front cover of Macbeth
Macbeth
William Shakespeare
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2021

In Migdalia Cruz’s Macbeth, the Witches run the world. The Macbeths live out a dark cautionary tale of love, greed, and power, falling from glory into calamity as the Witches spin their fate. Translating Shakespeare’s language for a modern audience, Nuyorican playwright Migdalia Cruz rewrites Macbeth with all the passion of the Bronx.  

This translation of Macbeth was presented in 2018 as part of the Play On! Shakespeare project, an ambitious undertaking from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival that commissioned new translations of 39 Shakespeare plays. These translations present the Bard’s work in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print—a new First Folio for a new era.

[more]

front cover of Mapping Shakespeare's World
Mapping Shakespeare's World
Peter Whitfield
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2015
Shakespeare never set a play in his own Elizabethan London. From the castle in Elsinore where Hamlet avenges his father’s death to Cleopatra’s Alexandria at the height of the Roman Empire to the seaport town in Cyprus where we await the arrival of Othello, each of Shakespeare’s plays is set in a time or space remote from his primary audience. Why is this? How much did the Bard and his contemporaries know about the foreign lands his characters often inhabit? What expectations did an audience have if the curtains rose on a play which claimed to take place in ancient Troy or the Pyrenean kingdom of Navarre in northern Spain?
           
Mapping Shakespeare’s World explores these questions with surprising results. It has often been said that setting is irrelevant to Shakespeare’s plays—that, wherever they are set, their enduring appeal lies in their ability to speak to broad questions of human nature. Peter Whitfield shows that, on the contrary, many of Shakespeare’s locations were carefully chosen for their ability to convey subtle meanings an Elizabethan audience would have picked up on and understood. Through the use of paintings, drawings, contemporary maps and geographical texts, Whitfield suggests answers to such questions as where Illyria was located, why The Merry Wives of Windsor could only have taken place in Windsor, and how two utterly different comedies—The Comedy of Errors and Pericles, Prince of Tyre—both came to take place in ancient Ephesus.
           
Just when one might think there was nothing more to be said about Shakespeare, with Mapping Shakespeare’s World, Whitfield offers a fascinating new point of view.
[more]

front cover of The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1
The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1
Harold C. Goddard
University of Chicago Press, 1960
In two magnificent and authoritative volumes, Harold C. Goddard takes readers on a tour through the works of William Shakespeare, celebrating his incomparable plays and unsurpassed literary genius.
[more]

front cover of The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 2
The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 2
Harold C. Goddard
University of Chicago Press, 1960
In two magnificent and authoritative volumes, Harold C. Goddard takes readers on a tour through the works of William Shakespeare, celebrating his incomparable plays and unsurpassed literary genius.
[more]

front cover of Measure for Measure
Measure for Measure
William Shakespeare
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2023
An accessible new translation of one of Shakespeare’s most interesting and challenging plays.
 
One of Shakespeare’s most difficult plays, Measure for Measure has long challenged performers and audiences alike. In reworking the play in her translation, Aditi Brennan Kapil honors the structure, rhythms, and themes of Shakespeare’s original. Kapil’s updated language makes this cautionary fable about frailty, power, and the perils of legislating morality accessible for today’s audiences.
 
This translation of Measure for Measure was written as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On! project, which commissioned new translations of thirty-nine Shakespeare plays. These translations present the work of “The Bard” in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print—a new First Folio for a new era.
[more]

front cover of The Media Players
The Media Players
Shakespeare, Middleton, Jonson, and the Idea of News
Stephen Wittek
University of Michigan Press, 2015
The Media Players: Shakespeare, Middleton, Jonson, and the Idea of News builds a case for the central, formative function of Shakespeare’s theater in the news culture of early modern England. In an analysis that combines historical research with recent developments in public sphere theory, Dr. Stephen Wittek argues that the unique discursive space created by commercial theater helped to foster the conceptual framework that made news possible.

Dr. Wittek’s analysis focuses on the years between 1590 and 1630, an era of extraordinary advances in English news culture that begins with the first instance of serialized news in England and ends with the emergence of news as a regular, permanent fixture of the marketplace. Notably, this period of expansion in news culture coincided with a correspondingly extraordinary era of theatrical production and innovation, an era that marks the beginning of commercial theater in London, and has left us with the plays of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Middleton.
[more]

front cover of The Merchant of Venice
The Merchant of Venice
William Shakespeare
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2021
An updated version of The Merchant of Venice that speaks to our contemporary reckoning with racism and injustice. 
 
