-PDF Download- Rewriting Shakespeare Rewriting Ourselves EBOOK

Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves

Author: Peter Erickson

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1994-02

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 0520086465

Participants in the current debate about the literary canon generally separate the established literary order—of which Shakespeare is the most visible icon—from the emergent minority literatures. In this challenging study, Peter Erickson insists on bringing the two realms together. He asks: what impact does a revision of the literary canon have on Shakespeare's status? Part One of his book is about Shakespeare on women. In analyses of several Shakespearean works, Erickson discusses Shakespeare's ambivalence about women as a reflection of male anxiety about the cultural authority of Queen Elizabeth. Part Two is about (contemporary) women on Shakespeare. Erickson discusses Adrienne Rich's revision of the very concept of canon and discusses how several African-American women writers (in particular Maya Angelou and Gloria Naylor) have reflected on the ambivalent status of Shakespeare in their worlds. Erickson here offers a model for multicultural literary criticism and a new conceptual framework with which to discuss issues of identity politics. Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves makes an important contribution to the national debate about educational policy in the humanities.

Hag-Seed

Author: Margaret Atwood

Publisher: Hogarth

Published: 2016-10-11

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 0804141304

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The beloved author of The Handmaid’s Tale reimagines Shakespeare’s final, great play, The Tempest, in a gripping and emotionally rich novel of passion and revenge. “A marvel of gorgeous yet economical prose, in the service of a story that’s utterly heartbreaking yet pierced by humor, with a plot that retains considerable subtlety even as the original’s back story falls neatly into place.”—The New York Times Book Review Felix is at the top of his game as artistic director of the Makeshiweg Theatre Festival. Now he’s staging aTempest like no other: not only will it boost his reputation, but it will also heal emotional wounds. Or that was the plan. Instead, after an act of unforeseen treachery, Felix is living in exile in a backwoods hovel, haunted by memories of his beloved lost daughter, Miranda. And also brewing revenge, which, after twelve years, arrives in the shape of a theatre course at a nearby prison. Margaret Atwood’s novel take on Shakespeare’s play of enchantment, retribution, and second chances leads us on an interactive, illusion-ridden journey filled with new surprises and wonders of its own. Praise for Hag-Seed “What makes the book thrilling, and hugely pleasurable, is how closely Atwood hews to Shakespeare even as she casts her own potent charms, rap-composition included. . . . Part Shakespeare, part Atwood, Hag-Seed is a most delicate monster—and that’s ‘delicate’ in the 17th-century sense. It’s delightful.”—Boston Globe “Atwood has designed an ingenious doubling of the plot of The Tempest: Felix, the usurped director, finds himself cast by circumstances as a real-life version of Prospero, the usurped Duke. If you know the play well, these echoes grow stronger when Felix decides to exact his revenge by conjuring up a new version of The Tempest designed to overwhelm his enemies.”—Washington Post “A funny and heartwarming tale of revenge and redemption . . . Hag-Seed is a remarkable contribution to the canon.”—Bustle

Citing Shakespeare

Author: Peter Erickson

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 2007-03-15

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9781403970541

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This study finds a significant number of contemporary writers and artists who quote our most quotable author for the purpose of reconsidering and reformulating the twin themes of Shakespeare and race. The book examines Shakespeare quotation as a means of revision in the work of Nadine Gordimer, Rita Dove, Derek Walcott, Leon Forrest, Ishmael Reed, Caryl Phillips, Djanet Sears, Fred Wilson, and J. M. Coetzee. In addition, a pivotal chapter discusses Paul Robeson as an earlier figure whose performance of Othello poses the problem of race in Shakespeare and suggests the need for reinterpretation.

Rewriting Shakespeare’s Plays For and By the Contemporary Stage

Author: Michael Dobson

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2017-06-23

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 1443878707

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Why have contemporary playwrights been obsessed by Shakespeare’s plays to such an extent that most of the canon has been rewritten by one rising dramatist or another over the last half century? Among other key figures, Edward Bond, Heiner Müller, Carmelo Bene, Arnold Wesker, Tom Stoppard, Howard Barker, Botho Strauss, Tim Crouch, Bernard Marie Koltès, and Normand Chaurette have all put their radical originality into the service of adapting four-century-old classics. The resulting works provide food for thought on issues such as Shakespearean role-playing, narrative and structural re-shuffling. Across the world, new writers have questioned the political implications and cultural stakes of repeating Shakespeare with and without a difference, finding inspiration in their own national experiences and in the different ordeals they have undergone. How have our contemporaries carried out their rewritings, and with what aims? Can we still play Hamlet, for instance, as Dieter Lesage asks in his book bearing this title, or do we have to “kill Shakespeare” as Normand Chaurette implies in a work where his own creative process is detailed? What do these rewritings really share with their sources? Are they meaningful only because of Shakespeare’s shadow haunting them? Where do we draw the lines between “interpretation,” “adaptation” and “rewriting”? The contributors to this collection of essays examine modern rewritings of Shakespeare from both theoretical and pragmatic standpoints. Key questions include: can a rewriting be meaningful without the reader’s or spectator’s already knowing Shakespeare? Do modern rewritings supplant Shakespeare’s texts or curate them? Does the survival of Shakespeare in the theatrical repertory actually depend on the continued dramatization of our difficult encounters with these potentially obsolete scripts represented by rewriting?

White People in Shakespeare

Author: Arthur L. Little, Jr.

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-12-29

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1350283657

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

What part did Shakespeare play in the construction of a 'white people' and how has his work been enlisted to define and bolster a white cultural and racial identity? Since the court of Queen Elizabeth I, through the early modern English theatre to the storming of the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021, white people have used Shakespeare to define their cultural and racial identity and authority. White People in Shakespeare unravels this complex cultural history to examine just how crucial Shakespeare's work was to the early modern development of whiteness as an embodied identity, as well as the institutional dissemination of a white Shakespeare in contemporary theatres, politics, classrooms and other key sites of culture. Featuring contributors from a wide range of disciplines, the collection moves across Shakespeare's plays and poetry and between the early modern and our own time to interrogate these relationships. Split into two parts, 'Shakespeare's White People' and 'White People's Shakespeare', it explores a variety of topics, ranging from the education of the white self in Hamlet, or affective piety and racial violence in Measure for Measure, to Shakespearean education and the civil rights era, and interpretations of whiteness in more contemporary work such as American Moor and Desdemona.

Adapting King Lear for the Stage

Author: Dr Lynne Bradley

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2013-04-28

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 1409476162

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Questioning whether the impulse to adapt Shakespeare has changed over time, Lynne Bradley argues for restoring a sense of historicity to the study of adaptation. Bradley compares Nahum Tate's History of King Lear (1681), adaptations by David Garrick in the mid-eighteenth century, and nineteenth-century Shakespeare burlesques to twentieth-century theatrical rewritings of King Lear, and suggests latter-day adaptations should be viewed as a unique genre that allows playwrights to express modern subject positions with regard to their literary heritage while also participating in broader debates about art and society. In identifying and relocating different adaptive gestures within this historical framework, Bradley explores the link between the critical and the creative in the history of Shakespearean adaptation. Focusing on works such as Gordon Bottomley's King Lear's Wife (1913), Edward Bond's Lear (1971), Howard Barker's Seven Lears (1989), and the Women's Theatre Group's Lear's Daughters (1987), Bradley theorizes that modern rewritings of Shakespeare constitute a new type of textual interaction based on a simultaneous double-gesture of collaboration and rejection. She suggests that this new interaction provides constituent groups, such as the feminist collective who wrote Lear's Daughters, a strategy to acknowledge their debt to Shakespeare while writing against the traditional and negative representations of femininity they see reflected in his plays.

Looking for an Argument

Author: Richard Louis Levin

Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 9780838639641

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This book collects a number of Richard Levin's essays, beginning with his well-known PMLA article of 1988 on Feminist Thematics and Shakespearean Tragedy and continuing through the 1990s, that examine and evaluate some of the most important aspects of the new critical approaches to the interpretations of the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries- principally the New Historicism, feminism, and revisionist versions of Marxism and Freudianism. In these essays he is looking not only for rational arguments in these approaches, but also for a rational argument with their practitioners, and therefore he reprints several of the responses that these essays have elicited (including th PMLA Forum letter signed by twenty-four people who objected to Feminist Thematics) along with his answers to them, which contribute to this critique of the present state of the discourse in this field.

Reimagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults

Author: Naomi Miller

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-15

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 1135363358

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Shakespeare's Problem Plays

Author: Simon Barker

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2005-04-25

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1137208902

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This New Casebook offers a wide-ranging selection of contemporary critical readings of Shakespeare's three 'problem plays': All's Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure and Trolius and Cressida. Together, they reflect the diversity of late twentieth-century theory and the controversy that continues to be generated by the plays, and discuss a variety of key issues. These include the meaning of the term 'problem play', the historical context and political and cultural significance of the plays, as well as issues of staging and theatre history. The volume also provides a helpful introduction which guides the reader through the critical approaches, terms and debates, as well as explanatory notes for each essay and a useful section on further reading.

A Meaningful World

Author: Benjamin Wiker

Publisher: InterVarsity Press

Published: 2009-09-20

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0830874305

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Meaningful or meaningless? Purposeful or pointless? When we look at nature, whether at our living earth or into deepest space, what do we find? In stark contrast to contemporary claims that the world is meaningless, Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt reveal a cosmos charged with both meaning and purpose. Their journey begins with Shakespeare and ranges through Euclid's geometry, the fine-tuning of the laws of physics, the periodic table of the elements, the artistry of ordinary substances like carbon and water, the intricacy of biological organisms, and the irreducible drama of scientific exploration itself. Along the way, Wiker and Witt fashion a robust argument from evidence in nature, one that rests neither on religious presuppositions nor on a simplistic view of nature as the best of all possible worlds. In their exploration of the cosmos, Wiker and Witt find all the challenges and surprises, all of the mystery and elegance one expects from a work of genius.