logo for Ohio University Press
Teaching Shakespeare into the Twenty-First Century
Ronald E. Salomone
Ohio University Press, 1997

Shakespeare is a central shaping and defining figure in our culture. His plays are being taught, filmed, and performed every day in many places and in most of the world’s languages. At the same time, teachers and students from junior high through the early undergraduate years often struggle with the Bard in discomfort and negativity that can only be counter-productive.

Teaching Shakespeare into the Twenty-First Century is by teachers and for teachers. Specifically, it is a collection of essays in which teachers describe their best ideas and experiences as they confront the challenges of bringing Shakespeare alive for students who often feel intimidated and less than eager to participate.

It is on behalf of these students that this book has been prepared. Written by middle school, high school, and college teachers from around the country, the essays record successful efforts at bringing Shakespeare and the student together in fresh, exciting, and productive ways.

From today’s performance techniques, designed to make students active participants in the learning process, through a host of extra-textual resources such as festivals and films, to a look at applications of the computer and cyberspace, Teaching Shakespeare into the Twenty-First Century is a book of success stories.

Covering the most contemporary issues, critical theory, and classroom approach, it is designed to provide teachers with a useful, friendly, and forward-looking resource as they continue to make Shakespeare available into the future.

[more]

front cover of Tempest In The Caribbean
Tempest In The Caribbean
Jonathan Goldberg
University of Minnesota Press, 2003
Places sexuality at the center of Caribbean responses to Shakespeare's play. Shakespeare's The Tempest has long been claimed by colonials and postcolonial thinkers alike as the dramatic work that most enables them to confront their entangled history, recognized as early modernity's most extensive engagement with the vexing issues of colonialism--race, dispossession, language, European displacement and occupation, disregard for native culture. Tempest in the Caribbean reads some of the "classic" anticolonial texts--by Aimé Césaire, Roberto Fernández Retamar, George Lamming, and Frantz Fanon, for instance--through the lens of feminist and queer analysis exemplified by the theoretical essays of Sylvia Wynter and the work of Michelle Cliff. Extending the Tempest plot, Goldberg considers recent works by Caribbean authors and social theorists, among them Patricia Powell, Jamaica Kincaid, and Hilton Als. These rewritings, he suggests, and the lived conditions to which they testify, present alternatives to the masculinist and heterosexual bias of the legacy that has been derived from The Tempest. By placing gender and sexuality at the center of the debate about the uses of Shakespeare for anticolonial purposes, Goldberg's work points to new possibilities that might be articulated through the nexus of race and sexuality. Jonathan Goldberg is Sir William Osler Professor of English Literature at The Johns Hopkins University. His previous books include Shakespeare's Hand (2003), Desiring Women Writing (1997), Sodometries (1992), and, as editor, Reclaiming Sodom (1994) and Queering the Renaissance (1994).
[more]

front cover of Textual and Theatrical Shakespeare
Textual and Theatrical Shakespeare
Questions of Evidence
Edward Pechter
University of Iowa Press, 1996
Shakespeare commentary and performance today present us with a multiplicity of interpretations constructed and reconstructed from such diverse origins that the underlying evidence has become hidden by layers of reconceptualized meanings. What can or should count as evidence for the claims made by scholars and performers, and how should this evidence by organized? In Textual and Theatrical Shakespeare ten essayists answer these stimulating questions by exploring the possibilities for and the constraints upon useful communication among critics who come to Shakespeare from so many different directions.

Bridging the stage-versus-page gap between actors, critics, and scholars, the contributors in this carefully crafted yet energizing book reflect upon the many kinds of evidence available to us from Shakespeare's various incarnations as historical subject and as “our contemporary” as well as from his amphibious occupation of both stage and study. The constraints become arbitrary as each essayist clarifies the sources of this evidence; the seemingly rigid boundaries of scholarly and creative disciplines are crossed and redrawn.
From “How Good Does Evidence Have to Be?” to “Invisible Bullets, Violet Beards: Reading Actors Reading,” the essays in Textual and Theatrical Shakespeare illuminate the long and complex development of our diverse engagements with Shakespeare. Textual and literary scholars, performance critics, social historians, cultural theorists, actors, and theatre historians will appreciate and benefit from this generous spirit of cross-cultural communication.
[more]

front cover of Theater Of Envy
Theater Of Envy
William Shakespeare
Rene Girard
St. Augustine's Press, 2004
In this ground-breaking work, one of our foremost literary and cultural critics turns to the major figure in English literature, William Shakespeare, and proposes a dramatic new reading of nearly all his plays and poems. The key to A Theater of Envy is Girard’s novel reinterpretation of "mimesis." For Girard, people desire objects not for their intrinsic value, but because they are desired by someone else – we mime or imitate their desires. This envy – or "mimetic desire" – he sees as one of the foundations of the human condition.

