Barbara Hodgdon – författare

Shakespeare, Performance and the Archive is a ground-breaking and movingly written exploration of what remains when actors evacuate the space and time of performance. An analysis of ‘leftovers’, it moves between tracking the politics of what is consciously archived and the politics of visible and invisible theatrical labour to trace the persistence of performance.

In this fascinating volume, Hodgdon considers how documents, material objects, sketches, drawings and photographs explore scenarios of action and behaviour – and embodied practices. Rather than viewing these leftovers as indexical signs of a theatrical past, Hodgdon argues that the work they do is neither strictly archival nor documentary but performative – that is, they serve as sites of re-performance.

Shakespeare, Performance and the Archive creates a deeply materialized historiography of performance and attempts to make that history do something entirely new.

Barbara Hodgdon is Professor of English at the University of Michigan, now retired. Her major interest is in theatrical performances, especially performed Shakespeare. She is the author of: The End Crowns All, The Shakespeare Trade, and most recently the Arden edition of The Taming of the Shrew.

Shakespeare, Performance and the Archive is a ground-breaking and movingly written exploration of what remains when actors evacuate the space and time of performance. An analysis of ‘leftovers’, it moves between tracking the politics of what is consciously archived and the politics of visible and invisible theatrical labour to trace the persistence of performance.

In this fascinating volume, Hodgdon considers how documents, material objects, sketches, drawings and photographs explore scenarios of action and behaviour – and embodied practices. Rather than viewing these leftovers as indexical signs of a theatrical past, Hodgdon argues that the work they do is neither strictly archival nor documentary but performative – that is, they serve as sites of re-performance.

Shakespeare, Performance and the Archive creates a deeply materialized historiography of performance and attempts to make that history do something entirely new.

Barbara Hodgdon is Professor of English at the University of Michigan, now retired. Her major interest is in theatrical performances, especially performed Shakespeare. She is the author of: The End Crowns All, The Shakespeare Trade, and most recently the Arden edition of The Taming of the Shrew.

In this bold reconceptualization of Shakespeare''s histories as plays that ultimately generate and seek to legitimize new kings, Barbara Hodgdon examines how closure contests as well as celebrates power relations dominant in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean society--particularly those between sovereign and subjects. Taking a broad view of closure as a developing process in which narrative structures, generic signs, and rhetorical conventions play contributory, and often contradictory, roles, she also considers how theatrical representations interpret, or reinterpret, closural features to recuperate and redirect their social energies. By giving special emphasis to theatrical reproduction as a form of textuality and to the intertextual relations between drama and other forms of history writing, Hodgdon situates performance as a type of new historicism and shows how theatrical productions, like critical discourse, participate in cultural work. Through a study of playtexts and selected performance texts, she negotiates between the critical and theatrical guises of Shakespeare to assess how past and present-day theatrical practice has appropriated his work to serve particular institutional and social practices.Originally published in 1991.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance provides a state-of-the-art engagement with the rapidly developing field of Shakespeare performance studies.

The Taming of the Shrew is unique among Shakespeare''s plays and is a perennial and compelling success in the theatre. Its reception is marked, however, by ongoing polarised debate over the meaning and worth of the play. This edition disengages Shakespeare''s exuberant and disturbing marital farce from the tangled history of its reception. It views the two sixteenth-century Shrew plays as textually independent but theatrically interdependent and so includes the full text of The Taming of A Shrew in an appendix.

While the Introduction and Commentary focus on the critical and theatrical debate surrounding the play, the original and comprehensive editing of the playtext makes available a ''different'' Shrew, more open to the reader''s interpretation than is usually the case. Barbara Hodgdon is a distinguished feminist scholar whose reading of the play offers a stimulating array of ideas and questions about this enduringly popular yet challenging comedy.