Shakespeare's Surrogates Rewriting Renaissance Drama

by Loftis, Sonya Freeman

• ISBN13: 9781137352538
• ISBN10: 1137352531
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-12-18
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Shakespeare's Surrogates contends that the adaptation of Renaissance drama played a key role in the development of modern drama's major aesthetic movements. This book reveals the way that modern drama built itself in response to its Elizabethan past, ransacking the literary work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries for 'new' innovations in dramatic technique and content. Indeed, playwrights central to the evolution of modern and postmodern drama often returned at key moments in their writing careers to the remains of the Renaissance. Sonya Freeman Loftis argues that for playwrights such as Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, Eugene O'Neill, Samuel Beckett, Tom Stoppard, and Heiner Müller, Shakespearean appropriation was central both to the creation of their public personas and to the development of their own dramatic canons.

Author Biography

Sonya Freeman Loftis is an Assistant Professor of English at Morehouse College, USA. Her work on drama has appeared in journals such as the Shakespeare Bulletin, The Brecht Yearbook, SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, The South Atlantic Review, Text & Presentation, and Renaissance Papers.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Attacking the Canon through the Corpse
1. 'Blaming the Bard': Shaw, Shakespeare, Shotover
2. Tearing the Skin off of History: Brecht and the Early Modern Body
3. 'To face my dead at last': The Personal and Literary Ghosts of Long Day's Journey into Night
4. 'Some Remains': Forgetting Shakespeare in Endgame and Happy Days
5. 'A bit of Shakespeare': The Playwright and the Player in Stoppard's Shakespearean Adaptations
6. 'A mother's womb is not a one-way street': Re-entering the Shakespearean Womb of Hamletmachine