Presents the original text of Shakespeare's play side by side with a modern version, with marginal notes and explanations and full descriptions of each character.

This collection of scholarly essays offers a new understanding of local and global myths that have been constructed around Shakespeare in theatre, cinema, and television from the nineteenth century to the present. Drawing on a definition of myth as a powerful ideological narrative, Local and Global Myths in Shakespearean Performance examines historical, political, and cultural conditions of Shakespearean performances in Europe, Asia, and North and South America. The first part of this volume offers a theoretical introduction to Shakespeare as myth from a twenty-first century perspective. The second part critically evaluates myths of linguistic transcendence, authenticity, and universality within broader European, neo-liberal, and post-colonial contexts. The study of local identities and global icons in the third part uncovers dynamic relationships between regional, national, and transnational myths of Shakespeare. The fourth part revises persistent narratives concerning a political potential of Shakespeare's plays in communist and post-communist countries. Finally, part five explores the influence of commercial and popular culture on Shakespeare myths. Michael Dobson's Afterword concludes the volume by locating Shakespeare within classical mythology and contemporary concerns.

Shakespeare Survey is a yearbook of Shakespeare studies and production. Since 1948 Survey has published the best international scholarship in English and many of its essays have become classics of Shakespeare criticism. Each volume is devoted to a theme, or play, or group of plays; each also contains a section of reviews of that year's textual and critical studies, and of the year's major British performances. The books are illustrated with a variety of Shakespearean images and production photographs. The virtues of accessible scholarship and a keen interest in performance, from Shakespeare's time to our own, have characterised the journal from the start. Most volumes of Survey have long been out of print. Backnumbers are gradually being reissued in paperback.

This book adds a unique eastern perspective to the ever growing corpus of Shakespeare criticism. The ancient Sanskrit theory of Rasa - the aesthete's emotional response to performing arts - is explicated in detail and applied to Shakespeare's tragic masterpieces. Bharata, who wrote about Rasa in the Natyasastra, developed detailed guidelines for the communication of emotion from author to actor and then to the audience culminating in a sublime aesthetic experience. Though chronologically Bharata is as ancient as Aristotle, thematically, his ideas are as relevant today as Aristotle's is and often echo those of the Greek master. This cross-cultural study on the communication of emotions in art establishes that emotions are universal and their communication follows similar patterns in all climes. The Rasa theory is today applied to modern media like film and has found a place among audience centric communication theories. This volume extends the East-West dialogue in aesthetic theory by identifying parallels and points of deviation and delights both aesthete and critic alike.

Shakespeare's Law is a critical overview of law and legal issues within the life, career, and works of William Shakespeare as well as those that arise from the endless array of activities that happen today in the name of Shakespeare. Mark Fortier argues that Shakespeare's attitudes to law are complex and not always sanguine, that there exists a deep and perhaps ultimate move beyond law very different from what a lawyer or legal scholar might recognize. Fortier looks in detail at the legal issues most prominent across Shakespeare's work: status, inheritance, fraud, property, contract, tort (especially slander), evidence, crime, political authority, trials, and the relative value of law and justice. He also includes two detailed case studies, of The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure, as well as a chapter looking at law in works by Shakespeare's contemporaries. The book concludes with a chapter on the law as it relates to Shakespeare today. The book shows that the legal issues in Shakespeare are often relevant to issues we face now, and the exploration of law in Shakespeare is as germane today, though in sometimes new ways, as in the past.

Crossing the boundaries between literature, philosophy and theology, Shakespeare and the Grace of Words pioneers a reading strategy that approaches language as grounded in praise; that is, as affirmation and articulation of the goodness of Being. Offering a metaphysically astute theology of language grounded in the thought of Renaissance theologian Nicholas of Cusa, as well as readings of Shakespeare that instantiate and complement its approach, this book shows that language in which the divine gift of Being is received, apprehended and expressed, even amidst darkness and despair, is language that can renew our relationship with one another and with the things and beings of the world. Shakespeare and the Grace of Words aims to engage the reader in detailed, performative close readings while exploring the metaphysical and theological contours of Shakespeare's art-as a venture into a poetic illumination of the deep grammar of the real.

A History of Shakespeare on Screen chronicles how film-makers have re- imagined Shakespeare's plays from the earliest exhibitions in music halls and nickelodeons to today's multi-million dollar productions shown in megaplexes. Topics include the silent era, Hollywood in the Golden Age, the films of Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles, the television scene to include the BBC plays, the avant-garde cinema of Jarman and Greenaway, and non-Anglophone contributions from Japan and elsewhere. This second edition updates the chronology to the year 2003 and includes a new chapter on such recent films as John Madden's Shakespeare in Love, Kenneth Branagh's Love's Labours Lost, Michael Almereyda's Hamlet, and Billy Morrissette's Scotland, Pa. An up-to- date filmography, bibliography, and index of names makes it invaluable as a one-volume reference work for specialists, while the accessible style will ensure that it also appeals to a wider audience of Shakespeareans and cinephiles.

