Shakespeares Others In 21st Century European Performance

"The Merchant of Venice and Othello are the two Shakespeare plays which serve as touchstones for contemporary understandings and responses to notions of 'the stranger' and 'the other'. This groundbreaking collection explores the dissemination of the two plays through Europe in the first two decades of the 21st-century, tracing how productions and interpretations have reflected the changing conditions and attitudes locally and nationally. Packed with case studies of productions of each play in different countries, the volume opens vistas on the continent's turbulent history marked by the instability of allegiances and boundaries, and shifting senses of identity in a context of war, decolonization and migration. Chapters examine productions in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Italy, France, Portugal and Germany to shed light on wide-scale European developments for the first time in English. In a final section, performance insights are offered by interviews with three directors: Karin Coonrod on directing The Merchant in Venice at the Venetian Ghetto in 2016, Plamen Markov on his 2020 Othello for the Varna Theatre (Bulgaria), and Arnaud Churin, whose Othello toured France in 2019. In drawing attention to the ways in which historical circumstances and collective memory shape and refashion performance, Shakespeare's Others in 21st-century European Performance offers a rich review of European theatrical engagements with Otherness in the productions of these two plays"--

The Merchant of Venice and Othello are the two Shakespeare plays which serve as touchstones for contemporary understandings and responses to notions of 'the stranger' and 'the other'. This groundbreaking collection explores the dissemination of the two plays through Europe in the first two decades of the 21st-century, tracing how productions and interpretations have reflected the changing conditions and attitudes locally and nationally. Packed with case studies of productions of each play in different countries, the volume opens vistas on the continent's turbulent history marked by the instability of allegiances and boundaries, and shifting senses of identity in a context of war, decolonization and migration. Chapters examine productions in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Italy, France, Portugal and Germany to shed light on wide-scale European developments for the first time in English. In a final section, performance insights are offered by interviews with three directors: Karin Coonrod on directing The Merchant in Venice at the Venetian Ghetto in 2016, Plamen Markov on his 2020 Othello for the Varna Theatre (Bulgaria) and Arnaud Churin, whose Othello toured France in 2019. In drawing attention to the ways in which historical circumstances and collective memory shape and refashion performance, Shakespeare's Others in 21st-century European Performance offers a rich review of European theatrical engagements with Otherness in the productions of these two plays.

The Merchant of Venice and Othello are the two Shakespeare plays which serve as touchstones for contemporary understandings and responses to notions of 'the stranger' and 'the other'. This groundbreaking collection explores the dissemination of the two plays through Europe in the first two decades of the 21st-century, tracing how productions and interpretations have reflected the changing conditions and attitudes locally and nationally. Packed with case studies of productions of each play in different countries, the volume opens vistas on the continent's turbulent history marked by the instability of allegiances and boundaries, and shifting senses of identity in a context of war, decolonization and migration. Chapters examine productions in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Italy, France, Portugal and Germany to shed light on wide-scale European developments for the first time in English. In a final section, performance insights are offered by interviews with three directors: Karin Coonrod on directing The Merchant in Venice at the Venetian Ghetto in 2016, Plamen Markov on his 2020 Othello for the Varna Theatre (Bulgaria) and Arnaud Churin, whose Othello toured France in 2019. In drawing attention to the ways in which historical circumstances and collective memory shape and refashion performance, Shakespeare's Others in 21st-century European Performance offers a rich review of European theatrical engagements with Otherness in the productions of these two plays.

This volume argues that a focus on the European reception of Othello represents an important contribution to critical work on the play. The chapters in this volume examine non-anglophone translations and performances, alternative ways of distinguishing between texts, adaptations and versions, as well as differing perspectives on questions of gender and race. Additionally, a European perspective raises key political questions about power and representation in terms of who speaks for and about Othello, within a European context profoundly divided over questions of immigration, religious, ethnic, gender and sexual difference. The volume illustrates the ways in which Othello has been not only a stimulus but also a challenge for European Shakespeares. It makes clear that the history of the play is inseparable from histories of race, religion and gender and that many engagements with the play have reinforced rather than challenged the social and political prejudices of the period.

