Shakespeares Foreign Worlds

Download or read book Shakespeare's Foreign Worlds written by Carole Levin and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-15 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Shakespeare's Foreign Worlds, Carole Levin and John Watkins focus on the relationship between the London-based professional theater preeminently associated with William Shakespeare and an unprecedented European experience of geographic, social, and intellectual mobility. Shakespeare's plays bear the marks of exile and exploration, rural depopulation, urban expansion, and shifting mercantile and diplomatic configurations. He fills his plays with characters testing the limits of personal identity: foreigners, usurpers, outcasts, outlaws, scolds, shrews, witches, mercenaries, and cross-dressers. Through parallel discussions of Henry VI, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Merchant of Venice, Levin and Watkins argue that Shakespeare's centrality to English national consciousness is inseparable from his creation of the foreign as a category asserting dangerous affinities between England's internal minorities and its competitors within an increasingly fraught European mercantile system. As a women's historian, Levin is particularly interested in Shakespeare's responses to marginalized sectors of English society. As a scholar of English, Italian Studies, and Medieval Studies, Watkins situates Shakespeare in the context of broadly European historical movements. Together Levin and Watkins narrate the emergence of the foreign as portable category that might be applied both to "strangers" from other countries and to native-born English men and women, such as religious dissidents, who resisted conformity to an increasingly narrow sense of English identity. Shakespeare's Foreign Worlds will appeal to historians, literary scholars, theater specialists, and anyone interested in Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Age.

Download or read book Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (Anniversary Edition) written by Stephen Greenblatt and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2010-05-03 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named One of Esquire's 50 Best Biographies of All Time The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, reissued with a new afterword for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. A young man from a small provincial town moves to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, becomes the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time. How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained? Stephen Greenblatt brings us down to earth to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life, could have become the world’s greatest playwright.

Download or read book Mapping Shakespeare's World written by Peter Whitfield and published by Bodleian Library. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The locations of Shakespeare s plays range from Greece, Turkey and Syria to England, and they range in time from 1000 BC to the early Tudor age. He never set a play explicitly in Elizabethan London which he and his audience inhabited, but always in places remote in space or time. How much did he and his contemporaries know about the foreign cities where the plays took place? What expectations did an audience have if the curtain rose on a drama which claimed to take place in Verona, Elsinore, Alexandria or ancient Troy? This fully illustrated book explores these questions, surveying Shakespeare s world through contemporary maps, geographical texts, paintings and drawings. The results are intriguing and sometimes surprising. Why should Love s Labour s Lost be set in the Pyrenean kingdom of Navarre? Was the Forest of Arden really in Warwickshire? Why do two utterly different plays like The Comedy of Errors and Pericles focus strongly on ancient Ephesus? Where was Illyria? Did the Merry Wives have to live in Windsor? Why did Shakespeare sometimes shift the settings of the plays from those he found in his literary sources? It has always been easy to say that wherever the plays are set, Shakespeare was really writing about human psychology and human nature, and that the settings are irrelevant. This book takes a different view, showing that many of his locations may have had resonances which an Elizabethan audience would pick up and understand, and it shows how significant the geographical background of the plays could be. "

Download or read book Shakespeare and the Second World War written by Irene Rima Makaryk and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare's works occupy a prismatic and complex position in world culture: they straddle both the high and the low, the national and the foreign, literature and theatre. The Second World War presents a fascinating case study of this phenomenon: most, if not all, of its combatants have laid claim to Shakespeare and have called upon his work to convey their society's self-image. In wartime, such claims frequently brought to the fore a crisis of cultural identity and of competing ownership of this 'universal' author. Despite this, the role of Shakespeare during the Second World War has not yet been examined or documented in any depth. Shakespeare and the Second World War provides the first sustained international, collaborative incursion into this terrain. The essays demonstrate how the wide variety of ways in which Shakespeare has been recycled, reviewed, and reinterpreted from 1939–1945 are both illuminated by and continue to illuminate the War today.

Download or read book World-Wide Shakespeares written by Sonia Massai and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-05-07 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: World-Wide Shakespeares brings together an international team of leading scholars in order to explore the appropriation of Shakespeare's plays in film and performance around the world.

Download or read book Worlds Elsewhere written by Andrew Dickson and published by Random House. This book was released on 2015-10-15 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anti-apartheid activist, Bollywood screenwriter, Nazi pin-up, hero of the Wild West: this is Shakespeare as you have never seen him before. ‘Extraordinarily exhilarating ... like no other Shakespeare criticism you have ever read’ (Margaret Drabble) ~ ‘A tour de force by any standards’ (David Crystal) ~ ‘Revelatory’ (James Shapiro) ~ ‘Brilliantly original’ (Michael Pye) From the sixteenth-century Baltic to the American Revolution, from colonial India to the skyscrapers of modern-day Shanghai, Shakespeare’s plays appear at the most fascinating of times and in the most unexpected of places. But what is it about William Shakespeare – a man who never once set foot outside England – that has made him at home in so many places around the globe? Travelling across four continents, six countries and 400 years, Worlds Elsewhere is an attempt to understand how Shakespeare has become the international phenomenon he is – and why.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare written by Arthur F. Kinney and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 846 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contains forty original essays.