|
Showing 1 - 23 of
23 matches in All Departments
As we witness monuments of white Western history fall, many are
asking 'How is Shakespeare still relevant?' Professor Farah
Karim-Cooper has dedicated her career to the Bard, which is why she
wants to take the playwright down from his plinth to unveil a
Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. If we persist in reading
Shakespeare as representative of only one group, as the very
pinnacle of the white Western canon, then he will truly be in
peril. Combining piercing analysis of race, gender and otherness in
famous plays from Antony and Cleopatra to The Tempest with a
radical reappraisal of Elizabethan London, The Great White Bard
entreats us neither to idealise nor bury Shakespeare but instead to
look him in the eye and reckon with the discomforts of his plays,
playhouses and society. In inviting new perspectives and
interpretations, we may yet prolong and enrich his extraordinary
legacy.
A clear-eyed look at the works of Shakespeare through the lens of
race, by codirector of education at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre,
Farah Karim-Cooper Consider the dead white male author. No
intersection of identities could sound less equipped to address the
dire racial inequality that plagues Western society. Now consider
Shakespeare, the most venerated of these authors, and we have
before us what seems like a cultural relic, all too easy to
dismiss. Farah Karim-Cooper, Shakespeare scholar and head of higher
education and research at the Globe Theatre, asks us to take a step
back from this initial reaction. The first step, she says, is to
take him off his pedestal. Karim-Cooper's deft analysis and deep
love of Shakespeare generate an account of his works that confronts
their complexities, and those of British society and the
English-speaking world, through the lens of race. Thinking about
Shakespeare through the lens of race may be discomfiting at times,
but the depth of understanding that it yields is worth the
challenge. In The Great White Bard, Karim-Cooper contends with
Shakespeare as neither an idol nor an irrelevant fossil, but as a
writer whose works are deeply human and comprehensible by all who
actively engage with them. From examining the texts themselves to
considering the conventions of the plays' staging, Karim-Cooper
unflinchingly interrogates how Shakespeare, both then and now, has
been shaped by race.
How do writers work? The differing habits of seven great authors
are examined in this collection. Writers often meditate on what
physical situations they need to do the work in hand. A room of
their own, bills, bed, procrastination, regular meals, Benzedrine
and beer, office routines, walking and riding, even prison, can be
machines that make them write. Trollope got 2,000 words done every
morning, watch on the table. Clare composed en pleine air, jotting
on his hat rim. Wesley's hymns came to him on horseback. The Bronte
sisters paced round adrawing-room table. Donne was dismally
prompted to write by nappies. Johnson needed the printer's devil
knocking at his door. On a grand scale, city planners try to entice
the creative classes into a creative area: while at alocal level,
readers have a magical sense that putting themselves into the
bodily position of a writer may allow them to join in her planning
and plotting. The essays in this volume examine the working habits
of seven greatauthors, from 1600 to today: Jonson, Milton, the
Bronte sisters, Trollope, Oliphant, and Auden. There are also
interviews on the creative environment with the Poet Laureate of
Great Britain, the British Library's Head of Modern Literary
Manuscripts, the Director of the Hay Festival, research fellows at
Stratford and the Globe, and a poet-web-blogger. CONTRIBUTORS: STAN
SMITH, ELISABETH JAY, N. JOHN HALL, STEVIE DAVIS, PETER C. HERMAN,
FARAH KARIM-COOPER, KATE RUMBOLD, MICHELLE O'CALLAGHAN, ADAM SMYTH,
ANDREW MOTION, JAMIE ANDREWS, ROBERT SHEPPARD, PETER FLORENCE
Shakespeare / Space explores new approaches to the enactment of
‘space’ in and through Shakespeare’s plays, as well as to the
cognitive, material and virtual spaces in which they are enacted.
With contributions from 14 leading experts in their fields, the
collection forges innovative connections between spatial studies
and cultural geography, cognitive studies, phenomenology and the
history of the emotions, gender and race studies, rhetoric and
language, translation studies, memory studies, theatre history and
performance studies. Each chapter offers methodological reflections
on intersections such as space/cognition, space/emotion,
space/geopoetics, space/embodiment, space/language, space/virtual,
whose critical purchase is demonstrated in close-readings of one or
several plays. The essays assembled here testify to the importance
of space for our understanding of Shakespeare’s creative and
theatrical practice, and at the same time enlarge our understanding
of space as a critical concept in the humanities. It will prove
useful to students, scholars, teachers and theatre practitioners of
Shakespeare and early modern studies.
