The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare

The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare
Author: Charles LaPorte
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2020-11-05
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1108496156

How and why did Victorian culture make Shakespeare into a literary deity and his work into a secular Bible?

The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare

The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare
Author: Charles LaPorte
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2020-11-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108853463

In the Victorian era, William Shakespeare's work was often celebrated as a sacred text: a sort of secular English Bible. Even today, Shakespeare remains a uniquely important literary figure. Yet Victorian criticism took on religious dimensions that now seem outlandish in retrospect. Ministers wrote sermons based upon Shakespearean texts and delivered them from pulpits in Christian churches. Some scholars crafted devotional volumes to compare his texts directly with the Bible's. Still others created Shakespearean societies in the faith that his inspiration was not like that of other playwrights. Charles LaPorte uses such examples from the Victorian cult of Shakespeare to illustrate the complex relationship between religion, literature and secularization. His work helps to illuminate a curious but crucial chapter in the history of modern literary studies in the West, as well as its connections with Biblical scholarship and textual criticism.

Shakespeare and the Victorians

Shakespeare and the Victorians
Author: Stuart Sillars
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2013-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199668078

Shakespeare and the Victorians explores the place of Shakespeare in Victorian culture, and shows how the plays and the man became central to all levels of Victorian life and thought.

Shakespeare / Play

Shakespeare / Play
Author: Emma Whipday
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2024-07-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350304441

What is (a) play? How do Shakespeare's plays engage with and represent early modern modes of play – from jests and games to music, spectacle, movement, animal-baiting and dance? How have we played with Shakespeare in the centuries since? And how does the structure of the plays experienced in the early modern playhouse shape our understanding of Shakespeare plays today? Shakespeare / Play brings together established and emerging scholars to respond to these questions, using approaches spanning theatre and dance history, cultural history, critical race studies, performance studies, disability studies, archaeology, affect studies, music history, material history and literary and dramaturgical analysis. Ranging across Shakespeare's dramatic oeuvre as well as early modern lost plays, dance notation, conduct books, jest books and contemporary theatre and film, it includes consideration of Measure for Measure, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, Titus Andronicus, Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear and The Merry Wives of Windsor, among others. The subject of this volume is reflected in its structure: Shakespeare / Play features substantial new essays across 5 'acts', interwoven with 7 shorter, playful pieces (a 'prologue', 4 'act breaks', a 'jig' and a 'curtain call'), to offer new directions for research on Shakespearean playing, playmaking and performance. In so doing, this volume interrogates the conceptions of playing of/in Shakespeare that shape how we perform, read, teach and analyze Shakespeare today.

Contested Will

Contested Will
Author: James Shapiro
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2011-04-19
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1416541632

Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro explains when and why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote his plays.

Shakespeare and the Royal Actor

Shakespeare and the Royal Actor
Author: Sally Barnden
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2024-02-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198895038

Shakespeare and the Royal Actor argues that members of the royal family have identified with Shakespearean figures at various times in modern history to assert the continuity, legitimacy, and national identity of the royal line. It provides an account of the relationship between the Shakespearean afterlife and the royal family through the lens of a broadly conceived theatre history suggesting that these two hegemonic institutions had a mutually sustaining relationship from the accession of George III in 1760 to that of Elizabeth II in 1952. Identifications with Shakespearean figures have been deployed to assert the Englishness of a dynasty with strong familial links to Germany and to cultivate a sense of continuity from the more autocratic Plantagenet, Tudor, and Stuart monarchs informing Shakespeare's drama to the increasingly ceremonial monarchs of the modern period. The book is driven by new archival research in the Royal Collection and Royal Archives. It reads these archives critically, asking how different forms of royal and Shakespearean performance are remembered in the material holdings of royal institutions.

A Midsummer-night's Dream

A Midsummer-night's Dream
Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher:
Total Pages: 72
Release: 1734
Genre: English drama (Comedy)
ISBN:

National Sylvan Theatre, Washington Monument grounds, The Community Center and Playgrounds Department and the Office of National Capital Parks present the ninth summer festival program of the 1941 season, the Washington Players in William Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," produced by Bess Davis Schreiner, directed by Denis E. Connell, the music by Mendelssohn is played by the Washington Civic Orchestra conducted by Jean Manganaro, the setting and lights Harold Snyder, costumes Mary Davis.

Shakespeare’s House

Shakespeare’s House
Author: Richard Schoch
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2023-11-16
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1350409375

In the wide realm of Shakespeare worship, the house in Stratford-upon-Avon where William Shakespeare was born in 1564 – known colloquially as the 'Birthplace' – remains the chief shrine. It's not as romantic as Anne Hathaway's thatched cottage, it's not where he wrote any of his plays, and there's nothing inside the house that once belonged to Shakespeare himself. So why, for centuries, have people kept turning up on the doorstep? Richard Schoch answers that question by examining the history of the Birthplace and by exploring how its changing fortunes over four centuries perfectly mirror the changing attitudes toward Shakespeare himself. Based on original research in the archives of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, and featuring two black and white illustrated plate sections which draw on the wide array of material available at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Victoria and Albert Museum, this book traces the history of Shakespeare's birthplace over four centuries. Beginning in the 1560s, when Shakespeare was born there, it ends in the 1890s, when the house was rescued from private purchase and turned into the Shakespeare monument that it remains today.

Facsimiles and the History of Shakespeare Editing

Facsimiles and the History of Shakespeare Editing
Author: Paul Salzman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2023-04-30
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1009228234

Is a facsimile an edition? In answering this question in relation to Shakespeare, and to early modern writing in general, the author explores the interrelationship between the beginning of the conventional process of collecting and editing Shakespeare's plays and the increasing sophistication of facsimiles. While recent scholarship has offered a detailed account of how Shakespeare was edited in the eighteenth century, the parallel process of the 'exact' reproduction of his texts has been largely ignored. The author will explain how facsimiles moved during the eighteenth and nineteenth century from hand drawn, traced, and type facsimiles to the advent of photographical facsimiles in the mid nineteenth century. Facsimiles can be seen as a barometer of the reverence accorded to the idea of an authentic Shakespeare text, and also of the desire to possess, if not original texts, then reproductions of them.

Shakespeare and Quotation

Shakespeare and Quotation
Author: Julie Maxwell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2018-04-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108640001

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.