What’s the Worst Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare?

What’s the Worst Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare?
Author: R. Burt
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2013-07-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137346094

What's the worst thing you can do to Shakespeare? The answer is simple: don't read him. To that end, Richard Burt and Julian Yates embark on a project of un/reading the Bard, turning the conventional challenges into a roadmap for textual analysis and a thorough reconsideration of the plays in light of their absorption into global culture.

Shakespeare in Modern English

Shakespeare in Modern English
Author: Translated by Hugh Macdonald
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2016-12-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 178589840X

Shakespeare in Modern English breaks the taboo about Shakespeare’s texts, which have long been regarded as sacred and untouchable while being widely and freely translated into foreign languages. It is designed to make Shakespeare more easily understood in the theatre without dumbing down or simplifying the content. Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’, ‘Coriolanus’ and ‘The Tempest’ are presented in Macdonald’s book in modern English. They show that these great plays lose nothing by being acted or read in the language we all use today. Shakespeare’s language is poetic, elaborately rich and memorable, but much of it is very difficult to comprehend in the theatre when we have no notes to explain allusions, obsolete vocabulary and whimsical humour. Foreign translations of Shakespeare are normally into their modern language. So why not ours too? The purpose in rendering Shakespeare into modern English is to enhance the enjoyment and understanding of audiences in the theatre. The translations are not designed for children or dummies, but for those who want to understand Shakespeare better, especially in the theatre. Shakespeare in Modern English will appeal to those who want to understand the rich and poetical language of Shakespeare in a more comprehensible way. It is also a useful tool for older students studying Shakespeare.

Shakespeare Monologues for Men

Shakespeare Monologues for Men
Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher: Nick Hern Books
Total Pages: 132
Release: 2009
Genre: Drama
ISBN:

Full of fresh speeches from Shakespeare's plays. Ideal for actors of all ages and experience.

Screening Gender in Shakespeare's Comedies

Screening Gender in Shakespeare's Comedies
Author: Magdalena Cieslak
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2019-04-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1498563759

When adapting Shakespeare's comedies, cinema and television have to address the differences and incompatibilities between early modern gender constructs and contemporary cultural, social, and political contexts. Screening Gender in Shakespeare’s Comedies: Film and Television Adaptations in the Twenty-First Century analyzes methods employed by cinema and television in approaching those aspects of Shakespeare's comedies, indicating a range of ways in which adaptations made in the twenty-first century approach the problems of cultural and social normativity, gender politics, stereotypes of femininity and masculinity, the dynamic of power relations between men and women, and social roles of men and women. This book discusses both mainstream cinematic productions, such as Michael Radford's The Merchant of Venice or Julie Taymor's The Tempest, and more low-key adaptations, such as Kenneth Branagh's As You Like It and Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing, as well as the three comedies of BBC ShakespeaRe-Told miniseries: Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. This book examines how the analyzed films deal with elements of Shakespeare's comedies that appear subversive, challenging, or offensive to today's culture, and how they interpret or update gender issues to reconcile Shakespeare with contemporary cultural norms. By exploring tensions and negotiations between early modern and present-day gender politics, the book defines the prevailing attitudes of recent adaptations in relation to those issues, and identifies the most popular strategies of accommodating early modern constructs for contemporary audiences.

Shakespeare / Not Shakespeare

Shakespeare / Not Shakespeare
Author: Christy Desmet
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2017-11-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319633007

This essay collection addresses the paradox that something may at once “be” and “not be” Shakespeare. This phenomenon can be a matter of perception rather than authorial intention: audiences may detect Shakespeare where the author disclaims him or have difficulty finding him where he is named. Douglas Lanier’s “Shakespearean rhizome,” which co-opts Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of artistic relations as rhizomes (a spreading, growing network that sprawls horizontally to defy hierarchies of origin and influence) is fundamental to this exploration. Essays discuss the fine line between “Shakespeare” and “not Shakespeare” through a number of critical lenses—networks and pastiches, memes and echoes, texts and paratexts, celebrities and afterlives, accidents and intertexts—and include a wide range of examples: canonical plays by Shakespeare, historical figures, celebrities, television performances and adaptations, comics, anime appropriations, science fiction novels, blockbuster films, gangster films, Shakesploitation and teen films, foreign language films, and non-Shakespearean classic films.

Beyond Shakespeare

Beyond Shakespeare
Author: Iris H. Tuan
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2023-07-25
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9811994021

With joy and grace to accompany the readers to have the translocal tour to visit about thirty-seven works, this monograph applies the academic critical theories of Performance Studies, Film Studies, Psychoanalysis, Postmodernism, and Visual Culture, to interpreting the special selection works. The focus and common theme are on race, body, and class. With the background of COVID-19 since 2019 up to the present, the book offers the readers with the remarkable insight of human beings’ accumulated wisdom and experiences in surviving with the dreadful diseases like the plagues in Shakespeare’s time. After the supreme reading, may the global readers in the world acquire the knowledge and power to live in sustainability with education and entertainment of films, performances, and online streaming Netflix TV dramas.

Shakespeare on Screen: Romeo and Juliet

Shakespeare on Screen: Romeo and Juliet
Author: Victoria Bladen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2023-10-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 100920095X

From canonical movies to web series, this volume illuminates myriad forms of Romeo and Juliet on screen around the world.

Shakespeare and Quotation

Shakespeare and Quotation
Author: Julie Maxwell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2018-04-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108592295

Shakespeare is the most frequently quoted English author of all time. Quotations appear everywhere, from the epigraphs of novels to the mottoes on coffee cups. But Shakespeare was also a frequent quoter himself - of classical and contemporary literature, of the Bible, of snatches of popular songs and proverbs. This volume brings together an international team of scholars to trace the rich history of quotation from Shakespeare's own lifetime to the present day. Exploring a wide range of media, including Romantic poetry, theatre criticism, novels by Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy and Ian McEwan, political oratory, propaganda, advertising, drama, film and digital technology, the chapters draw fresh connections between Shakespeare's own practices of creative reworking and the quotation of his work in new and traditional forms. Richly illustrated and featuring an Afterword by Margreta de Grazia, the collection tells a new story of the making and remaking of Shakespeare's plays and poems.

Shakespeare on Screen

Shakespeare on Screen
Author: Sarah Hatchuel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2017-04-27
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1107113504

This volume provides up-to-date coverage of recent screen versions of Shakespeare's plays, as well as critical reviews of older canonical films.

Broadcast your Shakespeare

Broadcast your Shakespeare
Author: Stephen O'Neill
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2017-12-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1474295126

This volume of essays contributes to current debates about Shakespeare in new media. It importantly develops the field by providing a comparativist approach to Shakespeare's dynamic media history. Contributors to Broadcast Your Shakespeare address the variety of ways Shakespeare texts have been expressed through different media and continue to be. Writing at the intersection of Shakespeare studies and media studies, these international contributors also consider the role of a particular media in producing Shakespeare's effect on us - as readers, viewers and users. The volume suggests how current analyses of new media Shakespeare have much to learn from older media, and that an awareness both of media specificity and also continuity can enhance Shakespeare pedagogy and research.