Contemporary Interpretations of Shakespeare – serie

This book examines six plays by Shakespeare ("Love's Labour's Lost", "Hamlet", "As You Like It", "Twelfth Night", "The Winter's Tale" and "The Tempest") as dramatizations of the Renaissance Court in its developing history - a history searched by Shakespeare to disclose its most characteristic gains and losses. For these plays do not simply celebrate Tudor and Stuart rule: they scrutinize it too, in the centre of its institutional theatre of power, the Court. This book shows how, if the plays came into Court, the Court also came into the plays, with its most salient features - its competitiveness, its inner tensions and its contradictions, its language, its cultural life and its entertainments - exposed to the scrutiny of an art-form that proved itself to be a new mode of historical understanding.

Theatre has never been afraid to adapt, rewrite and contemporize Shakespeare's drama, since theatre by definition is a living medium involving a corporate creativity. Shakespeare himself rewrote or adapted old plays and stories, and since being written his dramas have experienced many transformations. Recent dramatists, following this age-old tradition, have rewritten some of Shakespeare's plays for the contemporary stage or modelled their drama on formulations used by him. In this book, Professor Scott examines a selection of such plays written in the last 40 years. They include Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot", Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" and Ionesco's "Macbeth". Edward Bond's "Lear", Arnold Wesker's "The Merchant" and Charles Marowitz's "Collages" represent an attempt by some modern dramatists to challenge a particular ideology which appears to have appropriated Shakespeare to itself. The book concludes with an examination of some recent trends in Shakespearean production, particularly by the Royal Shakespeare Company.Michael Scott's previous publications include "Renaissance Drama and a Modern Audience", "'Antony and Cleopatra' - Text and Performance", "John Marston's Plays", "Harold Pinter: 'The Birthday Party', 'The Caretaker' and 'The Homecoming': A Casebook". He is the general editor of Macmillan's "Text and Performance" and "The Critics Debate".