Shakespeare Studies

Shakespeare: Actors and Audiences brings together the voices of those who make productions of Shakespeare come to life. It shines a spotlight on the relationship between actors and audiences and explores the interplay that makes each performance unique. We know much about theatre in Shakespeare's time but very little about the audiences who attended his plays. Even today the audience's voice remains largely ignored. This volume places the role of the audience at the centre of how we understand Shakespeare in performance. Part One offers an overview of the best current audience research and provides a critical framework for the interviews and testimony of leading actors, theatre makers and audience members that follow in Part Two, including Juliet Stevenson and Emma Rice. Shakespeare: Actors and Audiences offers a fascinating insight into the world of theatre production and of the relationship between actor and audience that lies at the heart of theatre-making.

Boldly moves criticism of Shakespeare's history plays beyond anti-humanist theoretical approachesThis important intervention in the critical and theoretical discourse of Shakespeare studies summarises, evaluates and ultimately calls time on the mode of criticism that has prevailed in Shakespeare studies over the past thirty years. It heralds a new, more dynamic way of reading Shakespeare as a supremely intelligent and creative political thinker, whose history plays address and illuminate the very questions with which cultural historicists have been so preoccupied since the 1980s. In providing bold and original readings of the first and second tetralogies ( Henry VI, Richard III, Richard II and Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2), the book reignites old debates and re-energises recent bids to humanise Shakespeare and to restore agency to the individual in the critical readings of his plays.

A range of mainstream and independent English language film productions of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', 'Romeo and Juliet', 'Othello', 'Twelfth Night', and 'The Merchant of Venice' take centre stage in 'Queering the Shakespeare Film'. This study critiques the various representations of the queer - broadly understood as that which is at odds with what has been deemed to be the normal, the legitimate, and the dominant, particularly - but not exclusively - as regards sexual matters, in the Shakespeare film.

The first full-length study of how the concept of the "girl" was constructed in sixteenth and seventeenth century literature and drama. The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Sistersargues for a paradigm shift in our current conceptions of the early modern sex-gender system, challenging the widespread assumption that the category of the "girl" played little or no role in the construction of gender in early modern English culture. Girl characters appeared in a variety of texts, from female infants in Shakespeare's late romances to little children in Tudor interludes to adult "roaring girls" in city comedies. Drawing from a variety of print and manuscript sources, including early modern drama, dictionaries, midwifery manuals, and women's autobiographies, this book argues that girlhood in Shakespeare's England was both a time of life and a form of gender transgression.

This study of the many poets, musicians and visual artists portrayed or described in Shakespeare's plays and poems reveals a fascination with art and its makers that continued to influence Shakespeare's work throughout his career. It also uncovers unexpected aspects of an enthusiastic Elizabethan consumption of artworks, an enthusiasm that had significant bearing on the quite new profession that Shakespeare himself followed. A high valuation placed on art and artists, and at the same time certain fears of these and fears for these, made for a very complex reception of the figure of the artist, and Shakespeare's treatments were equal to that complexity.

In this collaborative monograph, five scholars from Britain, Australia and New Zealand reflect on the modes of commemoration of Shakespeare in and after the Tercentenary year, 1916, in two hemispheres. They argue that it was at this moment of remembering that 'global Shakespeare' first emerged in recognizable, if embryonic form. Despite a recent surge of interest in the Shakespeare Tercentenary, a great deal has been forgotten about this key moment in the history of the place of Shakespeare in national and global culture - much more than has been remembered. In addressing this the book offers new materials and discoveries about, and new interpretations of, the Tercentenary celebrations in Britain and in Australia and New Zealand, and reflects also on the long legacy of those celebrations.

- How do actors prepare a script of a Shakespeare play for performance? - Where do directors begin? - What do Shakespeare's plays offer a designer or choreographer? - How do the cast and creative team work together in rehearsals? With Shakespeare in Action, Jaq Bessell presents thirty interviews with theatre practitioners from some of the larger producing theatres in the UK and the US, exploring the various processes which bring Shakespeare's plays to the stage. Actors, designers, directors and choreographers, including Eve Best, Bunny Christie, Gregory Doran and Lindsay Kemp, share their collective wisdom and experience, and reveal how training and practice informs productions of Shakespeare plays. These first-hand accounts provide students of Shakespeare in performance and practitioners with a critical toolkit with which to study the plays in performance.

Shakespeare on Record is a unique guide to major Shakespeare discoveries and the archival insight that made them possible. With contributions from experts at The National Archives, the Folger Shakespeare Library and leading universities, the book explores and explains the bureaucratic processes and governmental practices that shaped life and records in Renaissance England - making it a key resource for both Shakespeare scholars and researchers of early modern lives. Chapters examine key documents concerning property, the law, coats of arms and investments, which relate to Shakespeare's lives in both Stratford and London. Several of The National Archives' collection of over 120 documents which illuminate Shakespeare's life are profiled here for the first time. Richly illustrated throughout, this is a key resource for both Shakespeare scholars and researchers of early modern lives.

In Shakespeare's Language, Keith Johnson offers an overview of the rich and dynamic history of the reception and study of Shakespeare's language from his death right up to the present. Tracing a chronological history of Shakespeare's language, Keith Johnson also picks up on classic and contemporary themes, such as: lexical and digital studies original pronunciation rhetoric grammar. The historical approach provides a comprehensive overview, plotting the attitudes towards Shakespeare's language, as well as a history of its study. This approach reveals how different cultural and literary trends have moulded these attitudes and reflects changing linguistic climates; the book also includes a chapter that looks to the future. Shakespeare's Language is therefore not only an essential guide to the language of Shakespeare, but it offers crucial insights to broader approaches to language as a whole.

This book examines Shakespearean adaptations through the critical lens of fan studies and asks what it means to be a fan of Shakespeare in the context of contemporary media fandom. Although Shakespeare studies and fan studies have remained largely separate from one another for the past thirty years, this book establishes a sustained dialogue between the two fields. In the process, it reveals and seeks to overcome the problematic assumptions about the history of fan cultures, Shakespeares place in that history, and how fan works are defined. While fandom is normally perceived as a recent phenomenon focused primarily on science fiction and fantasy, this book traces fans practices back to the eighteenth century, particularly David Garricks Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769. Shakespeares Fans connects historical and scholarly debates over who owns Shakespeare and what constitutes an appropriate adaptation of his work to online fan fiction and commercially available fan works.