Shakespeare and World Cinema radically re-imagines the field of Shakespeare on film, drawing on a wealth of examples from Africa, the Arctic, Brazil, China, France, India, Malaysia, Mexico, ...Singapore, Tibet, Venezuela, Yemen and elsewhere. Mark Thornton Burnett explores the contemporary significance of Shakespeare cinema outside the Hollywood mainstream for the first time, arguing that these adaptations are an essential part of the story of Shakespearean performance and reception. The book reveals in unique detail the scope, inventiveness and vitality of over seventy films that have undeservedly slipped beneath the radar of critical attention and also discusses regional Shakespeare cinema in Latin America and Asia. Utilising original interviews with filmmakers throughout, it introduces new auteurs, analyses multiple adaptations of plays such as Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet and pioneers fresh methodologies for understanding the role that Shakespeare continues to play in the international marketplace.
Renaissance humanists believed that if you want to build a just society you must begin with the facts of human nature. This book argues that the idea of a universal human nature was as important to ...Shakespeare as it was to every other Renaissance writer. In doing so it questions the central principle of post-modern Shakespeare criticism. Postmodernists insist that the notion of defining a human essence was alien to Shakespeare and his contemporaries; as radical anti-essentialists, the Elizabethans were, in effect, postmodernists before their time. In challenging this claim Shakespeare's Humanism shows that for Shakespeare, as for every other humanist writer in this period, the key to all wise action was 'the knowledge of our selves and our human condition'.
This engaging and stimulating book argues that Shakespeare's plays
significantly influenced movie genres in the twentieth century,
particularly in films concerning love in the classic Hollywood
...period. Shakespeare's 'green world' has a close functional
equivalent in 'tinseltown' and on 'the silver screen', as well as
in hybrid genres in Bollywood cinema. Meanwhile, Romeo and
Juliet continues to be an enduring source for romantic tragedy
on screen. The nature of generic indebtedness has not gained
recognition because it is elusive and not always easy to recognise.
The book traces generic links between Shakespeare's comedies of
love and screen genres such as romantic comedy, 'screwball' comedy
and musicals, as well as clarifying the use of common conventions
defining the genres, such as mistaken identity, 'errors', disguise
and 'shrew-taming'. Speculative, challenging and entertaining, the
book will appeal to those interested in Shakespeare, movies and the
representation of love in narratives.
Can reading, writing about, and teaching Shakespeare contribute to the health of the planet? To what degree are Shakespeare's plays anthropocentric or ecocentric? What is the connection between the ...literary and the real when it comes to ecological conduct? This collection, engages with these pressing questions surrounding ecocritical Shakespeare, in order to provide a better understanding of where and how ecocritical readings should be situated. The volume combines multiple critical perspectives, juxtaposing historicism and presentism, as well as considering ecofeminism and pedagogy; and addresses such topics as early modern flora and fauna, and the neglected areas of early modern marine ecology and oceanography. Concluding with an assessment of the challenges-and necessities-of teaching Shakespeare ecocritically, Ecocritical Shakespeare not only broadens the implications of ecocriticism in early modern studies, but represents an important contribution to this growing field.
Study of the sea--both in terms of human interaction with it and its literary representation--has been largely ignored by ecocritics. InShakespeare's Ocean,Dan Brayton foregrounds the maritime ...dimension of a writer whose plays and poems have had an enormous impact on literary notions of nature and, in so doing, plots a new course for ecocritical scholarship.
Shakespeare lived during a time of great expansion of geographical knowledge. The world in which he imagined his plays was newly understood to be a sphere covered with water. In vital readings of works ranging fromThe Comedy of Errorsto the valedictoryThe Tempest,Brayton demonstrates Shakespeare's remarkable conceptual mastery of the early modern maritime world and reveals a powerful benthic imagination at work.
First published in 1996, James Shapiro's pathbreaking analysis of the portrayal of Jews in Elizabethan England challenged readers to recognize the significance of Jewish questions in Shakespeare's ...day. From accounts of Christians masquerading as Jews to fantasies of settling foreign Jews in Ireland, Shapiro's work delves deeply into the cultural insecurities of Elizabethans while illuminating Shakespeare's portrayal of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. In a new preface, Shapiro reflects upon what he has learned about intolerance since the first publication of Shakespeare and the Jews.
How do we recapture, or hold on to, the live performances we most love, and the talented artists and performers we most revere? Shakespeare and the Legacy of Loss tells the story of how 18th-century ...actors, novelists, and artists, key among them David Garrick, struggled with these questions through their reenactments of Shakespearean plays. For these artists, the resurgence of Shakespeare, a playwright whose works just decades earlier had nearly been erased, represented their own chance for eternal life. Despite the ephemeral nature of performance, Garrick and company would find a way to make Shakespeare, and through him the actor, rise again. In chapters featuring Othello, Richard III, Hamlet, The Winter’s Tale, and The Merchant of Venice, Emily Hodgson Anderson illuminates how Garrick’s performances of Shakespeare came to offer his contemporaries an alternative and even an antidote to the commemoration associated with the monument, the portrait, and the printed text. The first account to read 18th-century visual and textual references to Shakespeare alongside the performance history of his plays, this innovative study sheds new light on how we experience performance, and why we gravitate toward an art, and artists, we know will disappear.
This engaging book demonstrates Shakespeare’s abiding interest in the theatrical potential of the Christian resurrection from the dead. In 14 of Shakespeare’s plays, characters who have been lost, ...sometimes for years, suddenly reappear—seemingly returning from the dead. In the classical recognition scene, such moments are explained away in naturalistic terms—a character was lost at sea but survived, or abducted and escaped, and so on. Shakespeare never invalidates such explanations, but in his manipulation of classical conventions he parallels these moments with the recognition scenes from the Gospels, repeatedly evoking Christ’s resurrection from the dead.
Benson’s close study of the plays, as well as the classical and biblical sources that Shakespeare fuses into his recognition scenes, clearly elucidates the ways in which the playwright explored his abiding interest in the human desire to transcend death and to live reunited and reconciled with others. In his manipulation of resurrection imagery, Shakespeare conflates the material with the immaterial, the religious with the secular, and the sacred with the profane.
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