This essay attempts to insulate the Folio from periodic swings of opinion about it by illustrating that some aspects of this text have gained greater respect over the last four centuries. The essay ...locates the importance of the Folio specifically in the increased esteem for its apparent reflection of early performance, as instanced in the editorial handling of a pair of cruxes near the close of A Midsummer Night's Dream. This essay charts a course from the eighteenth-century rhetorical denigration of Folio readings as supposedly corrupt theatrical documents to valuable witnesses of stage practice by some editors in the nineteenth century and later. Part of this essay's original contribution is also an emphasis on the ease with which editors moved from text to text, and line by line, to construct thoroughly hybrid editorial texts. At our four hundred-year remove, the Folio remains a powerful force not principally because it was endorsed by a series of editors who agreed on its prominence but because it has persisted through an extensive series of editorial arguments about its performability and its overall validity.
For its 2022–23 season, the National Dramatic Centre of Montpellier put Shakespeare in the spotlight by programming no less than four productions based on his plays. This article aims to review these ...productions and analyse how they came together during this theatrical season to think contemporary issues through Shakespeare and to explore what it means to stage Shakespeare today.
The critically celebrated but academically controversial Canadian television series Slings & Arrows presents a poignant exploration of the interrelations between art and life. By depicting a ...dialectic of faith in and doubt about the transformative power of fictional narrative, Slings & Arrows mirrors the larger world of Shakespeare studies as it has unfolded not only since the Bardbiz debate of the early 90s but across much of the last century. In large part, this is because the show allegorises some of the key distinctions outlined in Peter Brook's landmark work The Empty Space (1968). In doing so, the series rises above the status of a televisual roman-à-clef about the Stratford Ontario Shakespeare Festival under the direction of Richard Monette to become a convincing account of the dialectic between conviction and malaise typical of modern classical theatre as a vocation, and, by extension, of early modern literary studies as a vocation. Ultimately, the show's avowal of Shakespeare's cultural authority does not rest on camera-angles, keenly timed arpeggios, emotional realism, or hunky actors. More fundamentally, it derives from its overall narrative conception, its weaving together of the plays, the show's own story, and the producers' real lives.
Compared to Ben Jonson, Shakespeare seems far more discreet, or even removed from the controversy about the theatre. But appearances can be deceiving: although less visible and more oblique, his ...responses to the attacks against the stage are nonetheless present in his plays. Against the enemies of the stage who identify theatre as a source of profanation and pollution of bodies and souls, most of the defenders emphasize the virtuous exemplarity of performance. Shakespeare responds in a provocative manner and elaborates another conception of theatre, involving the actor as well as the spectator. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It and Hamlet reproduce the theatrophobic accusations against actors and the contamination of the spectator by the passions performed on stage. Yet even as he accumulates elements of accusatory discourse, the playwright displaces the terms in order to think through the emotional (and thus necessarily impure) experience of theatre and give it a social and moral function: the actor’s art turns into a form of magic devoid of supernatural qualities and the spectator’s reception is redefined as intelligence through emotions.
In this classic work, acclaimed Shakespeare critic C. L. Barber argues that Elizabethan seasonal festivals such as May Day and Twelfth Night are the key to understanding Shakespeare's comedies. ...Brilliantly interweaving anthropology, social history, and literary criticism, Barber traces the inward journey--psychological, bodily, spiritual--of the comedies: from confusion, raucous laughter, aching desire, and aggression, to harmony. Revealing the interplay between social custom and dramatic form, the book shows how the Elizabethan antithesis between everyday and holiday comes to life in the comedies' combination of seriousness and levity.
"I have been led into an exploration of the way the social form of Elizabethan holidays contributed to the dramatic form of festive comedy. To relate this drama to holiday has proved to be the most effective way to describe its character. And this historical interplay between social and artistic form has an interest of its own: we can see here, with more clarity of outline and detail than is usually possible, how art develops underlying configurations in the social life of a culture."--C. L. Barber, in the Introduction
This new edition includes a foreword by Stephen Greenblatt, who discusses Barber's influence on later scholars and the recent critical disagreements that Barber has inspired, showing thatShakespeare's Festive Comedyis as vital today as when it was originally published.
This article takes as its starting point Theseus' well-known speech about "the lunatic, the lover and the poet" in Act 5 Scene 1 of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It provides a wider context for the ...character's ambiguous pronouncements by considering both "the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry" and early modern poetic theories. More recent critical positions in the page-versus-stage debate are assessed and applied to the two "political" poets in Julius Caesar, as well as to the "patronized" poet in Timon of Athens. The focus on these latter characters - the only dramatis personae to whom Shakespeare gives the simple designation "Poet" - in turn brings new insights to bear on Theseus and the "political" implications of his comments on poetry.
This article documents two Palestinian productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that took place in Ramallah at Ashtar Theatre in 1995 and Al-Kasaba Drama Academy in 2011. This exploration ...demonstrates how Shakespearean plays have become a medium for international collaboration and exchange between European and Palestinian theatre training institutions. Recognizing that the works of Shakespeare have been used as a tool to further British imperialist ambitions, and drawing upon the author’s own experiences as director of the 2011 production, this article examines the ways in which these two contemporary productions both acknowledge this colonial heritage in Palestine and use it to further the mission of training emerging actors.
Works of literature prosper not through simple reproduction but through reinterpretations, quotations and transformations. Jane Austen's novels are now undergoing what seems a peculiar mutation ...indeed, being blended with material from modern horror films to comic effect. These current travesties heighten a process that has been going on since 1995, when a slew of Austen films and novelistic rewritings of her life began to hit popular culture with particular intensity. This movement of a literary figure from cultural prominence to megastardom - through adaptation of genre, resetting, hybridization and even travesty - has precedent with Shakespeare himself. This essay looks at the tripartite forces of transformation that created and marked Shakespeare's rise to extraordinary fame in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and which are creating and marking Austen's further rise in the late twentieth and early twenty-first: adaptation, travesty and fictionalization of the author.
No enredo dos artesãos, uma das quatro narrativas entrelaçadas de Sonho de uma noite de verão, Shakespeare (2004) tematiza os procedimentos de apropriação textual e os processos de criação ...colaborativos utilizados na montagem de um espetáculo. Não se trata apenas da inserção do recurso metateatral da peça dentro da peça, mas da inscrição, ao longo do texto, dos mecanismos da adaptação do texto dramatúrgico da página ao palco, desde a concepção até a concretização cênica e receptiva. Além de iluminar questões como a representação da realidade e a ruptura da ilusão dramática, o texto de Shakespeare ainda pode ser pode ser lido como uma reflexão lúdica e metacrítica sobre o seu próprio fazer teatral que dialoga com as teorias da apropriação/adaptação teorizadas por críticos contemporâneos. In the artisans' plot, one of the four intertwined narratives of "A Midsummer Night's Dream", Shakespeare thematizes the procedures of textual appropriation and the collaborative processes used for the creation of a spectacle. The bard does not only insert the metatheatrical device of the play within the play, but inscribes within his text the mechanisms of adaptation from page to stage, including conception, production and reception. Besides illuminating issues, such as the representation of reality and the breaking of dramatic illusion, Shakespeare's text can also be read as a ludic and metacritical reflection on his own dramaturgy which establishes a dialogue with the appropriation/adaptation theories discussed by contemporary critics.
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