Shakespeare | Sense explores the intersection of Shakespeare and
sensory studies, asking what sensation can tell us about early
modern drama and poetry, and, conversely, how Shakespeare explores
the senses in his literary craft, his fictional worlds, and his
stagecraft. 15 substantial new essays by leading Shakespeareans
working in sensory studies and related disciplines interrogate
every aspect of Shakespeare and sense, from the place of hearing,
smell, sight, touch, and taste in early modern life, literature,
and performance culture, through to the significance of sensation
in 21st century engagements with Shakespeare on stage, screen and
page. The volume explores and develops current methods for studying
Shakespeare and sensation, reflecting upon the opportunities and
challenges created by this emergent and influential area of
scholarly enquiry. Many chapters develop fresh readings of
particular plays and poems, from Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream,
King Lear, and The Tempest to less-studied works such as The Comedy
of Errors, Venus and Adonis, Troilus and Cressida, and Cymbeline.
Shakespeare | Sense explores the intersection of Shakespeare and
sensory studies, asking what sensation can tell us about early
modern drama and poetry, and, conversely, how Shakespeare explores
the senses in his literary craft, his fictional worlds, and his
stagecraft. 15 substantial new essays by leading Shakespeareans
working in sensory studies and related disciplines interrogate
every aspect of Shakespeare and sense, from the place of hearing,
smell, sight, touch, and taste in early modern life, literature,
and performance culture, through to the significance of sensation
in 21st century engagements with Shakespeare on stage, screen and
page. The volume explores and develops current methods for studying
Shakespeare and sensation, reflecting upon the opportunities and
challenges created by this emergent and influential area of
scholarly enquiry. Many chapters develop fresh readings of
particular plays and poems, from Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream,
King Lear, and The Tempest to less-studied works such as The Comedy
of Errors, Venus and Adonis, Troilus and Cressida, and Cymbeline.
Revised and updated critical survey of the field of cosmetics and
adornment studies This revised edition examines how the plays of
Shakespeare and his contemporaries dramatise the Renaissance
preoccupation with cosmetics. Farah Karim-Cooper explores the
then-contentious issue of female beauty and identifies a 'culture
of cosmetics', which finds its visual identity on the early modern
stage. She also examines cosmetic recipes and anti-cosmetic
literature focusing on their relationship to drama in its
representations of gender, race, politics and beauty. Key Features
Offers a new analysis of the construction of whiteness as a racial
signifier Provides an original insight into women's cosmetic
practice through an exploration of ingredients, methods and
materials used to create cosmetics and the perception of make up in
Shakespeare's time Includes numerous cosmetic recipes from the
early modern period found in printed books and never published in a
modern edition
Revised and updated critical survey of the field of cosmetics and
adornment studies This revised edition examines how the plays of
Shakespeare and his contemporaries dramatise the Renaissance
preoccupation with cosmetics. Farah Karim-Cooper explores the
then-contentious issue of female beauty and identifies a 'culture
of cosmetics', which finds its visual identity on the early modern
stage. She also examines cosmetic recipes and anti-cosmetic
literature focusing on their relationship to drama in its
representations of gender, race, politics and beauty. Key Features
Offers a new analysis of the construction of whiteness as a racial
signifier Provides an original insight into women's cosmetic
practice through an exploration of ingredients, methods and
materials used to create cosmetics and the perception of make up in
Shakespeare's time Includes numerous cosmetic recipes from the
early modern period found in printed books and never published in a
modern edition
Shakespeare / Text sets new agendas for the study and use of the
Shakespearean text. Written by 20 leading experts on textual
matters, each chapter challenges a single entrenched binary - such
as book/theatre, source/adaptation, text/paratext, canon/apocrypha,
sense/nonsense, extant/ephemeral, material/digital and
original/copy - that has come to both define and limit the way we
read, analyze, teach, perform and edit Shakespeare today. Drawing
on methods from book history, bibliography, editorial theory,
library science, the digital humanities, theatre studies and
literary criticism, the collection as a whole proposes that our
understanding of Shakespeare - and early modern drama more broadly
- changes radically when 'either/or' approaches to the
Shakespearean text are reconfigured. The chapters in Shakespeare /
Text make strong cases for challenging received wisdom and offer
new, portable methods of treating 'the text', in its myriad
instantiations, that will be useful to scholars, editors, theatre
practitioners, teachers and librarians.
