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Shakespeare’s use of location governs his dramas. Some he was personally familiar with, like Windsor; some he knew through his imagination, like Kronborg Castle (‘Elsinore’); some matter because Shakespeare’s plays were performed there, like Hampton Court and the Great Hall of the Middle Temple. Shakespeare’s plays are powerfully shaped by their sense of place, and the location becomes an unacknowledged actor. This book is about the locations that he used for his plays, each of which the author has visited, and the result presents the reader with a sense of those places that Shakespeare knew either through direct personal contact or through his imaginative re-interpretation of the scene.
The first book on Shakespeare to take the unique perspective of location. Publication will coincide with the 400Th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in April 2016
This Element considers place as a partner in the learning process. It aims to develop a learner's sense of place in two ways: through deepening their authentic engagement with and knowledge of Shakespeare's texts, and by expanding critical awareness of their environmental responsibilities.
"Doing Shakespeare is simply harder than anything else," Colm Feore says to his interviewer, while apparently on break from rehearsing his role as Marcus Andronicus before principal photography begins for Julie Taymor's film, Titus (1999). "It's harder than Chekov, it's harder than Moliere, it's harder than Racine, it's harder than -- anything!" ("The Making of Titus," DVD Special Features). The team involved in Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000) as well as that of Richard Loncraine's Richard III (1995) didn't have it any easier. By all accounts of each filmmaking process, none of the films to be discussed here had the luxury of simply being one film among many; each had to face the weight of centuries of Shakespearean production and the cultural monolith that stands behind the playwright's name. Worthen argues that a Shakespearean production "affords a powerful way to bring questions of authority and performance into view", such as whether a production is "engaged in transmitting the work, or producing it". Though Worthen deals mainly with stage productions, perhaps the difficulty faced by these filmmakers comes from the fact that changing Shakespeare's medium brings assumptions of authority into focus. Feore's anxiety toward his position in a Shakespearean production shows us "the sense that performance transmits Shakespearean authority remains very much in play."Taking a script written for the stage and using it to create a film causes many opportunities for anxiety, especially if the playwright is one of the most famous writers in the English language. There have been some recent films that adapted the story to a modern setting for the screen (Touchstone Picture's Ten Things I Hate About You, 1999), but productions that use the original language in the script must combine the theatrical storytelling methods in the text with cinematic ones. There have also been productions that use the visual component of film to elaborate and expand on what is in the text, creating a cinematic universe that might result in a "realistic" Shakespeare film (Kenneth Branagh's Henry V, 1989; Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet, 1990). These films resolve the contradictions between cinematic storytelling and theatrical convention by basically ignoring them. There are, however, films that invite these contradictions to the surface through their use of physical and historical setting. The focus in this case will be how the tension between "the theatrical" and "the cinematic" exposes Shakespearean textual authority: it is confronted, dealt with ironically, or incorporated on film through the distinct relationship theater and cinema have with the movement of time.
This book renders William Shakespeare''s Romeo and Juliet play in a poetic modern language. The story takes place in a distant future, in a secular Canadian setting. The reader will therefore have a few surprises regarding both the characters and the storyline. Despite this, most of Shakespeare''s play shines through with an undiminished power. FOREWORD For the 2016 worldwide Shakespeare celebration - the "Hogarth programme" - many writers are taking on the task of retelling his plays in the form of a novel. This book was born from the idea of setting Romeo and Juliet not in the past, and not in the present, but in a "far distant future", that is, hundreds of years from now, and asking the questions: will the story hold together in this case, and how? How much of the original play can be kept? In order to preserve the linguistic richness of the original, I used not only a modern, but also a correspondingly poetic style of writing - thus, the similarity with Shakespeare''s own language. Despite the changes in the setting, characters, and storyline, I only minimally altered and excised lines from the play, keeping as much of Shakespeare''s text as possible. It was irresistible to place the story in a Canadian setting, and I envision a future Canada that is part of an open, borderless world. A world that is international in its ethos. One that is significantly less nationalistic than the one in which we live today. Perhaps as an extension of the theory of the European Union project, a united world would be made up of countries governed according to an international Constitution. Gradually bolstered and brought in, countries of the third world would prosper alongside their wealthier counterparts, which in their turn would benefit from a new, fully global economy. Such a borderless society, four hundred or so years from now to be specific, would be a secular one, and this required some small and not so small changes to Shakespeare''s text. Also, this story - projected into a future characterized by a rather more humane society - necessitated a Romeo who does not commit murder, not even for the sake of revenge. Despite these changes, my main goal was to keep the dramatic tension of the play undiminished, so that after reading the New Romeo and Juliet - which, by the way, also has a slightly different ending - the reader ends up with the feeling that he or she had read something that is not much different from the original, and asks the question: why new Romeo and Juliet? ACT I SCENE I. Scarborough. A public place. (Scarborough''s social code of honour allows the use of stylized pugil sticks as weapons for duel challenges between its residents. These martial sticks look like long wooden spoons, whose intricate handles have carved bowls at both ends. This particular day when the story begins, Sampson and Gregory, two chefs from the clan of Capulet, are out for a walk.) Sampson Gregory, ever since Canada claimed the North Pole none of my ancestors felt this much antagonized. We cannot let them animate us like that. Gregory No, because then we would be living cartoons. Sampson What I mean is that if they enrage my blood I charge. Gregory Your blood simmers like water - you can discharge but vapours of distress from your humid personality. Is that what you call being enraged? Sampson Any dirty magician from the clan of Montague can change all that, and bring my blood to a boil. Gregory Sampson, you are no less of a chef than I am. So, when it boils over, use the spoon to bring it under control. But you probably have not mastered spooning. Sampson I can bring under control any man or woman of their clan with this terrifying spoon, mate. ...................