The first decade of the new century has certainly been a busy one for diversity in Shakespearean performance and interpretation, yielding, for example, global, virtual, digital, interactive, televisual, and cinematic Shakespeares. In Locating Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century, Gabrielle Malcolm and Kelli Marshall assess this active world of Shakespeare adaptation and commercialization as they consider both novel and traditional forms: from experimental presentations (in-person and online) and literal rewritings of the plays/playwright to televised and filmic Shakespeares. More specifically, contributors in Locating Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century examine the BBC’s ShakespeaRE-Told series, Canada’s television program Slings and Arrows, the Mumbai-based film Maqbool, and graphic novels in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, as well as the future of adaptation, performance, digitization, and translation via such projects as National Theatre Live, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Archive of Digital Performance, and the British Library’s online presentation of the complete Folios. Other authors consider the place of Shakespeare in the classroom, in the Kenneth Branagh canon, in Jewish revenge films (Quentin Tarantino’s included), in comic books, in Young Adult literature, and in episodes of the BBC’s popular sci-fi television program Doctor Who. Ultimately, this collection sheds light, at least partially, on where critics think Shakespeare is now and where he and his works might be going in the near future and long-term. One conclusion is certain: however far we progress into the new century, Shakespeare will be there.

Boika Sokolova and Kirilka Stavreva’s second edition of the stage history of The Merchant of Venice interweaves into the chronology of James Bulman’s first edition richly contextualised chapters on Max Reinhardt, Peter Zadek, and the first production of the play in Mandatory Palestine, directed by Leopold Jessner. While the focus of the book is on post-1990s productions across Europe and the USA, and on film, the Segue provides a broad survey of the interpretative shifts in the play’s performance from the 1930s to the second decade of the twenty-first century. Individual chapters explore productions by Peter Zadek, Trevor Nunn, Robert Sturua, Edward Hall, Rupert Goold, Daniel Sullivan, and Karin Coonrod. An extensive film section including silent film offers close analysis of Don Selwyn’s Te Tangata Whai Rawa o Weniti and Michael Radford’s adaptation. Accessible and engaging, the book will interest students, academics, and general readers.

William Shakespeare and 21st-Century Culture, Politics, and Leadership examines problems, challenges, and crises in our contemporary world through the lens of William Shakespeare’s plays, one of the best-known, most admired, and often controversial authors of the last half-millennium.

Most studies of the performance of Shakespeare's work concentrate on how the text has been played and what meanings have been conveyed through acting and interpretive directing. Dennis Kennedy demonstrates that much of audience response is determined by the visual representation, which is normally more immediate and direct than the aural conveyance of a text. Ranging widely over productions in Britain, Europe, Japan and North America, Kennedy gives a thorough account of the main scenographic movements of the century, investigating how the visual relates to Shakespeare on the stage. The second edition of this acclaimed history includes a new chapter on Shakespeare performance in the 1990s, bringing the story up to date by drawing on examples from a wide international field. There are more than twenty new illustrations, some of them in colour (bringing the total number of illustrations to almost 200), and previous references have been updated.

The title of this collection, Shifting the Scene, adapts words from one of the Choruses in Henry V. Its essays try, without denying authority to the text and the theatre, to widen the scene of inquiry to include other institutions, like education, politics, language, and the arts, and to juxtapose the constructions of Shakespeare and his works that have been produced by them. However, as in Henry V, there is also a geographical dimension. The collection goes beyond England and the English-speaking world and focuses on Europe (including Britain). It brings together 17 essays by leading authorities and promising young scholars in the field

Shakespeare and Crisis: One hundred years of Italian narratives explores how Shakespeare intervened in the Italian socio-political and cultural scene between his third and fourth centenaries, at times which were manifestly perceived as ‘critical’. It asks which complex mythopoietic processes contributed to shaping regimes of reading Shakespeare in response to those times of crisis. Crises of national identity during the Great War and the Fascist regime, crises of history in the 1970s, and crises of representation in the second half of the twentieth century extending into the new millennium constitute the three main areas of a discussion that ultimately aims at probing into the role of literature at times of crisis. The volume situates itself at the juncture of European Shakespeare studies and studies of Shakespeare and Italy. It addresses essential questions about the position of literature in society, offering at different levels new insights for scholars, students, and the general reader.