Shakespeare / Sex interrogates the relationship between Shakespeare
and sex by challenging readers to consider Shakespeare’s texts in
light of the most recent theoretical approaches to gender and
sexuality studies. It takes as its premise that gender and
sexuality studies are key to any interpretation of Shakespeare, be
it his texts and their historical contexts, contemporary stage and
cinematic productions, or adaptations from the Restoration to the
present day. Approaching ‘sex’ from four main perspectives –
heterosexuality, third-wave intersectional feminism, queer studies
and trans studies – this book tackles a range of key topics, such
as medical science, rape culture, the environment, disability,
religion, childhood sexuality, race, homoeroticism and trans
bodies. The 12 essays range across Shakespeare’s poems and plays,
including the Sonnets and The Rape of Lucrece, Coriolanus, A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, Measure for Measure, Richard III and The
Two Noble Kinsmen. Encouraged to push the envelope, contributors to
this essay collection open new avenues of inquiry for the study of
gender and sexuality in Shakespeare.
Shakespeare's and Peele's Titus Andronicus has had a theatrical and
a critical revival in the last fifteen years; the critical revival
was perhaps prompted by Jonathan Bate's Arden edition of the play
and its revision of the traditional critical account that it is an
immature work and overly sensationalistic with its emphasis on
non-essential violence. Recent debates and approaches have drawn
closer attention to the play's classicism; re-defined its genre
(for example the revised edition of the New Dramatic Sources will
re-classify the play as one of Shakespeare's Roman plays);
re-considered the nature of violent spectacle, family relations and
kinship, political alliance, race and miscegenation. This study
will explore how the revitalized critical responses to early modern
and contemporary performance histories has had a significant impact
upon the wider reception of this play.
Shakespeare's company, the King's Men, played at the Globe, and
also in an indoor theatre, the Blackfriars. The year 2014 witnessed
the opening of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, based on
seventeenth-century designs of an indoor London theatre and built
within the precincts of the current Globe on Bankside. This volume,
edited by Andrew Gurr and Farah Karim-Cooper, asks what prompted
the move to indoor theatres, and considers the effects that more
intimate staging, lighting and music had on performance and
repertory. It discusses what knowledge is required when attempting
to build an archetype of such a theatre, and looks at the effects
of the theatre on audience behaviour and reception. Exploring the
ways in which indoor theatre shaped the writing of Shakespeare and
his contemporaries in the late Jacobean and early Caroline periods,
this book will find a substantial readership among scholars of
Shakespeare and Jacobean theatre history.
This ground-breaking new book uncovers the way Shakespeare draws
upon the available literature and visual representations of the
hand to inform his drama. Providing an analysis of gesture, touch,
skill and dismemberment in a range of Shakespeare's works, it shows
how the hand was perceived in Shakespeare's time as an indicator of
human agency, emotion, social and personal identity. It
demonstrates how the hand and its activities are described and
embedded in Shakespeare's texts and about its role on the
Shakespearean stage: as part of the actor's body, in the language
as metaphor, and as a morbid stage-prop. Understanding the cultural
signifiers that lie behind the early modern understanding of the
hand and gesture, opens up new and sometimes disturbing ways of
reading and seeing Shakespeare's plays.
How did Elizabethan and Jacobean acting companies create their
visual and aural effects? What materials were available to them and
how did they influence staging and writing? What impact did the
sensations of theatre have on early modern audiences? How did the
construction of the playhouses contribute to technological
innovations in the theatre? What effect might these innovations
have had on the writing of plays? Shakespeare's Theatres and The
Effects of Performance is a landmark collection of essays by
leading international scholars addressing these and other questions
to create a unique and comprehensive overview of the practicalities
and realities of the theatre in the early modern period.