Elise Thoron’s translation of Shakespeare’s searing The Merchant of Venice cuts straight to the heart of today’s fraught issues of social justice and systemic racism. Thoron’s clear, compelling contemporary verse translation retains the power of the original iambic pentameter while allowing readers and audiences to fully comprehend and directly experience the brutal dilemmas of Shakespeare’s Venice, where prejudice and privilege reign unchallenged. As the author of three acclaimed music-theater works on the Jewish experience and informed by her work directing cross-cultural projects in locations as different as Russia, Japan, Cuba, and New York City, Thoron brings to her Merchant an immediacy that speaks directly to the present reckoning with race in America.  
 
This translation was written as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On! project, which commissioned new translations of thirty-nine Shakespeare plays. These translations present the work of "The Bard" in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print—a new First Folio for a new era. 
[more]

front cover of The Merry Wives of Windsor
The Merry Wives of Windsor
William Shakespeare
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2023
A modern translation that will appeal to new audiences.

In her translation of The Merry Wives of Windsor, Dipika Guha updates the language of Shakespeare’s comedy through the lens of our current moment. Guha maintains the humor at the heart of the play while making it accessible for both performers and audiences.

This translation was written as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On! project, which commissioned new translations of thirty-nine Shakespeare plays. These translations present the work of "The Bard" in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print—a new First Folio for a new era.
[more]

front cover of A Midsummer Night's Dream
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare William
St. Augustine's Press, 2024

"This edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream takes the comedy seriously. Like my previous Hackett editions, it gives full weight to Shakespeare’s dramatic setting, which other editors (and scholars) almost always ignore or at least fail adequately to consider. Ancient Athens is the core, not the mere background, of Midsummer Night's Dream. As we shall see, Shakespeare focuses, in particular, on the love of the beautiful and the triumph of learning and art, along with the rise of democracy, which, as Pericles’ famously claims, are the hallmarks of Athens. 'We are lovers of the beautiful with thrift, and lovers of wisdom without softness' (Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, 2.40.1). […]
     Failure to consider classical Athens as central to Midsummer Night's Dream will cause a reader to miss not only the play’s remarkable substance, but much of its sparkling comedy as well. Far from impeding the play’s humor, focusing on Athens helps to bring out multi-layers of comedy that Shakespeare put there."

[more]

front cover of A Midsummer Night's Dream
A Midsummer Night's Dream
William Shakespeare
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2021
Shakespeare’s most spirited play, adapted for new audiences by Jeffrey Whitty.

Tony Award–winning and Oscar-nominated storyteller Jeffrey Whitty offers his adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, mindfully adapted into modern language. Matching the Bard line for line, rhyme for rhyme, Whitty illuminates Shakespeare’s meaning for modern audiences while maintaining the play’s storytelling architecture, emotional texture, and freewheeling humor. Designed to supplement, not supplant, the original, Whitty’s Midsummer cuts through the centuries to bring audiences a fresh, moment-by-moment take, designed to flow as effortlessly for modern audiences as Shakespeare’s beloved classic played to the Elizabethans.

This translation was written as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On! project, which commissioned new translations of thirty-nine Shakespeare plays. These translations present the work of "The Bard" in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print—a new First Folio for a new era. 
[more]

front cover of Modern Hamlets & Soliloquies
Modern Hamlets & Soliloquies
An Expanded Edition
Mary Z. Maher
University of Iowa Press, 2003

In Modern Hamlets and Their Soliloquies (Iowa, 1992), Mary Maher examined how modern actors have chosen to perform Hamlet’s soliloquies, and why they made the choices they made, within the context of their specific productions of the play.

Adding to original interviews with, among others, Derek Jacobi, David Warner, Kevin Kline, and Ben Kingsley, Modern Hamlets and Their Soliloquies: An Expanded Edition offers two new and insightful interviews, one with Kenneth Branagh, focusing on his 1997 film production of the play, and one with Simon Russell Beale, discussing his 2000-2001 run as Hamlet at the Royal National Theatre.

[more]

front cover of Much Ado About Nothing
Much Ado About Nothing
William Shakespeare
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2021
Ranjit Bolt updates Much Ado About Nothing with a merry new translation.
 
In Much Ado About Nothing, a series of miscommunications and misunderstandings spiral out of control, leaving two sets of lovers to untangle their words and their hearts. Ranjit Bolt, an accomplished translator, takes on Shakespeare’s well-loved comedy to update much of the obscure language while maintaining the humor, characterization, and wit that audiences know and love. For modern readers, Beatrice, Benedick, Hero, and Claudio are just as enchanting as always—and perhaps funnier than ever before.

This translation of Much Ado About Nothing was written as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On! project, which commissioned new translations of thirty-nine Shakespeare plays. These translations present work from “The Bard” in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print—a new First Folio for a new era.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter