hugo takes dictation from the beyond) Ruth Morse 14. Betrayal, derail, or a thin veil: the myth of origin Bi-qi Beatrice Lei 15. Global Shakespeares, affective histories, cultural memories Jyotsna G. Singh and Abdulhamit Arvas 16. Spinach and tobacco: making Shakespearian unoriginals Peter Holland 17. Ren Fest Shakespeare: the cosplay Bard Andrew James Hartley 18. 'Dead as earth': contemporary topicality and myths of origin in King Lear and The Shadow King Kate Flaherty 19. Shakespeare and the idea of national theatres Michael Dobson 20. John Rice and the boys of the Jacobean King's Men David Kathman 21. Shakespeare's Irish lives: the politics of biography Andrew Murphy 22. Shakespeare in blockaded Berlin: the 1948 'Elizabethan Festival' Bettina Boecker 23. Connecting the Globe: actors, audience and entrainment Robert Shaughnessy 24. 'Freetown!': Shakespeare and social flourishing Ewan Fernie 25. We'll always have Paris: the third household and the 'bed of death' in Romeo and Juliet Nicholas Crawford 26. The 'serpent of old Nile': Cleopatra and the pragmatics of reported speech Jelena Marelj 27. 'This insubstantial pageant faded': the drama of semiotic anxiety in The Tempest Lynn Forest-Hill 28. Shakespeare performances in England 2014 Carol Chillington Rutter 29. Professional Shakespeare productions in the British Isles, January–December 2013 James Shaw The year's contribution to Shakespeare studies: 1. Critical studies Charlotte Scott 2. Shakespeare in performance Russell Jackson 3. Editions and textual studies Peter Kirwan.
Shakespeare, Our Contemporary
by Jan KottShakespeare, Our Contemporary is a provocative, original study of the major plays of Shakespeare. More than that, it is one of the few critical works to have strongly influenced theatrical productions.Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz are among the many directors who have acknowledged their debt to Jan Kott, finding in his analogies between Shakespearean situations and those in modern life and drama the seeds of vital new stage conceptions. Shakespeare, Our Contemporary has been translated into nineteen languages since it appeared in 1961, and readers all over the world have similarly found their responses to Shakespeare broadened and enriched.
Shakespeare, Revenge Tragedy and Early Modern Law: Vindictive Justice (Early Modern Literature in History)
by Derek DunneThis book, the first to trace revenge tragedy's evolving dialogue with early modern law, draws on changing laws of evidence, food riots, piracy, and debates over royal prerogative. By taking the genre's legal potential seriously, it opens up the radical critique embedded in the revenge tragedies of Kyd, Shakespeare, Marston, Chettle and Middleton.
Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition
by Raphael LyneRaphael Lyne addresses a crucial Shakespearean question: why do characters in the grip of emotional crises deliver such extraordinarily beautiful and ambitious speeches? How do they manage to be so inventive when they are perplexed? Their dense, complex, articulate speeches at intensely dramatic moments are often seen as psychological - they uncover and investigate inwardness, character and motivation - and as rhetorical - they involve heightened language, deploying recognisable techniques. Focusing on A Midsummer Night's Dream, Othello, Cymbeline and the Sonnets, Lyne explores both the psychological and rhetorical elements of Shakespeare's language. In the light of cognitive linguistics and cognitive literary theory he shows how Renaissance rhetoric could be considered a kind of cognitive science, an attempt to map out the patterns of thinking. His study reveals how Shakespeare's metaphors and similes work to think, interpret and resolve, and how their struggle to do so results in extraordinary poetry.
Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, and Civic Life: The Boundaries of Civic Space (Routledge Studies in Shakespeare)
by Silvia Bigliazzi Lisanna CalviThis volume introduces ‘civic Shakespeare’ as a new and complex category entailing the dynamic relation between the individual and the community on issues of authority, liberty, and cultural production. It investigates civic Shakespeare through Romeo and Juliet as a case study for an interrogation of the limits and possibilities of theatre and the idea of the civic. The play’s focus on civil strife, political challenge, and the rise of a new conception of the individual within society makes it an ideal site to examine how early modern civic topics were received and reconfigured on stage, and how the play has triggered ever new interpretations and civic performances over time. The essays focus on the way the play reflects civic life through the dramatization of issues of crisis and reconciliation when private and public spaces are brought to conflict, but also concentrate on the way the play has subsequently entered the public space of civic life. Set within the fertile context of performance studies and inspired by philosophical and sociological approaches, this book helps clarify the role of theatre within civic space while questioning the relation between citizens as spectators and the community. The wide-ranging chapters cover problems of civil interaction and their onstage representation, dealing with urban and household spaces; the boundaries of social relations and legal, economic, political, and religious regulation; and the public dimension of memory and celebration. This volume articulates civic Romeo and Juliet from the sources of genre to contemporary multicultural performances in political contact-zones and civic ‘Shakespaces,’ exploring the Bard and this play within the context of communal practices and their relations with institutions and civic interests.
Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne: Renaissance Essays
by Frank KermodeFirst published in 1971. This collection of essays discusses some of the central works and areas of literature in the Renaissance period of cultural history. Contents include: Spenser and the Allegorists; The Faerie Queene, I and V; The Cave of Mammon; The Banquet of Sense; John Donne; The Patience of Shakespeare; Survival fo the Classic; Shakespeare's Learning; The Mature Comedies; The Final Plays.
Shakespeare, The Movie II: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, Video and DVD
by Richard Burt Lynda E. BooseFollowing on from the phenomenally successful Shakespeare, The Movie, this volume brings together an invaluable new collection of essays on cinematic Shakespeares in the 1990s and beyond. Shakespeare, The Movie II:*focuses for the first time on the impact of postcolonialism, globalization and digital film on recent adaptations of Shakespeare;*takes in not only American and British films but also adaptations of Shakespeare in Europe and in the Asian diapora;*explores a wide range of film, television, video and DVD adaptations from Almereyda's Hamlet to animated tales, via Baz Luhrmann, Kenneth Branagh, and 1990s' Macbeths, to name but a few;*offers fresh insight into the issues surrounding Shakespeare on film, such as the interplay between originals and adaptations, the appropriations of popular culture, the question of spectatorship, and the impact of popularization on the canonical status of "the Bard."Combining three key essays from the earlier collection with exciting new work from leading contributors, Shakespeare, The Movie II offers sixteen fascinating essays. It is quite simply a must-read for any student of Shakespeare, film, media or cultural studies.
Shakespeare, Theatre, and Time (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies #20)
by Matthew WagnerThat Shakespeare thematized time thoroughly, almost obsessively, in his plays is well established: time is, among other things, a 'devourer' (Love's Labour's Lost), one who can untie knots (Twelfth Night), or, perhaps most famously, simply ‘out of joint’ (Hamlet). Yet most critical commentary on time and Shakespeare tends to incorporate little focus on time as an essential - if elusive - element of stage praxis. This book aims to fill that gap; Wagner's focus is specifically performative, asking after time as a stage phenomenon rather than a literary theme or poetic metaphor. His primary approach is phenomenological, as the book aims to describe how time operates on Shakespearean stages. Through philosophical, historiographical, dramaturgical, and performative perspectives, Wagner examines the ways in which theatrical activity generates a manifest presence of time, and he demonstrates Shakespeare’s acute awareness and manipulation of this phenomenon. Underpinning these investigations is the argument that theatrical time, and especially Shakespearean time, is rooted in temporal conflict and ‘thickness’ (the heightened sense of the present moment bearing the weight of both the past and the future). Throughout the book, Wagner traces the ways in which time transcends thematic and metaphorical functions, and forms an essential part of Shakespearean stage praxis.
Shakespeare, Theology, and the Unstaged God (Routledge Studies in Theology, Imagination and the Arts)
by Anthony D. BakerWhile many scholars in Shakespeare and Religious Studies assume a secularist viewpoint in their interpretation of Shakespeare’s works, there are others that allow for a theologically coherent reading. Located within the turn to religion in Shakespeare studies, this book goes beyond the claim that Shakespeare simply made artistic use of religious material in his drama. It argues that his plays inhabit a complex and rich theological atmosphere, individually, by genre and as a body of work. The book begins by acknowledging that a plot-controlling God figure, or even a consistent theological dogma, is largely absent in the plays of Shakespeare. However, it argues that this absence is not necessarily a sign of secularization, but functions in a theologically generative manner. It goes on to suggest that the plays reveal a consistent, if variant, attention to the theological possibility of a divine "presence" mediated through human wit, both in gracious and malicious forms. Without any prejudice for divine intervention, the plots actually gesture on many turns toward a hidden supernatural "actor", or God. Making bold claims about the artistic and theological of Shakespeare’s work, this book will be of interest to scholars of Theology and the Arts, Shakespeare and Literature more generally.
Shakespeare, Theory and Performance
by James C. BulmanShakespeare, Theory and Performance is a groundbreaking collection of seminal essays which apply the abstract theory of Shakespearean criticism to the practicalities of performance. Bringing together the key names from both realms, the collection reflects a wide range of sources and influences, from traditional literary, performance and historical criticism to modern cultural theory. Together they raise questions about the place of performance criticism in modern and often competing debates of cultural materialism, new historicism, feminism and deconstruction. An exciting and fascinating volume, it will be important reading for students and scholars of literary and theatre studies alike.