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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 of the ways 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 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 citizens, subjects, and their leaders.
This collection of essays examines the works of the most famous writer of plays in the English language within the most culturally pervasive genre in which they are performed. Though Realist productions of Shakespeare are central to the ways in which his work is produced and consumed in the 21st century-and has been for the last 100 years-scholars are divided on the socio-political, historical, and ethical effects of this marriage of content and style. The book is divided into two sections, the first of which focuses on how Realist performance style influences our understanding of Shakespeare’s characters. These chapters engage in close readings of multiple performances, interrogating the ...
Shakespeare in the Light convenes an accomplished group of scholars, actors, and teachers to celebrate the legacy of renowned Shakespearean and co-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 book considers early modern and postmodern ideals of health, vigor, ability, beauty, well-being, and happiness, uncovering and historicizing the complex negotiations among physical embodiment, emotional response, and communally-sanctioned behavior in Shakespeare's literary and material world. The volume visits a series of questions about the history of the body and how early modern cultures understand physical ability or vigor, emotional competence or satisfaction, and joy or self-fulfillment. Individual essays investigate the purported disabilities of the "crook-back" King Richard III or the "corpulent" Falstaff, the conflicts between different health-care belief-systems in The Taming ...
Inspired by the verbal exuberance and richness of all that can be heard by audiences both on and off Shakespeare’s stages, Shakespeare’s Auditory Worlds examines such special listening situations as overhearing, eavesdropping, and asides. It breaks new ground by exploring the complex relationships between sound and sight, dialogue and blocking, dialects and other languages, re-voicings, and, finally, nonverbal or metaverbal relationships inherent in noise, sounds, and music, staging interstices that have been largely overlooked in the critical literature on aurality in Shakespeare. Its contributors include David Bevington, Ralph Alan Cohen, Steve Urkowitz, and Leslie Dunn, and, in a conc...
Bringing together the discrete fields of appropriation and performance studies, this collection explores pivotal intersections between the two approaches to consider the ethical implications of decisions made when artists and scholars appropriate Shakespeare. The essays in this book, written by established and emerging scholars in subfields such as premodern critical race studies, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, performance studies, adaptation/appropriation studies and fan studies, demonstrate how remaking the plays across time, cultures or media changes the nature both of what Shakespeare promises and the expectations of those promised Shakespeare. Using examples such as rap music, popular television, theatre history and twentieth-century poetry, this collection argues that understanding Shakespeare at different intersections between performance and appropriation requires continuously negotiating what is signified through Shakespeare to the communities that use and consume him.
Elizabeth Kraft radically alters our conventional views of early women novelists by taking seriously their representations of female desire. Reading fiction by Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Smith, Frances Burney, and Elizabeth Inchbald in light of ethical paradigms drawn from biblical texts about women and desire, Kraft demonstrates not only the centrality of female desire in eighteenth-century culture and literature but its ethical importance as well.
This book compares the theatrical cultures of early modern England and Spain and explores the causes and consequences not just of the remarkable similarities but also of the visible differences between them. An exercise in multi-focal theatre history research, it deploys a wide range of perspectives and evidence with which to recreate the theatrical landscapes of these two countries and thus better understand how the specific conditions of performance actively contributed to the development of each country’s dramatic literature. This monograph develops an innovative comparative framework within which to explore the numerous similarities, as well as the notable differences, between early mo...
The purpose of this book is to honor the scholarly legacy of Charles R. Forker with a series of essays that address the problem of literary influence in original ways and from a variety of perspectives. The emphasis throughout is on the sort of careful, exhaustive, evidence-based scholarship to which Forker dedicated his entire professional life. Although wide-ranging and various by design, the essays in this book never lose sight of three discrete yet overlapping areas of literary inquiry that create a unity of perspective amid the diversity of approaches: 1) the formation of play texts, textual analysis, and editorial practice; 2) performance history and the material playing conditions fro...
Double Shakespeares examines contemporary performances of Shakespeare plays that employ the “emotional realist” traditions of acting that were codified by Stanislavski over a century ago. These performances recognize the inescapable doubleness of realism: that the actor may aspire to be the character but can never fully do so. This doubleness troubled the late-nineteenth-century actors and theorists who first formulated realist modes of acting; and it equally troubles theorists and theatre practitioners today. The book first looks at contemporary performances that foreground the doubleness of the actor’s body, particularly through cross-dressing. It then examines narratives of Shakespearean rehearsal—both fictional representations of rehearsal in film and video, and eye-witness narratives of actual rehearsals—and how they show us the process by which the actor does or does not “become” the character. And, finally, it looks at modern performances that “frame” Shakespeare’s play as a play-within-a-play, showing the audience both the character in the Shakespeare play-within and the actor in the frame-play acting that character.