Playing Shakespeare’s Characters - Böcker

Playing Shakespeare’s Lovers examines Shakespeare’s romantic characters from multiple perspectives. Contributing actors, directors, educators and scholars bring diverse and wide-ranging insights into the motives, context, history and challenges of performing Shakespeare’s "infinite variety" of lovers. The volume begins with an introductory essay, followed by brief essays and interviews, on various characters within the world of Shakespeare’s lovers.

The essays in Playing Shakespeare’s Villains trouble our assumptions of what—and who—constitutes "villainy" in Shakespeare’s works, through probing and provocative analyses of the murky moral logics at play in the Bard’s oeuvre. Shakespeare spreads before us a panoply of evil, villainy, and amorality—of characters doing bad things for good reasons, bad things for bad reasons, and bad things for no reason at all. How does Shakespeare handle culpability and consequence? How much does he justify his villains’ actions? How much do we enjoy watching people get away with murder and mayhem? What are we to make of the moral universe that Shakesperare presents: a universe in which some villains are punished and others seem to be rewarded; where mischief can quickly turn violent; and where an entire world can be brought down by someone’s willful insistence on having one’s way? Questions like these animate the discussions in this lively volume, the second in the Playing Shakespeare’s Characters series.

Playing Shakespeare’s Monarchs and Madmen is the third volume in the Peter Lang series, Playing Shakespeare’s Characters. As in the previous volumes, a broad range of contributors (actors, directors, scholars, educators, etc.) analyze the concepts of monarchy, leadership, melancholy and madness with not only references to Elizabethan and Jacobean studies, but also to Trump, Brexit, cross-gender and multi-cultural casting. What does it mean to “play the king” in the 21st century? What is the role of an “all-licensed” Fool in the age of spin? Who gets to represent the power dynamics in Shakespeare’s plays? This volume looks at the Henrys, Richards, Hamlets, Lears and various other dukes and monarchs and explores the ways in which men—and women—approach these portrayals of power and the lessons they hold for us today.

Playing Shakespeare’s Beautiful People is an in-depth, comprehensive look at the concepts and standards of "beauty" found in Shakespeare’s plays and poems, both in staged performances and in critical literary analyses. Issues as challenging as race, gender, sex, and power come into play when discussing who or what is "beautiful" in Shakespeare — and who gets to make that determination. How do we address or perform "beauty" today in a manner that is both consistent with 21st century conceptions of diversity and equity, while still honoring the integrity of Shakespeare’s texts, even as we interrogate them?In this volume, the fifth in the series of Playing Shakespeare’s Characters, ten distinguished contributors, including Shakespearean scholars, art historians, playwrights, actors, philosophers, visual artists, and educators, bring their unique and provocative responses to Shakespeare’s challenge for us to "look on beauty."