Shakespeares Liminal Spaces

This engaging study appreciably advances recent critical developments in the way the playwright created his worlds to reflect concurrent cartographic, geopolitical and social anxieties. In seeking to expose the dynamics and fluctuations of power on the stage, Shakespeare's liminal spaces provides a unique set of perspectives through which Shakespeare’s forests, battlefields, shores and gardens are revealed as deliberate dramatic devices with the capacity to destabilise social structures. Haworth’s nuanced consideration of these spaces reveals that they were ideally suited to the staging of social frictions as he traces the shifting balance of power between opposing ideological standpoints and the internal struggles between an emergent subjectivity and conformity with the centralised authorities of Church and Court.

This engaging study offers fresh readings of canonical Shakespeare plays, illuminating ways stagecraft and language of movement create meaning for playgoers. The discussions engage materials from the period, present revelatory readings of Shakespeare's language, and demonstrate how these continually popular texts engage all of us in making meaning.

Now available in paperback, Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory is an up-to-date guide to contemporary debates in postcolonial studies and how these shape our understanding of Shakespeare's politics and poetics. Taking a historical perspective, it covers early modern discourses of colonialism, 'race', gender and globalization, through to contemporary intercultural appropriations and global adaptations of Shakespeare. Showing how the dialogue between Shakespeare criticism and postcolonial studies has evolved, this book offers a critical vocabulary that connects contemporary and early modern cultural struggles. Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory also provides guides to further reading and online resources which make this an essential resource for students and scholars of Shakespeare.

Shakespeare / Space explores new approaches to the enactment of 'space' in and through Shakespeare's plays, as well as to the material, cognitive and virtual spaces in which they are enacted. With contributions from 14 leading and emergent experts in their fields, the collection forges innovative connections between spatial studies and cultural geography, cognitive studies, memory studies, phenomenology and the history of the emotions, gender and race studies, rhetoric and language, translation studies, theatre history and performance studies. Each chapter offers methodological reflections on intersections such as space/mobility, space/emotion, space/supernatural, space/language, space/race and space/digital, whose critical purchase is demonstrated in close readings of plays like King Lear, The Comedy of Errors, Othello and Shakespeare's history plays. They testify to the importance of space for our understanding of Shakespeare's creative and theatrical practice, and at the same time enlarge our understanding of space as a critical concept in the humanities. It will prove useful to students, scholars, teachers and theatre practitioners of Shakespeare and early modern studies.

Can there be a virtue in vengeance? Can revenge do ethical work? Can revenge be the obligation of women? This wide-ranging literary study looks at Shakespeare's women and finds bold answers to questions such as these. A surprising number of Shakespeare's female characters respond to moral outrages by expressing a strong desire for vengeance. This book's analysis of these characters and their circumstances offers incisive critical perceptions of feminine anger, ethics, and agency and challenges our assumptions about the role of gender in revenge. In this provocative book, Marguerite A. Tassi counters longstanding critical opinions on revenge: that it is the sole province of men in Western literature and culture, that it is a barbaric, morally depraved, irrational instinct, and that it is antithetical to justice. Countless examples have been mined from Shakespeare's dramas to reveal women's profound concerns with revenge and justice, honor and shame, crime and punishment. In placing the critical focus on avenging women, this book significantly redresses a gender imbalance in scholarly treatments of revenge, particularly in early modern literature.

Exploring Shakespeare's intellectual interest in placing both characters and audiences in a state of uncertainty, mystery, and doubt, this book interrogates the use of paradox in Shakespeare's plays and in performance. By adopting this discourse-one in which opposites can co-exist and perspectives can be altered, and one that asks accepted opinions, beliefs, and truths to be reconsidered-Shakespeare used paradox to question love, gender, knowledge, and truth from multiple perspectives. Committed to situating literature within the larger culture, Peter Platt begins by examining the Renaissance culture of paradox in both the classical and Christian traditions. He then looks at selected plays in terms of paradox, including the geographical site of Venice in Othello and The Merchant of Venice, and equity law in The Comedy of Errors, Merchant, and Measure for Measure. Platt also considers the paradoxes of theater and live performance that were central to Shakespearean drama, such as the duality of the player, the boy-actor and gender, and the play/audience relationship in the Henriad, Hamlet, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. In showing that Shakespeare's plays create and are created by a culture of paradox, Platt offers an exciting and innovative investigation of Shakespeare's cognitive and affective power over his audience.

This volume offers a comprehensive array of readings of 'skin' in Shakespeare's works, a term that embraces the human and animal, noun and verb. Shakespeare / Skin departs from previous studies as it deliberately and often explicitly engages with issues of social and racial justice. Each of the chapters interrogates and centres 'skin' in relation to areas of expertise that include performance studies, aesthetics, animal studies, religious studies, queer theory, Indigenous studies, history, food studies, border studies, postcolonial studies, Black feminism, disease studies and pedagogy. By considering contemporary understandings of skin, this volume examines how the literature of the early modern past creates paths to constructing racial hierarchies. With contributors from the USA, UK, South Africa, India, Sri Lanka, Singapore and Australia, chapters are informed by an array of histories, shedding light on how skin was understood in Shakespeare's time and at key moments during the past 400 years in different media and cultures. Chapters include considerations of plays such as Titus Andronicus, The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream, and work by Borderlands Theater, Los Colochos and Satyajit Ray, among many others. For researchers and instructors, this book will help to shape teaching and inform research through its modelling of antiracist critical practice. Collectively, the chapters in this collection allow us to consider how sustained attention to skin via cross-historical and innovative approaches can reveal to us the various uses of Shakespeare that shed light on the fraught nature of our interrelatedness. They set a path for readers to consider how much skin they have in the game when it comes to challenging structures of racism.

This eye-opening study draws attention to the largely neglected form of the early modern prologue. Reading the prologue in performed as well as printed contexts, Douglas Bruster and Robert Weimann take us beyond concepts of stability and autonomy in dramatic beginnings to reveal the crucial cultural functions performed by the prologue in Elizabethan England. While its most basic task is to seize the attention of a noisy audience, the prologue's more significant threshold position is used to usher spectators and actors through a rite of passage. Engaging competing claims, expectations and offerings, the prologue introduces, authorizes and, critically, straddles the worlds of the actual theatrical event and the 'counterfeit' world on stage. In this way, prologues occupy a unique and powerful position between two orders of cultural practice and perception. Close readings of prologues by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, including Marlowe, Peele and Lyly, demonstrate the prologue's role in representing both the world in the play and playing in the world. Through their detailed examination of this remarkable form and its functions, the authors provide a fascinating perspective on early modern drama, a perspective that enriches our knowledge of the plays' socio-cultural context and their mode of theatrical address and action.

Shakespearean Spaces in Australian Literary Adaptations for Children and Young Adults offers a comprehensive examination of Shakespearean adaptations written by Australian authors for children and Young Adults. The 20-year period crossing the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries came to represent a diverse and productive era of adapting Shakespeare in Australian literature. As an analysis of Australian and international marketplaces, physical and imaginative spaces and the body as a site of meaning, this book reveals how the texts are ideologically bound to and disseminate Shakespearean cultural capital in contemporary ways. Combining current research in children’s literature and Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital deepens the critical awareness of the status of Australian literature while illuminating a corpus of literature underrepresented by the pre-existing concentration on adaptations from other parts of the world. Of particular interest is how these adaptations merge Shakespearean worlds with the spaces inhabited by young people, such as the classroom, the stage, the imagination and the gendered body. The readership of this book would be academics, researchers and students of children’s literature studies and Shakespeare studies, particularly those interested in Shakespearean cultural theory, transnational adaptation and literary appropriation. High school educators and pre-service teachers would also find this book valuable as they look to broaden and strengthen their use of adaptations to engage students in Shakespeare studies.