Shakespeare and the Modern Dramatist
Shakespeare and the Modern Dramatist

Author: Michael Scott

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-07-27

Total Pages: 171

ISBN-13: 134913340X

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Theatre has never been afraid to adapt, rewrite and contemporize Shakespeare's drama since theatre by definition is a living medium involving a corporate creativity. Shakespeare himself rewrote or adapted old plays and stories and since writing his dramas have experienced many transformations. Recent dramatists following this age-old tradition have rewritten some of Shakespeare's plays for the contemporary stage or modelled their drama on formulations used by him. Michael Scott examines a selection of such plays written in the last forty years. Some, such as Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot or Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead have become famed. Others such as Ionesco's Macbett are less well known but are no less signficant. Edward Bond's Lear, Arnold Wesker's The Merchant and Charles Marowitz's Collages represent an attempt by some modern dramatists to challenge a particular ideology which appears to have appropriated Shakespeare to itself. The book concludes with an examination of some recent trends in Shakespearean production, particularly by the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist
Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist

Author: Lukas Erne

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-04-25

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 1107029651

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This second edition of Erne's groundbreaking study includes a new preface that reviews the controversy the book has triggered.

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists

Author: Ton Hoenselaars

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-10-11

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 1107494338

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While Shakespeare's popularity has continued to grow, so has the attention paid to the work of his contemporaries. The contributors to this Companion introduce the distinctive drama of these playwrights, from the court comedies of John Lyly to the works of Richard Brome in the Caroline era. With chapters on a wide range of familiar and lesser-known dramatists, including Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Webster, Thomas Middleton and John Ford, this book devotes particular attention to their personal and professional relationships, occupational rivalries and collaborations. Overturning the popular misconception that Shakespeare wrote in isolation, it offers a new perspective on the most impressive body of drama in the history of the English stage.

Teaching Shakespeare and Early Modern Dramatists
Teaching Shakespeare and Early Modern Dramatists

Author: A. Hiscock

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 2007-07-13

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 9781403994752

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This collection offers practical suggestions for the integration of non-Shakespearean drama into the teaching of Shakespeare. It shows both the ways in which Shakespearean drama is typical of its period and of the ways in which it is distinctive, by looking at Shakespeare and other writers who influenced and developed the genres in which he worked.

Shakespeare as a Dramatist
Shakespeare as a Dramatist

Author: Sir John Collings Squire

Publisher: Ardent Media

Published: 1971

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13:

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In writing a play, the playwright must take into account the devices & sets available to him for the optimum stage presentation of his work. In Shakespeare's day, there were very few mechanical devices, & even fewer sets, available to the playwright. The author examines the Bard's players in the light of the staging problems he faced & how he had to write his plays so that dialogue & inflection would "set the scene", express the mood of the play, & convey other meanings to the audience that a playwright of today might accomplish with scenery, lighting, musical accompaniment, mechanical devices, etc. Highly useful for English literature & theatre collections.

Shakespeare, Court Dramatist
Shakespeare, Court Dramatist

Author: Richard Dutton

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-04-07

Total Pages: 491

ISBN-13: 0191083321

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Shakespeare, Court Dramatist centres around the contention that the courts of both Elizabeth I and James I loomed much larger in Shakespeare's creative life than is usually appreciated. Richard Dutton argues that many, perhaps most, of Shakespeare's plays have survived in versions adapted for court presentation, where length was no object (and indeed encouraged) and rhetorical virtuosity was appreciated. The first half of the study examines the court's patronage of the theatre during Shakespeare's lifetime and the crucial role of its Masters of the Revels, who supervised all performances there (as well as censoring plays for public performance). Dutton examines the emergence of the Lord Chamberlain's Men and the King's Men, to whom Shakespeare was attached as their 'ordinary poet', and reviews what is known about the revision of plays in the early modern period. The second half of the study focuses in detail on six of Shakespeare's plays which exist in shorter, less polished texts as well as longer, more familiar ones: Henry VI Part II and III, Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, Hamlet, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Dutton argues that they are not cut down from those familiar versions, but poorly reported originals which Shakespeare revised for court performance into what we know best today. More localized revisions in such plays as Titus Andronicus, Richard II, and Henry IV Part II can also best be explained in this context. The court, Richard Dutton argues, is what made Shakespeare Shakespeare.

Shakespeare's Modern Collaborators
Shakespeare's Modern Collaborators

Author: Lukas Erne

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2007-12-18

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 1441163611

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Recent work in Shakespeare studies has brought to the forefront a variety of ways in which the collaborative nature of Shakespearean drama can be investigated: collaborative performance (Shakespeare and his fellow actors); collaborative writing (Shakespeare and his co-authors); collaborative textual production (Shakespeare and his transcribers and printers). What this leaves unaccounted for is the form of collaboration that affects more than any other our modern reading experience of Shakespeare's plays: what we read as Shakespeare now always comes to us in the form of a collaborative enterprise - and is decisively shaped by the nature of the collaboration - between Shakespeare and his modern editors. Contrary to much recent criticism, this book suggests that modern textual mediators have a positive rather than negative role: they are not simply 'pimps of discourse' or cultural tyrants whose oppressive interventions we need to 'unedit' but collaborators who can decisively shape and enable our response to Shakespeare's plays. Erne argues that any reader of Shakespeare, scholar, student, or general reader, approaches Shakespeare through modern editions that have an endlessly complicated and fascinating relationship to what Shakespeare may actually have intended and written, that modern editors determine what that relationship is, and that it is generally a very good thing that they do so.