Shakespeare's and Peele's Titus Andronicus has had a theatrical and
a critical revival in the last fifteen years; the critical revival
was perhaps prompted by Jonathan Bate's Arden edition of the play
and its revision of the traditional critical account that it is an
immature work and overly sensationalistic with its emphasis on
non-essential violence. Recent debates and approaches have drawn
closer attention to the play's classicism; re-defined its genre
(for example the revised edition of the New Dramatic Sources will
re-classify the play as one of Shakespeare's Roman plays);
re-considered the nature of violent spectacle, family relations and
kinship, political alliance, race and miscegenation. This study
will explore how the revitalized critical responses to early modern
and contemporary performance histories has had a significant impact
upon the wider reception of this play.
Yukio Ninagawa (1935-2016) was Japan's foremost director of
Shakespeare whose productions were acclaimed around the world. His
work was lauded for its spectacular imagery, its inventive use of
Japanese iconography and its striking fusion of Eastern and Western
theatre traditions. Over a career spanning six decades, Ninagawa
directed 31 of Shakespeare's plays, many of them, including Hamlet,
on multiple occasions. His productions of Macbeth, The Tempest,
Pericles, Twelfth Night and Cymbeline became seminal events in
world Shakespeare production during the last 30 years. This is the
first English-language book dedicated exclusively to Ninagawa's
work. Featuring an overview of his extraordinary output, this study
considers his Shakespearean work within the context of his overall
career. Individual chapters cover Ninagawa's approach Shakespeare
and Greek tragedy, in particular his landmark productions of
Macbeth and Medea, and his eight separate productions of Hamlet.
The volume includes a detailed analysis of the Sai-no-Kuni
Shakespeare Series - in which Ninagawa set out to stage all of
Shakespeare's plays in his hometown of Saitama, north of Tokyo.
Written by Conor Hanratty, who studied with Ninagawa for over a
year, it offers a unique and unprecedented glimpse into the work
and approach of one of the world's great theatre directors.
Shakespeare / Nature sets new agendas for the study of nature in
Shakespeare's work. Offering an expansive exploration of the
intersections between the human and non-human worlds, chapters by
19 experts focus on the rich and persuasive language of nature,
both as organic matter and cultural conditioning. Each chapter is
grounded in a close reading of Shakespeare's plays and poems and
among the many themes considered are natural theology in Macbeth;
the influence of the stars in Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Hamlet
and Macbeth; monstrous bodies in Richard III and The Tempest;
kinship in King Henry V; places and spaces in Love's Labour's Lost,
and acting sex scenes in a range of plays including Measure for
Measure, Titus Andronicus and The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
Approaching ‘Nature’ in all its diversity, this collection
explores the multifaceted and complex ways in which the human and
non-human worlds intersect and the development of a language of
symbiosis that attempts to both control as well as create the terms
of human authority. It offers an entirely new approach to the
subject of nature, bringing together divergent approaches that have
previously been pursued independently so as to explore their shared
investment in the intersections between the human and non-human
worlds and how these discourses shape and condition the emotional,
organic, cultural, and psychological landscapes of Shakespeare’s
play world. Contributors approach Shakespeare’s nature through
the various lenses of philosophy, historicism, psychoanalysis,
gender studies, cosmography, geography, sexuality, linguistics,
environmentalism, feminism and robotics to provide new and nuanced
readings of the intersectional terms of both meaning and matter.
Siblings Sarah Siddons (1755-1831) and John Philip Kemble
(1757-1823) were the most famous British actors of the late-18th
and early-19th centuries. Through their powerful acting and
meticulous conceptualisation of Shakespeare's characters and their
worlds, they created iconic interpretations of Shakespeare's major
roles that live on in our theatrical and cultural memory. This book
examines the actors' long careers on the London stage, from
Siddons's debut in 1782 to Kemble's retirement in 1817,
encompassing Kemble's time as theatre manager, when he sought to
foreground their strengths as Shakespearean performers in his
productions. Over the course of more than thirty years, Siddons and
Kemble appeared opposite one another in many Shakespeare plays,
including King John, Henry VIII, Coriolanus and Macbeth. The actors
had to negotiate two major Shakespeare scandals: the staging of
Vortigern - a fake Shakespearean play - in 1796 and the Old Price
Riots of 1809, during which the audience challenged Siddons's and
Kemble's perceived attempts to control Shakespeare. Fiona Ritchie
examines the siblings' careers, focusing on their collaborations,
as well as placing Siddons's and Kemble's Shakespeare performances
in the context of contemporary 18th- and 19th-century drama. The
volume not only offers a detailed consideration of London theatre,
but also explores the importance of provincial performance to the
actors, notably in the case of Hamlet - a role in which both
appeared across Britain and in Ireland.
