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Shakespeare has never been more ubiquitous, not only on the stage and in academic writing, but in film, video and the popular press. On television, he advertises everything from cars to fast food. His birthplace, the tiny Warwickshire village of Stratford-Upon-Avon, has been transformed into a theme park of staggering commercialism, and the New Globe, in its second season, is already a far bigger business than the old Globe could ever have hoped to be. If popular culture cannot do without Shakespeare, continually reinventing him and reimagining his drama and his life, neither can the critical and scholarly world, for which Shakespeare has, for more than two centuries, served as the central text for analysis and explication, the foundation of the western literary canon and the measure of literary excellence.The Shakespeare the essays collected in these volumes reveal is fully as multifarious as the Shakespeare of theme parks, movies and television. Indeed, it is part of the continuing reinvention of Shakespeare. The essays are drawn for the most part from work done in the past three decades, though a few essential, enabling essays from an earlier period have been included. They not only chart the directions taken by Shakespeare studies in the recent past, but they serve to indicate the enormous and continuing vitality of the enterprise, and the extent to which Shakespeare has become a metonym for literary and artistic endeavor generally.
An alternative to literary models that either minimise or exalt the writer's creative role, film theory - in Lehmann's view - perceives authorship as a site of constitutive conflict, generating in the process the notion of the auteur.
In 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 and Religion examines the topic of religion in Shakespearean drama from two points of view: the historical, and that of postmodern philosophy and theology.
A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune keep hitting beleaguered English professor Jason Fitger right between the eyes in this hilarious and eagerly awaited sequel to the cult classic of anhedonic academe, the Thurber Prize-winning Dear Committee Members. Once more into the breach... Now is the fall of his discontent, as Jason Fitger, newly appointed chair of the English Department of Payne University, takes arms against a sea of troubles, personal and institutional. His ex-wife is sleeping with the dean who must approve whatever modest initiatives he undertakes. The fearsome department secretary Fran clearly runs the show (when not taking in rescue parrots and dogs) and holds plenty of secrets she's not sharing. The lavishly funded Econ Department keeps siphoning off English's meager resources and has taken aim at its remaining office space. And Fitger's attempt to get a mossbacked and antediluvian Shakespeare scholar to retire backfires spectacularly when the press concludes that the Bard is being kicked to the curricular curb. Lord, what fools these mortals be! Julie Schumacher proves the point and makes the most of it in this delicious romp of satire.
Most studies of the performance of Shakespeare's work concentrate on how the text has been played and what meanings have been conveyed through acting and interpretive directing. Dennis Kennedy demonstrates that much of audience response is determined by the visual representation, which is normally more immediate and direct than the aural conveyance of a text. Ranging widely over productions in Britain, Europe, Japan and North America, Kennedy gives a thorough account of the main scenographic movements of the century, investigating how the visual relates to Shakespeare on the stage. The second edition of this acclaimed history includes a new chapter on Shakespeare performance in the 1990s, bringing the story up to date by drawing on examples from a wide international field. There are more than twenty new illustrations, some of them in colour (bringing the total number of illustrations to almost 200), and previous references have been updated.
Shakespearean Echoes assembles a global cast of established and emerging scholars to explore new connections between Shakespeare and contemporary culture, reflecting the complexities and conflicts of Shakespeare's current international afterlife.
In Shakespeare and Abraham, Ken Jackson illuminates William Shakespeare’s dramatic fascination with the story of Abraham’s near sacrifice of his son Isaac in Genesis 22. Themes of child killing fill Shakespeare’s early plays: Genesis 22 informed Clifford’s attack on young Rutland in 3 Henry 6, Hubert’s providentially thwarted murder of Arthur in King John, and Aaron the Moor’s surprising decision to spare his son amidst the filial slaughters of Titus Andronicus, among others. However, the playwright’s full engagement with the biblical narrative does not manifest itself exclusively in scenes involving the sacrifice of children or in verbal borrowings from the famously sparse story of Abraham. Jackson argues that the most important influence of Genesis 22 and its interpretive tradition is to be found in the conceptual framework that Shakespeare develops to explore relationships among ideas of religion, sovereignty, law, and justice. Jackson probes the Shakespearean texts from the vantage of modern theology and critical theory, while also orienting them toward the traditions concerning Abraham in Jewish, Pauline, patristic, medieval, and Reformation sources and early English drama. Consequently, the playwright’s “Abrahamic explorations” become strikingly apparent in unexpected places such as the “trial” of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and the bifurcated structure of Timon of Athens. By situating Shakespeare in a complex genealogy that extends from ancient religion to postmodern philosophy, Jackson inserts Shakespeare into the larger contemporary conversation about religion in the modern world.
The purpose of this book is to examine recent productions of Shakespeare on stage and film and to lay out some interpretive guidelines for responding to the scripts as recreated in these two very different formats and within the conflicted environment of shifting critical paradigms. The two traditions - Shakespeare on stage and Shakespeare on film - have experienced a midair collision with postmodernism. The results are beginning to be chronicled.
"Shakespeare: World Views comprises fifteen papers concerned with the politics of reading and performance in Autralasia, Asia, and Europe." "The attention to the history and politics of Shakespeare in performance is matched by an interest in the uses and inscriptions of Shakespeare from postcolonial and new European locations." "Two very different essays plot Shakespeare's investments in equally different cartographies: the unsettled and unsettling geographies of the Comedies and the patriarchal territories of Lucrece's Tragedy." "Taken together, these essays from widely differing geographic, political, and critical locations attest to the multiplicity of "Shakespeares" available today. This very multiplicity suggests that Shakespeare is being produced as both local and global, paradoxically fragmented and monolithic, a fertile site both for affinity and contest. The effect is a challenge to any easy claim for Shakespeare's unproblematic status as a stable indicator of cultural value. In Singh's words, this collection manifests the "anomalies and contradictions" as well as the rich variety of "Shakespeares" around the world."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved