On 23 April 1916, Oxford University Press published a magnificent
volume entitled A Book of Homage to Shakespeare, edited by
Professor Israel Gollancz. Created to mark the Tercentenary of
Shakespeare's death in the very midst of the First World War, it
was a substantial folio-sized volume of 557 pages bound in white
leather with Shakespeare's coat of arms embossed in gold, with nine
leaves of plates, each protected by tissue: with textured pages
laid out with a generous and elegant text design, it is a
strikingly beautiful material object in its own right, quite apart
from its contents, which include contributions by writers from
Rudyard Kipling to Rabindranath Tagore, from John Galsworthy to
Maurice Maeterlinck. One thousand two hundred and fifty copies were
printed, a fifth designed as presentation copies, with the rest put
on general sale. Within its pages, sandwiched between an opening
poem by Thomas Hardy about Stratford-upon-Avon and the London-based
editor's closing paean to the global community- 'Shakespeare's own
kindred, whatsoe'er their speech'-are a hundred and five essays,
dialogues and fragments and sixty-one poems, including twenty-six
translations, from locations as far apart as India, Ireland,
America, Armenia, Burma, South Africa, Russia and Japan. A Book of
Homage to Shakespeare is thus a celebration both local and global,
and it marks a pivotal moment in literary history-a moment at which
Shakespeare was the poet both of empire and of a world emerging
into a new, very different global order. Oxford University Press's
reissue, 100 years later, of this remarkable volume for the 2016
centenary reflects the style of the original edition and is
presented with a new foreword by King's College London's Gordon
McMullan, telling the story of the book's inception and creation,
focussing on its editor and guiding spirit, Israel Gollancz, and on
certain key contributions. His lively account reveals A Book of
Homage as a far more complex phenomenon than might be expected,
balancing the celebration of empire with elements both of
resistance to Shakespeare as the uncontested figurehead for empire
and of self-fashioning, implicit and explicit, on the part of its
contributors.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
