Shakespeare in Stages: New Theatre Histories

by Edited by Christine Dymkowski , Christie Carson

• ISBN13: 9780521884792
• ISBN10: 0521884799
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-04-26
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The history of Shakespearean performance is very well served at its two extremes, with volumes providing a valuable historical overview of the subject and others concentrating on the performance history of a particular play. However, no individual volume provides an in-depth consideration of the stage histories of a number of plays, chosen for their particular significance within specific cultural contexts. Shakespeare in Stages addresses this gap. The original case studies explore significant anglophone performances of the plays, as well as ideas about 'Shakespeare', through the changing prisms of three different cultural factors that have proved influential in the way Shakespeare is staged: notions of authenticity, attitudes towards sex and gender, and questions of identity. Ranging from the 16th to the 21st centuries and examining productions of plays in Britain, USA, Canada, Australia, and South Africa, the studies focus attention on the complex interaction between particular plays, issues, events, and periods.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	p. ix
Notes on contributors	p. xi
Acknowledgements	p. xvi
Introduction	p. 1
Notions of Authenticity	p. 5
The move indoors	p. 7
Whig heroics: Shakespeare, Cibber, and the troublesome	p. 22
Coriolanus and the (in) authenticities of William Poel's platform stage	p. 37
'A fresh advance in Shakespearean production': Tyrone Guthrie in Canada	p. 57
Authenticity in the twenty-first century: Propeller and Shakespeare's Globe	p. 71
Attitudes Towards Sex and Gender	p. 91
Performing beauty on the Renaissance stage	p. 93
The artistic, cultural, and economic power of the actress in the age of Garrick	p. 107
Women writing Shakespeare's women in the nineteenth century: The Winters Tale	p. 124
'Not our Olivia': Lydia Lopokova and Twelfth Night	p. 144
Measure for Measure: Shakespeare's twentieth-century play	p. 164
Questions of Identity	p. 185
Shakespeare and the rhetoric of scenography 1770-1825	p. 187
The presence of Shakespeare	p. 210
Finding local habitation: Shakespeare's Dream at play on the stage of contemporary Australia	p. 229
'Haply for I am black': shifting race and gender dynamics in Talawa's Othello	p. 248
British directors in post-colonial South Africa	p. 264
Epilogue Shakespeare's audiences as imaginative communities	p. 277
Index	p. 293
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