Bringing such provocative and iconoclastic insights to bear on Shakespeare, Girard reveals the previously overlooked coherence of problem plays like Troilus and Cressida, and makes a convincing argument for elevating A Midsummer Night’s Dream from the status of a chaotic comedy to a masterpiece. The book abounds with novel and provocative interpretations: Shakespeare becomes "a prophet of modern advertising," and the threat of nuclear disaster is read in the light of Hamlet. Most intriguing of all, perhaps, is a brief, but brilliant aside in which an entirely new perspective is brought to the chapter on Joyce’s Ulysses in which Stephen Dedalus gives a lecture on Shakespeare. In Girard’s view only Joyce, perhaps the greatest of twentieth-century novelists, comes close to understanding the greatest of Renaissance playwrights.

Throughout this impressively sustained reading of Shakespeare, Girard’s prose is sophisticated, but contemporary, and accessible to the general reader.
 
[more]

front cover of Theory And The Premodern Text
Theory And The Premodern Text
Paul Strohm
University of Minnesota Press, 2000

logo for University of Iowa Press
These Valiant Dead
Past Shakespeare'S Histories
Robert C. Jones
University of Iowa Press, 1991

front cover of Thinking with Shakespeare
Thinking with Shakespeare
Essays on Politics and Life
Julia Reinhard Lupton
University of Chicago Press, 2011
What is a person? What company do people keep with animals, plants, and things? Such questions—bearing fundamentally on the shared meaning of politics and life—animate Shakespearean drama, yet their urgency has often been obscured. Julia Reinhard Lupton gently dislodges Shakespeare’s plays from their historical confines to pursue their universal implications. From Petruchio’s animals and Kate’s laundry to Hamlet’s friends and Caliban’s childhood, Lupton restages thinking in Shakespeare as an embodied act of consent, cure, and care. Thinking with Shakespeare encourages readers to ponder matters of shared concern with the playwright by their side. Taking her cue from Hannah Arendt, Lupton reads Shakespeare for fresh insights into everything from housekeeping and animal husbandry to biopower and political theology.
[more]

front cover of This Wide and Universal Theater
This Wide and Universal Theater
Shakespeare in Performance, Then and Now
David Bevington
University of Chicago Press, 2007

Many readers first encounter Shakespeare’s plays in a book rather than a theater. Yet Shakespeare was through and through a man of the stage. So what do we lose when we leave Shakespeare the practitioner behind, and what do we learn when we think about his plays as dramas to be performed?

            David Bevington answers these questions with This Wide and Universal Theater, which explores how Shakespeare’s plays were produced both in his own time and in succeeding centuries. Making use of historical documents and the play scripts themselves, Bevington brings Shakespeare’s original stagings to life. He explains how the Elizabethan playhouse conveyed a sense of place using minimal scenery, from the Forest of Arden in As You Like It to the tavern in Henry IV, Part I. Moving beyond Shakespeare’s lifetime, Bevington shows the prodigious lengths to which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century companies went to produce spectacular effects, from flying witches in Macbeth to terrifying storms punctuating King Lear. To bring the book into the present, Bevington considers recent productions on both stage and screen, when character and language have taken precedence over spectacle. This volume brings a lifetime of study to bear on a remarkably underappreciated aspect of Shakespeare’s art.

“An eminent Shakespeare scholar and author, Bevington offers a concise, lucid, and unique overview of the history of Shakespeare in various modes of performance, from stage to film to television.”—Choice

“Even veteran Shakespeareans will profit from the varied reminders of how important performance and staging have always been to the interpretation of the plays.”—Renaissance Quarterly

 

[more]

front cover of The Trick of Singularity
The Trick of Singularity
"Twelfth Night" and the Performance Editions
Laurie E. Osborne
University of Iowa Press, 1996

In this innovative union of textual studies and performance criticism, Laurie Osborne explores the important ways in which an apparently single, unproblematic text is in fact multiple and various. Through a close analysis of the performance editions of Twelfth Night, she argues that the complex interaction between text and performance establishes a comedy as a work realized within changing social and erotic constructions.

Because it appears in a relatively clean and dated version in the Folio, Twelfth Night seems to be exempt from arguments for variant texts—but there are significant and persistent variations represented in the performance editions. Osborne's careful reading of these provides a crucial bridge linking theatre history and textual criticism. She employs a wide variety of approaches and disciplines—Shakespearean and Renaissance studies, theatre history, gender studies, contemporary literary criticism, and cultural history—to provide a fresh and engaging yet rigorous view.

Although she focuses on Twelfth Night, Osborne's argument applies more broadly to the history of performance and criticism, including a chapter on video versions of the play. Widely read in Shakespearean and Renaissance scholarship, she employs her archival research in promptbooks, the publishing history of the plays, and the history of Shakespearean production to accomplish a major job of scholarly integration and analysis of Shakespearean drama in performance.

[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter