Representing Shakespeare
Representing Shakespeare

Author: Robert Shaughnessy

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-07-15

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1317866754

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This text traces the changing theatrical and cultural identity of the History plays in the context of postwar social and political conflict, crisis and change. Since the company's inception in the early 1960s, the RSC's commitment to relevance has fostered close relationships between Shakespearean criticism and performance, and between the theatre and its audiences. Through a detailed discussion of key productions, from "The War of the Roses" in 1963 to "The Plantegenets" in 1988, Robert Shaughnessy emphasizes the political dimension of contemporary theatrical representations of Shakespeare, and of the "Shakespearean" modes of history that these plays have been employed to promote; individualist, cyclical, male-dominated, and driven by essentialised, transcendent human nature.

Presenting Shakespeare
Presenting Shakespeare

Author: Mirko Ilic

Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press

Published: 2015-10-20

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781616892920

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A skull held aloft, a lovesick donkey, a bloodied dagger—these familiar icons are instantly recognizable shorthand for the plays of William Shakespeare. In the four hundred years since his death, the Bard of Avon's exalted place in the pantheon of theater and poetry—indeed, all of Western culture—is unequaled. As Ben Jonson proclaimed, Shakespeare "is not of an age but for all time!" And just as centuries of theatrical artists have reimagined his works through the lens of their own time and culture, so too have illustrators and designers been inspired to create posters that reinvent Shakespeare's well-known themes for each new generation of theatergoers. Presenting Shakespeare collects 1,100 posters for Shakespeare's plays, designed by an international roster of artists representing 55 countries, from Japan to Colombia, India, Russia, Australia, and beyond. A fascinating trove of theatrical artifacts, Presenting Shakespeare is a necessary volume for theater and design lovers alike.

Shakespeare and Social Theory
Shakespeare and Social Theory

Author: BRADD. SHORE

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-08-23

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 9781032017174

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This book provides a bridge between Shakespeare Studies and classical social theory, opening up readings of Shakespeare to a new audience outside of literary studies and the humanities. Shakespeare has long been known as a 'great thinker' and this book reads his plays through the lens of an anthropologist, revealing new connections between Shakespeare's plays and the lives we now lead. Close readings of a selection of frequently studied plays - Hamlet, The Winter's Tale, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Julius Caesar and King Lear - engage with the plays in detail while connecting them with some of the biggest questions we all ask ourselves, about love, friendship, ritual, language, human interactions and the world around us. The plays are examined through various social theories including performance theory, cognitive theory, semiotics, exchange theory and structuralism. The book concludes with a consideration of how "the new astronomy" of his day and developments in optics changed the very idea of "perspective," and shaped Shakespeare's approach to embedding social theory in his dramatic texts. This accessible and engaging book will appeal to those approaching Shakespeare from outside literary studies, but will also be valuable to literature students approaching Shakespeare for the first time, or looking for a new angle on the plays.

Shakespeare After All
Shakespeare After All

Author: Marjorie Garber

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2008-11-19

Total Pages: 1010

ISBN-13: 0307490815

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A brilliant and companionable tour through all thirty-eight plays, Shakespeare After All is the perfect introduction to the bard by one of the country’s foremost authorities on his life and work. Drawing on her hugely popular lecture courses at Yale and Harvard over the past thirty years, Marjorie Garber offers passionate and revealing readings of the plays in chronological sequence, from The Two Gentlemen of Verona to The Two Noble Kinsmen. Supremely readable and engaging, and complete with a comprehensive introduction to Shakespeare’s life and times and an extensive bibliography, this magisterial work is an ever-replenishing fount of insight on the most celebrated writer of all time.

Shakespeare's liminal spaces
Shakespeare's liminal spaces

Author: Ben Haworth

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2024-07-09

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1526165910

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This engaging study appreciably advances recent critical developments in the way the playwright created his worlds to reflect concurrent cartographic, geopolitical and social anxieties. In seeking to expose the dynamics and fluctuations of power on the stage, Shakespeare's liminal spaces provides a unique set of perspectives through which Shakespeare’s forests, battlefields, shores and gardens are revealed as deliberate dramatic devices with the capacity to destabilise social structures. Haworth’s nuanced consideration of these spaces reveals that they were ideally suited to the staging of social frictions as he traces the shifting balance of power between opposing ideological standpoints and the internal struggles between an emergent subjectivity and conformity with the centralised authorities of Church and Court.

Domination And Defiance
Domination And Defiance

Author: Diane Elizabeth Dreher

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2021-03-17

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 0813181739

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Shakespeare was clearly fascinated by the relationship between fathers and daughters, for this primal bond of domination and defiance structures twenty-one of his comedies, tragedies, and romances. In a conflict that is at once social and interpersonal, Shakespeare's fathers demand hierarchical obedience while their daughters affirm the new, more personal values upheld by Renaissance humanists and Puritans. In her penetrating analysis of this compelling relationship, Diane Dreher examines the underlying psychological tensions as well as the changing concepts of marriage and the family during Shakespeare's time. She points to the pain and conflict caused by sex role polarization. Shakespeare's possessive fathers tyrannize over their daughters, unwilling to relinquish their "masculine" power and control and leaving these young women with only two alternatives: paternal domination or defiance and loss of love. The logic of Shakespeare's plays repudiates traditional stereotypes, showing how women like Ophelia and Desdemona are destroyed by conforming to the passive Renaissance ideal. The book concludes with a consideration of Shakespeare's androgynous characters—dynamic women in doublet and hose, and fathers who become sensitive, caring, and empathetic. Shakespeare's balanced characters thus reconcile the polarities within themselves and bring greater harmony to their world. Domination and Defiance is the first book on this most provocative relationship in Shakespeare. Shedding new light on the complex father-daughter bond, character, and motivation, it makes a major contribution to literary studies.