This 2004 volume, with a foreword by Dennis Kennedy, addresses a range of attitudes to Shakespeare's English history plays in Britain and abroad from the early seventeenth century to the present day. It concentrates on the play texts as well as productions, translations and adaptations of them. The essays explore the multiple points of intersection between the English history they recount and the experience of British and other national cultures, establishing the plays as genres not only relevant to the political and cultural history of Britain but also to the history of nearly every nation worldwide. The plays have had a rich international reception tradition but critics and theatre historians abroad, those practising 'foreign' Shakespeare, have tended to ignore these plays in favour of the comedies and tragedies. By presenting the British and foreign Shakespeare traditions side by side, this volume seeks to promote a more finely integrated world Shakespeare.

This book is a study of twenty stage productions, adaptations and screen versions of Shakespeare's final Roman play. It makes available for the first time sustained discussions of major productions of the play in four languages and five countries, and explores how Shakespeare's most political drama has been shaped to circumstances radically different from its original early modern staging. The book offers in-depth analyses of Coriolanus productions covering the post-war era to the twenty-first century, combining close readings of documents and historical contextualisation to productions by the BBC, the Berliner Ensemble, The Katona Jozsef Theatre in communist Hungary, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Britain's National Theatre, The New York Shakespeare Festival, Robert Lepage, Shakespeare's Globe Theatre and Ralph Fiennes' major motion picture. -- .

How is a Shakespearean play transformed when it is directed for the screen? In this 2004 book, Sarah Hatchuel uses literary criticism, narratology, performance history, psychoanalysis and semiotics to analyse how the plays are fundamentally altered in their screen versions. She identifies distinct strategies chosen by film directors to appropriate the plays. Instead of providing just play-by-play or film-by-film analyses, the book addresses the main issues of theatre/film aesthetics, making such theories and concepts accessible before applying them to practical cases. Her book also offers guidelines for the study of sequences in Shakespearean adaptations and includes examples from all the major films from the 1899 King John, through the adaptations by Olivier, Welles and Branagh, to Taymor's 2000 Titus and beyond. This book is aimed at scholars, teachers and students of Shakespeare and film studies, providing a clear and logical apparatus with which to examine Shakespearean screen adaptations.

Essays on Arthurian themes, on Beowulf, Chaucer and Shakespeare, and textual studies of Gower and others. These essays for Shunichi Noguchi, by scholars from Britain, the USA and Japan, reflect his approach to English studies and his wide range of interests from Beowulf to Ulysses. The principal focus, however, is on medieval and renaissance studies: nine of the essays are on Arthurian themes, to which Professor Noguchi has devoted his academic life. There are also essays on Beowulf, Chaucer, the York miracle plays, and Shakespeare, as well as textual studies of Gower, Wulfstan, Wycliffe and Caxton. Contributors: SHUICHI AITA, SHINSUKE ANDO, DEREK BREWER, ANTONY DICKINSON, P.J.C. FIELD, KAZUO FUKUDA, EIICHI HAYAKAWA, TADAHIRO IKEGAMI, MIKIKO ISHII, SOUJIIWASAKI, GREGORY K. JEMBER, TOMOMI KATO, EDWARD DONALD KENNEDY,TADAO KUBOUCHI, JOHN LAWLOR, KIYOKAZU MIZOBATA, GEORGE MOOR, TSUYOSHI MUKAI, YUJI NAKAO, FUMIKO OKA, YUZUYO OKUMURA, ISAMU SAITO, SHIRO SHIBA, JAN SIMKO, JUN SUDO, TAKASHI SUZUKI, TOSHIYUKI TAKAMIYA, RAYMOND P. TRIPP.

This study looks at the violation of bodies in Shakespeare's tragedies, especially as revealed (or concealed) in performance on stage and screen. Pascale Aebischer discusses stage and screen performances of Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, Othello and King Lear with a view to showing how bodies which are virtually absent from both playtexts and critical discourse (due to silence, disability, marginalisation, racial otherness or death) can be prominent in performance, where their representation reflects the cultural and political climate of the production. Aebischer focuses on post-1980 Royal Shakespeare Company and Royal National Theatre productions but also covers film adaptations and landmark productions from the nineteenth century onwards. Her book will interest scholars and students of Shakespeare, gender, performance and cultural studies.

