Books in the Routledge Studies in Shakespeare series

Explores the relationship between performances of Shakespeare's plays and the ways in which they engage with various traumatic events and histories. In considering this relationship, the author asks how performance might articulate traumatic events. She interrogates a range of narratives about Shakespeare, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity.

Why do Shakespeare and the English Bible seem to have an inherent relationship with each other? How have these two monumental traditions in the history of the book functioned as mutually reinforcing sources of cultural authority? How do material books and related reading practices serve as specific sites of intersection between these two textual traditions? This collection makes a significant intervention in our understanding of Shakespeare, the Bible, and the role of textual materiality in the construction of cultural authority. Departing from conventional source study, it questions the often naturalized links between the Shakespearean and biblical corpora, examining instead the historically contingent ways these links have been forged. The volume brings together leading scholars in Shakespeare, book history, and the Bible as literature, whose essays converge on the question of Scripture as source versus Scripture as process¿whether that scripture is biblical or Shakespearean¿and in turn explore themes such as cultural authority, pedagogy, secularism, textual scholarship, and the materiality of texts. Covering an historical span from Shakespeare¿s post-Reformation era to present-day Northern Ireland, the volume uncovers how Shakespeare and the Bible¿s intertwined histories illuminate the enduring tensions between materiality and transcendence in the history of the book.

This book considers early modern and postmodern ideals of health, vigor, ability, beauty, well-being, and happiness, uncovering the complex negotiations among physical embodiment, emotional response, and communally-sanctioned behavior in Shakespeare's world. It visits the history of the body and how early modern cultures understand physical ability or vigor, emotional competence or satisfaction, and joy or self-fulfillment. Integrating insights from Disability Studies, Health Studies, and Happiness Studies, this book develops a detailed literary-historical analysis and a provocative cultural argument about the emphasis we place on popular notions of fitness and contentment today.

This collection considers issues that have emerged in Early Modern Studies in the past fifteen years relating to understandings of mind and body in ShakespeareΓÇÖs world. Informed by The Body in Parts, the essays in this book respond also to the notion of an early modern ΓÇÿbody-mindΓÇÖ in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries are understood in terms of bodily parts and cognitive processes. What might the impact of such understandings be on our picture of ShakespeareΓÇÖs theatre or on our histories of the early modern period, broadly speaking? This book provides a wide range of approaches to this challenge, covering histories of cognition, studies of early modern stage practices, textual studies, and historical phenomenology, as well as new cultural histories by some of the key proponents of this approach at the present time. Because of the breadth of material covered, full weight is given to issues that are hotly debated at the present time within Shakespeare Studies: presentist scholarship is presented alongside more historically-focused studies, for example, and phenomenological studies of material culture are included along with close readings of texts. What the contributors have in common is a refusal to read the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries either psychologically or materially; instead, these essays address a willingness to study early modern phenomena (like the Elizabethan stage) as manifesting an early modern belief in the embodiment of cognition.

This book sets out to explore the ways in which Mary Wroth negotiated the discourses that are embedded in the Shakespearean canon in order to develop an understanding of her oeuvre based, not on influence and imitation, but on difference, originality and innovation.

Drawing on theories of play and adaptation, Playfulness in Shakespearean Adaptations demonstrates how the practices of Shakespearean adaptations are frequently products of playful, and sometimes irreverent, engagements that allow new `Shakespeares¿ to emerge, revealing Shakespeare¿s ongoing impact in popular culture.

Visiting scenes of greeting, feeding, entertaining, and sheltering, this volume focuses on hospitality in Shakespeare¿s work, demonstrating how hospitality provides a compelling frame for the core ethical, political, theological, and ecological questions of Shakespeare¿s and our time. By reading the plays in conjunction with contemporary theory as well as early modern texts and objects, this book reimagines Shakespeare¿s playworld as one charged with the risks of hosting and the limits of generosity, demonstrating the importance of historicist, rhetorical, and phenomenological approaches to this diverse subject.

This volume gives Asia''s Shakespeares the critical, theoretical, and political space they demand, offering rich, alternative ways of thinking about Asia, Shakespeare, and Asian Shakespeare based on Asian experiences and histories. Challenging and supplementing the dominant critical and theoretical structures that determine Shakespeare studies today, close analysis of Shakespeare''s Asian journeys, critical encounters, cultural geographies, and the political complexions of these negotiations reveal perspectives different to the European. Exploring what Shakespeare has done to Asia along with what Asia has done with Shakespeare, this book demonstrates how Shakespeare helps articulate Asianess, unfolding Asia''s past, reflecting Asia''s present, and projecting Asia''s future. This is achieved by forgoing the myth of the Bard''s universality, bypassing the authenticity test, avoiding merely descriptive or even ethnographic accounts, and using caution when applying Western theoretical frameworks. Many of the productions studied in this volume are brought to critical attention for the first time, offering new methodologies and approaches across disciplines including history, philosophy, sociology, geopolitics, religion, postcolonial studies, psychology, translation theory, film studies, and others. The volume explores a range of examples, from exquisite productions infused with ancient aesthetic traditions to popular teen manga and television drama, from state-dictated appropriations to radical political commentaries in areas including Japan, India, Taiwan, Korea, Indonesia, China, and the Philippines. This book goes beyond a showcasing of Asian adaptations in various languages, styles, and theatre traditions, and beyond introductory essays intended to help an unknowing audience appreciate Asian performances, developing a more inflected interpretative dialogue with other areas of Shakespeare studies.

In this interdisciplinary book, scholars from English literature, Italian studies, performance history, and comparative literature offer new perspectives on the engagements between Shakespeare and Italian theatre, literary culture, and politics, from the 16th to the 21stcentury. Essays address how the artistic and intellectual culture of Renaissance Italy shaped Shakespeare¿s drama in his own time, and how the afterlife of Shakespeare in Italy has permeated Italian drama, poetry, opera, novels, and film. This book moves beyond conventional source study and familiar questions about influence, location, and adaptation to propose a new, evolving paradigm of cultural interchange.