In teaching our first-year university students to understand what Shakespearean language is and what it does, we asked them to edit the three different early modern editions of Hamlet and then adapt ...their edits into a comics spread. Using some of the numerous graphic novel adaptations of Shakespeare and a platform that we forked from Willian Carvalho's 2012 project 'comicgen', our first-year university students create their own visual representations of Shakespearean dialogue. This article explores the early modern texts that often coalesce to form a modern edition of Hamlet, the many Shakespearean graphic novels available today, the pedagogical comics platform created for our students, and the results of our pedagogical project.
This interdisciplinary study argues that the intersection of
pedagogical and affective language in Renaissance literature shows
that emotion was conceived as a conventional practice.
The crises of faith that fractured Reformation Europe also caused crises of individual and collective identity. Structures of feeling as well as structures of belief were transformed; there was a ...reformation of social emotions as well as a Reformation of faith.As Steven Mullaney shows in The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare, Elizabethan popular drama played a significant role in confronting the uncertainties and unresolved traumas of Elizabethan Protestant England. Shakespeare and his contemporaries—audiences as well as playwrights—reshaped popular drama into a new form of embodied social, critical, and affective thought. Examining a variety of works, from revenge plays to Shakespeare's first history tetralogy and beyond, Mullaney explores how post-Reformation drama not only exposed these faultlines of society on stage but also provoked playgoers in the audience to acknowledge their shared differences. He demonstrates that our most lasting works of culture remain powerful largely because of their deep roots in the emotional landscape of their times.
On 19 December 1601, John Croke, then Speaker of the House of Commons, addressed his colleagues: “If a question should be asked, What is the first and chief thing in a Commonwealth to be regarded? I ...should say, religion. If, What is the second? I should say, religion. If, What the third? I should still say, religion.” But if religion was recognized as the “chief thing in a Commonwealth,” we have been less certain what it does in Shakespeare’s plays. Written and performed in a culture in which religion was indeed inescapable, the plays have usually been seen either as evidence of Shakespeare’s own disinterested secularism or, more recently, as coded signposts to his own sectarian commitments. Based upon the inaugural series of the Oxford-Wells Shakespeare Lectures in 2008, this book offers a thoughtful, surprising, and often moving consideration of how religion actually functions in them: not as keys to Shakespeare’s own faith but as remarkably sensitive registers of the various ways in which religion charged the world in which he lived. The book shows what we know and can’t know about Shakespeare’s own beliefs, and demonstrates, in a series of wonderfully alert and agile readings, how the often fraught and vertiginous religious environment of Post-Reformation England gets refracted by the lens of Shakespeare’s imagination.
On the afternoon of Jun 29, 1613, William Shakespeare's Globe Theater collapsed into a hell of cinders and black smoke. The news certainly reached Shakespeare in Stratford, where he was increasingly ...preoccupied with the pecuniary affairs of a provincial burgher, his final role. The loss must have upset him, but how deeply is anyone's guess. Rollert discusses Shakespeare's experience as an actor and how the Globe fire must have been a heavy burden for him as it is where he first taught himself as a player and as a playwright.
Holger Syme presents a radically new explanation for the theatre's importance in Shakespeare's time. He portrays early modern England as a culture of mediation, dominated by transactions in which one ...person stood in for another, giving voice to absent speakers or bringing past events to life. No art form related more immediately to this culture than the theatre. Arguing against the influential view that the period underwent a crisis of representation, Syme draws upon extensive archival research in the fields of law, demonology, historiography and science to trace a pervasive conviction that testimony and report, delivered by properly authorised figures, provided access to truth. Through detailed close readings of plays by Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare - in particular Volpone, Richard II and The Winter's Tale - and analyses of criminal trial procedures, the book constructs a revisionist account of the nature of representation on the early modern stage.
Thomas Hickock's English translation of the travel memoirs of Cesare de Federici's Il Viaggio nell'India Orientale et oltra l'India was printed in London England in 1588, which was merely a year ...after its publication in Venice Italy. The Italian merchant-traveler's absorbing account of local people, places, customs, and trading practices encountered during his voyage across the Middle East, India, and South East Asia proved sufficiently popular to ensure its inclusion in other travel compendia such as Richard Hakluyt's The Principall Navigations, Voyages, Traffics and Discoveries (1589) that Shakespeare may likely have drawn on as source material for The Tempest (1611). One of the many curiously interesting convergences between Federici's brief account of his accidental detour to 'Sondiva' (Sandwip) en route to the port city of 'Chitigan' (Chittagong in modern Bangladesh) in 1569 and Shakespeare's unnamed island in the play lies in the strikingly similar circumstantial details surrounding the spectacular sea-storm and shipwreck followed by the providential appearance of the magical island.
This collection of essays explores the diverse ways in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries experienced and imagined Europe. The book charts the aspects of European politics and culture which ...interested Renaissance travellers, thus mapping the context within which Shakespeare's plays with European settings would have been received. Chapters cover the politics of continental Europe, the representation of foreigners on the English stage, the experiences of English travellers abroad, Shakespeare's reading of modern European literature, the influence of Italian comedy, his presentation of Moors from Europe's southern frontier, and his translation of Europe into settings for his plays.
With Daimon Goro (First player/Second gravedigger), Fujiwara Tatsuya (Hamlet), Hira Mikijiro (Claudius/Ghost of Hamlet's Father), Hirota Takashi (Norwegian Captain), Hoshi Tomoya (Marcellus), Hori ...Genki (Lucianus), Juku Ikkyu (Cornelius/Priest), Mamiya Hiroyuki (Rosencrantz), Masafumi Senoo (Voltemand/Prologue), Matsuda Shinya (Bernardo), Mitsushima Hikari (Ophelia), Mitsushima Shinnosuke (Laertes), Noguchi Kazuhiko (Messenger), Ohtori Ran (Gertrude), Okada Tadashi (Osric), Seike Eiichi (Guildenstern), Shinkawa Masato (Francisco/The Dumb Show King), Sunahara Kensuke (Player Queen), Takao Taka (Polonius), Takeda Kazuaki (Player King), Teuchi Takamori (Sailor/The Dumb Show Poisoner), Uchida Kenshi (Fortinbras), Urano Shinsuke (Gentleman/The Dumb Show Queen), Yamaya Hatsuo (First gravedigger), and Yokota Eiji (Horatio). A dedication to giving his Japanese audiences a sense of shared cultural identity through his appropriations of Shakespeare, while still retaining a connection to the original text through striking visual imagery and a strong commitment to storytelling, has been the hallmark of Ninagawa's directorial career. Even if the full significance of this tableau was lost on the non-Japanese members of the audience, the stunning burst of color threw into relief both the dark "prison" (2.2.239) of Hamlet's Denmark and the seamy "luxury" (1.5.83) of Claudius's court. Prompted to contemplate philosophical questions about life and death as he approaches his eightieth birthday, Ninagawa posed the following question in his "Director's Note": "What will be left after the layers of life are peeled off?" His latest restrained and nuanced revival of Hamlet found its answer in King Lear: "the thing itself; unaccommodated man" (3.4.98-99).