For more than four centuries, cultural preferences, literary values, critical contexts, and personal tastes have governed readers' responses to Shakespeare's sonnets. Early private readers often considered these poems in light of the religious, political, and humanist values by which they lived. Other seventeenth- and eighteenth- century readers, such as stationers and editors, balanced their personal literary preferences against the imagined or actual interests of the literate public to whom they marketed carefully curated editions of the sonnets, often successfully. Whether public or private, however, many disparate sonnet interpretations from the sonnets' first two centuries in print have been overlooked by modern sonnet scholarship, with its emphasis on narrative and amorous readings of the 1609 sequence. First Readers of Shakespeare's Sonnets reintroduces many early readings of Shakespeare's sonnets, arguing that studying the priorities and interpretations of these previous readers expands the modern critical applications of these poems, thereby affording them numerous future applications. This volume draws upon book history, manuscript studies, and editorial theory to recover four lost critical approaches to the sonnets, highlighting early readers' interests in Shakespeare's classical adaptations, political applicability, religious themes, and rhetorical skill during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Shakespeare, Theatre, Performance, History, adaptation, politics, postcolonial United Kingdom, race, gender, television, movie

Shakespeare in the World traces the reception histories and adaptations of Shakespeare in the nineteenth century, when his works became well-known to non-Anglophone communities in both Europe and colonial India. Sen provides thorough and searching examinations of nineteenth-century theatrical, operatic, novelistic, and prose adaptations that are still read and performed, in order to argue that, crucial to the transmission and appeal of Shakespeare's plays were the adaptations they generated in a wide range of media. These adaptations, in turn, made the absorption of the plays into different "national" cultural traditions possible, contributing to the development of "nationalist cosmopolitanisms" in the receiving cultures. Sen challenges the customary reading of Shakespeare reception in terms of "hegemony" and "mimicry," showing instead important parallels in the practices of Shakespeare adaptation in Europe and colonial India. Shakespeare in the World strikes a fine balance between the Bard's iconicity and his colonial and post-colonial afterlives, and is an important contribution to Shakespeare studies.

This book examines conceptions of authority for and in Shakespeare, and the construction of Shakespeare as literary and cultural authority. The first section, Defining and Redefining Authority, begins by re-defining the concept of Shakespeare's sources, suggesting that 'authorities' and 'resources' are more appropriate terms. Building on this conceptual framework, the remainder of this section explores linguistic and discursive authority more broadly. The second section, Shakespearean Authority, considers the construction, performance and questioning of authority in Shakespeare's plays. Essays here range from examinations of monarchical authority to discussions of household authority, literary authority and linguistic ownership. The final part, Shakespeare as Authority, then traces the increasing establishment of Shakespeare as an authority from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century in a series of essays that explore Shakespearean authority for editors, actors, critics, authors, readers and audiences. The volume concludes with two essays that reassess Shakespeare as an authority for visual culture - in the cinema and in contemporary art.

Shakespeare's works occupy a prismatic and complex position in world culture: they straddle both the high and the low, the national and the foreign, literature and theatre. The Second World War presents a fascinating case study of this phenomenon: most, if not all, of its combatants have laid claim to Shakespeare and have called upon his work to convey their society's self-image. In wartime, such claims frequently brought to the fore a crisis of cultural identity and of competing ownership of this 'universal' author. Despite this, the role of Shakespeare during the Second World War has not yet been examined or documented in any depth. Shakespeare and the Second World War provides the first sustained international, collaborative incursion into this terrain. The essays demonstrate how the wide variety of ways in which Shakespeare has been recycled, reviewed, and reinterpreted from 1939-1945 are both illuminated by and continue to illuminate the War today.

Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance asks a central theoretical question in the study of drama: What is the relationship between the dramatic text and the meanings of performance? W.B. Worthen argues that the text cannot govern the force of its performance. Instead, the text becomes significant only as embodied in the changing conventions of its performance. Worthen explores this understanding of dramatic performativity by interrogating several contemporary sites of Shakespeare production. The book includes detailed discussions of recent films and stage productions, and sets Shakespeare performance alongside other works of contemporary drama and theatre.

feminist approaches to Shakespeare by foregrounding the important role of women in showing the right way to live and achieve happiness. timely criticism, as it considers Shakespeare in the current context of the #MeToo movement providing new insights to studies of the emotions by approaching them from the perspective of research conducted by positive psychologists.