The locations of Shakespeare s plays range from Greece, Turkey and Syria to England, and they range in time from 1000 BC to the early Tudor age. He never set a play explicitly in Elizabethan London which he and his audience inhabited, but always in places remote in space or time. How much did he and his contemporaries know about the foreign cities where the plays took place? What expectations did an audience have if the curtain rose on a drama which claimed to take place in Verona, Elsinore, Alexandria or ancient Troy? This fully illustrated book explores these questions, surveying Shakespeare s world through contemporary maps, geographical texts, paintings and drawings. The results are intriguing and sometimes surprising. Why should Love s Labour s Lost be set in the Pyrenean kingdom of Navarre? Was the Forest of Arden really in Warwickshire? Why do two utterly different plays like The Comedy of Errors and Pericles focus strongly on ancient Ephesus? Where was Illyria? Did the Merry Wives have to live in Windsor? Why did Shakespeare sometimes shift the settings of the plays from those he found in his literary sources? It has always been easy to say that wherever the plays are set, Shakespeare was really writing about human psychology and human nature, and that the settings are irrelevant. This book takes a different view, showing that many of his locations may have had resonances which an Elizabethan audience would pick up and understand, and it shows how significant the geographical background of the plays could be. "
"This book offers a short, spirited defense of rhetoric and the liberal arts as catalysts for precision, invention, and empathy in today's world. The author, a professor of Shakespeare studies at a liberal arts college and a parent of school-age children, argues that high-stakes testing and a culture of assessment have altered how and what students are taught, as courses across the arts, humanities, and sciences increasingly are set aside to make room for joyless, mechanical reading and math instruction. Students have been robbed of a complete education, their imaginations stunted by this myopic focus on bare literacy and numeracy. Education is about thinking, Newstok argues, rather than the mastery of a set of rigidly defined skills, and the seemingly rigid pedagogy of the English Renaissance produced some of the most compelling and influential examples of liberated thinking. Each of the fourteen chapters explores an essential element of Shakespeare's world and work, aligns it with the ideas of other thinkers and writers in modern times, and suggests opportunities for further reading. Chapters on craft, technology, attention, freedom, and related topics combine past and present ideas about education to build a case for the value of the past, the pleasure of thinking, and the limitations of modern educational practices and prejudices"--
Much Ado About Nothing has long been celebrated as one of Shakespeare's most popular comedies. The central relationship, between Benedick and Beatrice, is wittily combative until love prevails. Broader comedy is provided by Dogberry, Verges and the watchmen.
An award-winning scholar and teacher explores how Shakespeare's greatest characters were built on a learned sense of empathy While exploring Shakespeare's plays with her students, Paula Marantz Cohen discovered that teaching and discussing his plays unlocked a surprising sense of compassion in the classroom. In this short and illuminating book, she shows how Shakespeare's genius lay with his ability to arouse empathy, even when his characters exist in alien contexts and behave in reprehensible ways. Cohen takes her readers through a selection of Shakespeare's most famous plays, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and The Merchant of Venice, to demonstrate the ways in which Shakespeare thought deeply and clearly about how we treat "the other." Cohen argues that only through close reading of Shakespeare can we fully appreciate his empathetic response to race, class, gender, and age. Wise, eloquent, and thoughtful, this book is a forceful argument for literature's power to champion what is best in us.