Eubanks Winkler and Schoch reveal how - and why - the first
generation to stage Shakespeare after Shakespeare's lifetime
changed absolutely everything. Founder of the Duke's Company, Sir
William Davenant influenced how Shakespeare was performed in a
profound and lasting way. This open access book provides the first
performance-based account of Restoration Shakespeare, exploring the
precursors to Davenant's approach to Restoration Shakespeare, the
cultural context of Restoration theatre, the theatre spaces in
which the Duke's Company performed, Davenant's adaptations of
Shakespeare's plays, acting styles, and the lasting legacy of
Davenant's approach to staging Shakespeare. The eBook editions of
this work are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence
on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Queens
University Belfast.
Shakespeare in the Light convenes an accomplished group of
scholars, actors, and teachers to celebrate the legacy of renowned
Shakespearean and founder of the American Shakespeare Center, Ralph
Alan Cohen. Each contributor pivots off a production at the ASC’s
Blackfriars Playhouse to explore Cohen’s abiding passion, the
performance of the plays of William Shakespeare under their
original theatrical conditions. Whether interested in early modern
theatre history, the teaching of Shakespeare to high school
students, or the performance of Shakespeare in twenty-first century
America, each essay sheds light on the professing of Shakespeare
today, whether on the page, on the stage, or in the classroom.
Guided by the spirit of “universal lighting” – so central to
the aesthetic of the American Shakespeare Center – Shakespeare in
the Light illuminates the impact that the ASC and its founder have
made upon the teaching, editing, scholarship, and performance of
Shakespeare today.
This ground-breaking new book uncovers the way Shakespeare draws
upon the available literature and visual representations of the
hand to inform his drama. Providing an analysis of gesture, touch,
skill and dismemberment in a range of Shakespeare's works, it shows
how the hand was perceived in Shakespeare's time as an indicator of
human agency, emotion, social and personal identity. It
demonstrates how the hand and its activities are described and
embedded in Shakespeare's texts and about its role on the
Shakespearean stage: as part of the actor's body, in the language
as metaphor, and as a morbid stage-prop. Understanding the cultural
signifiers that lie behind the early modern understanding of the
hand and gesture, opens up new and sometimes disturbing ways of
reading and seeing Shakespeare's plays.
Shakespeare's Company, the King's Men, played at the Globe, and
also in an indoor theatre, the Blackfriars. The year 2014 witnesses
the opening of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, based on
seventeenth-century designs of an indoor London theatre and built
within the precincts of the current Globe on Bankside. This volume,
edited by Andrew Gurr and Farah Karim-Cooper, asks what prompted
the move to indoor theatres, and considers the effects that more
intimate staging, lighting and music had on performance and
repertory. It discusses what knowledge is required when attempting
to build an archetype of such a theatre, and looks at the effects
of the theatre on audience behaviour and reception. Exploring the
ways in which indoor theatre shaped the writing of Shakespeare and
his contemporaries in the late Jacobean and early Caroline periods,
this book will find a substantial readership among scholars of
Shakespeare and Jacobean theatre history.
From 1997 Shakespeare's Globe flourished once more on London's
South Bank after an absence of 400 years. The playhouse is now a
major attraction for theatregoers, scholars, tourists, teachers and
students of all ages who come to experience Shakespeare's plays and
those of his contemporaries performed in their original conditions.
The team of artists and education specialists who made this happen
come together here to reflect on their 10-year experiment.
Principal actors, designers, musicians and Globe Education staff
engage with international scholars in a lively debate about the
impact of this extraordinary building. Featuring an in-depth
interview with former Artistic Director Mark Rylance and a
contribution from Patrick Spottiswoode, Founder and Director of
Globe Education, the book highlights the complex relationship
between designer, composer, actor and audience which gives energy
to this thriving Shakespearean centre.
|
|