Like a King: Casting Shakespeare's Histories for Citizens and Subjects is a dual examination of Shakespeare's history plays in their early modern production contexts and the ways in which the histories can speak directly to twenty-first-century American political and social concerns. Author and production director Christina Gutierrez-Dennehy examines how strategic doubled and re-gendered casting can animate the underlying questions of Richard II, Henry V, and King John in vital and immediate ways for American audiences. Examining evidence from both the archive and the rehearsal room, Gutierrez-Dennehy explores the texts as repositories for twenty-first-century dialogues about power, gender, identity, nationhood, and leadership. With the American political system as its backdrop, Like a King argues that productions of Shakespeare's histories can interrogate and explore the relationships between American citizens and their leaders.

This volume considers the linguistic complexities associated with Shakespeare's presence in South Africa from 1801 to early twentieth-first century televisual updatings of the texts as a means of exploring individual and collective forms of identity. A case study approach demonstrates how Shakespeare's texts are available for ideologically driven linguistic programs. Seeff introduces the African Theatre, Cape Town, in 1801, multilingual site of the first recorded performance of a Shakespeare play in Southern Africa where rival, amateur theatrical groups performed in turn, in English, Dutch, German, and French. Chapter 3 offers three vectors of a broadening Shakespeare diaspora in English, Afrikaans, and Setswana in the second half of the nineteenth century. Chapter 4 analyses Andre Brink's Kinkels innie Kabel, a transposition of Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors into Kaaps, as a radical critique of apartheid's obsession with linguistic and ethnic purity. Chapter 5 investigates John Kani's performance of Othello as a Xhosa warrior chief with access to the ancient tradition of Xhosa storytellers. Shakespeare in Mzansi, a televisual miniseries uses black actors, vernacular languages, and local settings to Africanize Macbeth and reclaim a cross-cultural, multilingualism. An Afterword assesses the future of Shakespeare in a post-rainbow, decolonizing South Africa. Global Sha Any reader interested in Shakespeare Studies, global Shakespeare, Shakespeare in performance, Shakespeare and appropriation, Shakespeare and language, Literacy Studies, race, and South African cultural history will be drawn to this book.

In a novel reading of Shakespeare's plays, this book addresses an observation first made many decades ago, that Shakespeare appears to neglect the intellectual upheavals that astronomy brought about in his lifetime. The author examines temporal, situational, and verbal anomalies in Hamlet and other plays using hermeneutic-dialectic methodology, and finds a consistent pattern of interpretation that is compatible with the history of astronomy and with the development of modern cosmology. He also demonstrates how Shakespeare takes into account beliefs about the nature of the heavens from the time of Pythagoras up to and including discoveries and theories in the first decade of the seventeenth century. The book makes the case that, as in many other fields, Shakespeare's celestial knowledge is far beyond what was commonly known at the time. Students and teachers interested in Shakespeare's alleged indifference towards, or ignorance of, the celestial sciences will find this book illuminating, as will historians of science and scholars whose work focuses on epistemology and its relationship to the canon, and on how Shakespeare acquired the data that his plays deliver.

This wide-ranging study relates patronage to Shakespeare and the theatrical culture of his time. Twelve distinguished theater historians address such questions as--What important functions did patronage have for the theater during this period? How, in turn, did the theater impact on and represent patronage? In what ways do patronage, political power, and playing intersect? The authors also show how patronage practices changed and developed from the early Tudor period to the years in which Shakespeare was the English theater's leading artist.

Shaping Shakespeare for Performance: The Bear Stage collects significant work from the 2013 Blackfriars Conference. The conference, sponsored by the American Shakespeare Center, brings together scholars, actors, directors, dramaturges, and students to share important new work on the staging practices used by William Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The volume's contributors range from renowned scholars and editors to acclaimed directors, highly-trained actors, and budding researchers. The topics cover a similarly wide range: a close reading of an often-cut scene from Henry V meets an account of staging pregnancy; a meticulous review of early modern contract law collides with an analysis of an actor in a bear costume; an account of printed punctuation from the 1600s encounters a study of audience interaction and empowerment in King Lear; the identification of candid doubling in A Comedy of Errors meets the troubling of gender categories in The Roaring Girl. The essays focus on the practical applications of theory, scholarship, and editing to performance of early modern plays.

Shakespeare's problem plays present an unusually fertile field for Jungian tillage. Like a face glimpsed in a crowd and then lost, these works seem to hint at truths just beyond our grasp. Viewed through the lens of Jung's theory of archetypes, pieces fall into place with remarkable clarity, each revolving around a specific critical axis that allows us to see the form and structure that elude us in other readings. The author argues that Jung's theories offer the best key to date for these most intriguing of literary and dramatic puzzles.