Katherine Steele Brokaw – författare

The term “secular” inspires thinking about disenchantment, periodization, modernity, and subjectivity. The essays in Sacred and Secular Transactions in the Age of Shakespeare argue that Shakespeare’s plays present “secularization” not only as a historical narrative of progress but also as a hermeneutic process that unleashes complex and often problematic transactions between sacred and secular. These transactions shape ideas about everything from pastoral government and performative language to wonder and the spatial imagination.Thinking about Shakespeare and secularization also involves thinking about how to interpret history and temporality in the contexts of Shakespeare’s medieval past, the religious reformations of the sixteenth century, and the critical dispositions that define Shakespeare studies today. These essays reject a necessary opposition between “sacred” and “secular” and instead analyze how such categories intersect. In fresh analyses of plays ranging from Hamlet and The Tempest to All’s Well that Ends Well and All Is True, secularization emerges as an interpretive act that explores the cultural protocols of representation within both Shakespeare’s plays and the critical domains in which they are studied and taught.The volume’s diverse disciplinary perspectives and theoretical approaches shift our focus from literal religion and doctrinal issues to such aspects of early modern culture as theatrical performance, geography, race, architecture, music, and the visual arts.

The term “secular” inspires thinking about disenchantment, periodization, modernity, and subjectivity. The essays in Sacred and Secular Transactions in the Age of Shakespeare argue that Shakespeare’s plays present “secularization” not only as a historical narrative of progress but also as a hermeneutic process that unleashes complex and often problematic transactions between sacred and secular. These transactions shape ideas about everything from pastoral government and performative language to wonder and the spatial imagination.Thinking about Shakespeare and secularization also involves thinking about how to interpret history and temporality in the contexts of Shakespeare’s medieval past, the religious reformations of the sixteenth century, and the critical dispositions that define Shakespeare studies today. These essays reject a necessary opposition between “sacred” and “secular” and instead analyze how such categories intersect. In fresh analyses of plays ranging from Hamlet and The Tempest to All’s Well that Ends Well and All Is True, secularization emerges as an interpretive act that explores the cultural protocols of representation within both Shakespeare’s plays and the critical domains in which they are studied and taught.The volume’s diverse disciplinary perspectives and theoretical approaches shift our focus from literal religion and doctrinal issues to such aspects of early modern culture as theatrical performance, geography, race, architecture, music, and the visual arts.

Given the many environmental crises facing the planet, we need to use all tools to address them, including Shakespearean theatre. This Element explains why Shakespeare is well-positioned to be an eco-playwright, how theatre-makers can adapt his plays to matter now, and how to make more ecological the many processes of Shakespearean theatre, from set design to performing outdoors. The co-authors are both directors, and conversations between them about their recent eco-productions of The Tempest for the Royal Shakespeare Company and A Midsummer Night's Dream for Shakespeare in Yosemite (California) give clear examples of both the why and how of eco-theatrical Shakespeare.

‘I wish I had copies like this at Drama School. Essential notes on the language for those who will get up and speak it, not purely for those who will sit and study it. An incredibly useful tool with room on every page to make notes. Next time I’m in rehearsal on a Shakespeare play, I have no doubt that a copy from this series will be in my hand.’ ADRIAN LESTER, Actor, Director and WriterArden Performance Editions are ideal for anyone engaging with a Shakespeare play in performance. With clear facing-page notes giving definitions of words, easily accessible information about key textual variants, lineation, metrical ambiguities and pronunciation, each edition has been developed to open the play’s possibilities and meanings to actors and students.Each edition offers: -Facing-page notes -Short, clear definitions of words-Easily accessible information about key textual variants-Notes on pronunciation of difficult names and unfamiliar words-An easy to read layout -Space to write notes -A short introduction to the play

In Staging Harmony, Katherine Steele Brokaw reveals how the relationship between drama, music, and religious change across England's long sixteenth century moved religious discourse to more moderate positions. It did so by reproducing the complex personal attachments, nostalgic overtones, and bodily effects that allow performed music to evoke the feeling, if not always the reality, of social harmony. Brokaw demonstrates how theatrical music from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries contributed to contemporary discourses on the power and morality of music and its proper role in religious life, shaping the changes made to church music as well as people's reception of those changes. In representing social, affective, and religious life in all its intricacy, and in unifying auditors in shared acoustic experiences, staged musical moments suggested the value of complexity, resolution, and compromise rather than oversimplified, absolutist binaries worth killing or dying for.The theater represented the music of the church's present and past. By bringing medieval and early Tudor drama into conversation with Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Brokaw uncovers connections and continuities across diverse dramatic forms and demonstrates the staying power of musical performance traditions. In analyzing musical practices and discourses, theological debates, devotional practices, and early staging conditions, Brokaw offers new readings of well-known plays (Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare's The Tempest and The Winter's Tale) as well as Tudor dramas by playwrights including John Bale, Nicholas Udall, and William Wager.

This book explores how productions of Shakespearean plays create meaning in specific communities, with special attention to issues of access, adaptation, and activism.