Examines Shakespeare’s role in contemporary cultureThis book deals with Shakespeare’s role in contemporary culture. It looks in detail at the way that Shakespeare’s plays inform modern ideas of ...cultural value and the work required to make Shakespeare part of modern culture. It is unique in using social policy, anthropology and economics, as well as close readings of the playwright, to show how a text from the past becomes part of contemporary culture and how Shakespeare’s writing informs modern ideas of cultural value. It goes beyond the twentieth-century cultural studies debates that argued the case for and against Shakespeare’s status, to show how he can exist both as a free artistic resource and as a branded product in the cultural marketplace. It will appeal not only to scholars studying Shakespeare, but also to educators and any reader interested in contemporary cultural policy.
Shakespeare is the most frequently quoted English author of all time. Quotations appear everywhere, from the epigraphs of novels to the mottoes on coffee cups. But Shakespeare was also a frequent ...quoter himself - of classical and contemporary literature, of the Bible, of snatches of popular songs and proverbs. This volume brings together an international team of scholars to trace the rich history of quotation from Shakespeare's own lifetime to the present day. Exploring a wide range of media, including Romantic poetry, theatre criticism, novels by Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy and Ian McEwan, political oratory, propaganda, advertising, drama, film and digital technology, the chapters draw fresh connections between Shakespeare's own practices of creative reworking and the quotation of his work in new and traditional forms. Richly illustrated and featuring an Afterword by Margreta de Grazia, the collection tells a new story of the making and remaking of Shakespeare's plays and poems.
The relationship of an institution to the value of culture is always attenuated, and the institutional relationship to the value of Shakespeare is particularly slippery. Because "Shakespeare" spans ...and now seemingly transcends categories of text, performance, and material heritage, in addition to symbolizing abstract qualities of beauty, morality, and knowledge, Shakespeare institutions have a necessarily incomplete grasp of his value.
In universities, as in mainstream education more widely, cognitive approaches to poetry are often dominant. Far from being irrelevant to the serious study of literature, we argue that eliciting ...students' affective responses to poetry can deepen their cognitive understanding and analytical skills. Drawing on recent research in psychology on the relationship between cognition and affect, we show that poetry has particular potential to make us aware of the crucial interrelation of our cognitive and affective processes; and that bringing those responses into balance can deepen our understanding of poetry. Building on recent educational studies of typical student (and teacher) anxieties and assumptions about working with poetry, and on our observations from our own initial, exploratory seminars, we explore some of the obstacles to rebalancing the cognitive and affective dimensions of poetry in higher education, and point to the potential value of such an approach if such obstacles are overcome.
This article examines the methodology and thinking behind Arts Council England's "Arts Debate", a public value inquiry conducted from October 2006 to September 2007. It considers the ways in which ...methodology might have been shaped by the current discourse of public value, examines the different stages of the debate, and asks how the findings might inform future policy and research.
This essay was runner‐up in the 2006 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Eighteenth Century Section.
Scholars of Shakespeare's reception still conclude that he was elevated in the eighteenth ...century from provincial playwright to ‘secular scripture’, his words reverently spoken ‘everywhere’. This article proposes that there was a negative side to this omnipresence. Through the lens of the eighteenth‐century novel, it examines the hitherto unstudied phenomenon of ‘banal Shakespeare’: a Shakespeare whose phrases are overused by polite society. It focuses on those instances in the fiction of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Sarah Fielding and Laurence Sterne when the novelists deliberately have their characters quote Shakespeare in ways that are trite, clichéd or compelled by society. Asking whether ‘banal Shakespeare’ is a threat, or an aid, to the ‘rise of bardolatry’, this article contributes a new sense of the multiple, ambiguous meanings of ‘Shakespeare’ in the eighteenth century, and develops the study of novelistic quotation.
SHAKESPEARE ANTHOLOGIZED Rumbold, Kate
The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts,
10/2011
Book Chapter
In the twenty-first century, “Shakespeare” is not only an English cultural icon but shares some of the characteristics of a powerful global brand. This chapter shows the surprising but important role ...that the many books of quotations and extracts from Shakespeare’s works, published from within his own lifetime to the present day, have played in establishing that status. It argues that these anthologies have not simply reflected Shakespeare’s growing status, but actively helped to construct it. The seemingly inherent qualities for which Shakespeare is now admired – the beauty of his language, his wise understanding of human nature, his Englishness – are
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