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This open access study offers queer readings of 10 key film productions of Shakespeare plays from the past 80 years.A range of mainstream and independent English language film productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Twelfth Night, and The Merchant of Venice take centre stage in Queering the Shakespeare Film. This study critiques the various representations of the queer – broadly understood as that which is at odds with what has been deemed to be the normal, the legitimate, and the dominant, particularly, but not exclusively, as regards sexual matters - in the Shakespeare film. The movies chosen for analysis correspond deliberately with those Shakespeare plays that, as written texts, have been subjected to a great deal of productive study in a queer context since the beginnings of queer theory in the early 1990s. Thus the book extends the ongoing queer discussion of these written texts to their counterpart cinematic texts. Queering the Shakespeare Film is a much-needed alternative and complementary critical history of the Shakespeare film genre.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-ND licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Knowledge Unlatched.

Shakespeare and Digital Pedagogy is an international collection of fresh digital approaches for teaching Shakespeare. It describes 15 methodologies, resources and tools recently developed, updated and used by a diverse range of contributors in Great Britain, Australia, Asia and the United States. Contributors explore how these digital resources meet classroom needs and help facilitate conversations about academic literacy, race and identity, local and global cultures, performance and interdisciplinary thought. Chapters describe each case study in depth, recounting needs, collaborations and challenges during design, as well as sharing effective classroom uses and offering accessible, usable content for both teachers and learners.The book will appeal to a broad range of readers. College and high school instructors will find a rich trove of usable teaching content and suggestions for mounting digital units in the classroom, while digital humanities and education specialists will find a snapshot of and theories about the field itself. With access to exciting new content from local archives and global networks, the collection aids teaching, research and reflection on Shakespeare for the 21st century.

In 1603, Queen Elizabeth I died and King James I inherited the English throne. During James’s reign, England continued to hark back to Elizabeth, comparing him with his predecessor – not always in a way that was either flattering or pleasing to James. Critics have traditionally assumed that Shakespeare avoided involving himself in this discourse. In this study of Shakespeare's Jacobean plays, however, Yuichi Tsukada demonstrates that, far from not involving himself in the phenomenon of nostalgia for Elizabeth, Shakespeare interacted closely with retrospective writings on Elizabeth and illuminated the complex politics behind the nostalgia. Based upon close readings of Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Cymbeline and Henry VIII, together with a range of plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries, including Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, George Chapman, John Marston, Thomas Middleton and Ben Jonson, the book traces the ongoing cultural negotiation of the memory of Elizabeth.Yuichi Tsukada offers fresh insights into enigmatic aspects of Shakespeare’s Jacobean drama. For instance, what was the original significance of the two contentious prophecies – 'none of woman born' and the march of Birnam Wood – in Macbeth? Or that of the seemingly out-of-place triumphal procession of Volumnia near the tragic end of Coriolanus? Although her memory recurred in all forms of discourse throughout the first decade of James’s reign, the impact of this cultural undercurrent on Shakespeare’s Jacobean drama has been ignored or underestimated. Shakespeare and the Politics of Nostalgia reveals the unnoticed richness of Shakespeare’s Jacobean drama by focusing on the growing cultural and political nostalgia for England’s dead queen.

Deanne Williams offers the very first study of the medieval and early modern girl actor. Whereas previous histories of the actress begin with the Restoration, this book demonstrates that the girl is actually a well-documented category of performer and a key participant in the drama of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It explores evidence of the girl actor in archival records of payment, eyewitness accounts, stage directions, paintings, and in the plays and masques that were explicitly composed for girls, and, in some cases, by them.Contradicting previous scholarly assumptions about the early modern stage as male-dominated, this evidence reveals girls’ participation in medieval religious drama, Tudor civic pageants and royal entries, Elizabethan country house entertainments, and Stuart court and household masques. This book situates its historical study of the girl actor within the wider contexts of 'girl culture', including girls as singers, translators and authors. By examining the impact of the girl actor on constructions of girlhood in the work of Shakespeare – whose girl characters register and evoke the power of the performing girl – Girl Culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance argues that girls’ dramatic, musical and literary performances actively shaped medieval and early modern culture. It shows how the active presence and participation of girls shaped medieval and Renaissance culture, and it reveals how some of its best-known literary and dramatic texts address, represent, and reflect upon girl children, not as an imagined ideal, but as a lived reality.

This book provides readers with the tools to unravel the complexities of one of the most difficult sonnet sequences, introducing them to the literary tradition, themes, stylistic features and cultural contexts of the genre and the collection, and offering close readings of more than 100 sonnets.This combined approach enables readers not only to disentangle the complex relationships of the poems’ characters but also to appreciate their philosophical, sensual, topical and subversive qualities.Of the book’s two sections, the first, ‘Contexts and Forms’, includes chapters on the sonnet tradition, early publication history, the structural features of the sequence and the Shakespearean sonnet, as well as the main characteristics of the dramatis personae. The second section, ‘Themes’, consists of 5 chapters and explores the theme clusters that can be identified throughout the sequence (preservation, writing, desire, deception, imagination). Additional features of the book include a step-by-step approach to a Shakespeare sonnet, a model interpretation of a sonnet, as well as charts and tables identifying and summarizing the sequence’s mini-narratives, groups, addressees and themes. For easy reference, the sonnets discussed in the book are cross-referenced and listed in the index, which also includes key terms and names of works and people. Suggestions for further reading are provided at the end of each chapter, and the annotated bibliography includes brief descriptions of the most useful works for further study.

Early modern English theatre provides countless examples of the tropes and feelings we associate with the horror genre. Depictions of obscenity and violence designed to elicit a mixture of loathing, fear, repugnance, shock, awe, and desire in their audiences abound. From the bodily mutilations of Titus Andronicus, to the demonic, ghostly, and psychological terrors of Macbeth and Hamlet, to the sensory shocks of torture and imprisonment within The Duchess of Malfi. This collection of essays argues that the horror genre as we know it should be extended back to the 16th century to include classic early modern plays from A Midsummer Night's Dream to The Witch of Edmonton.Contributors plot a new theory of horror through its roots as a conscious and complex generic mode in the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century. Drawing together essays on topics such as bodily torture and experimentation, necrophilia and decomposition, psychological and supernatural torment, scholars critically engage with categories such as tragedy, comedy, parody, and folk horror. The volume offers new interpretations of both famous and obscure early modern plays, and places them in conversation with contemporary horror films like Midsommar, The Wicker Man, The Substance, and the works of David Cronenberg, providing a new route into the burgeoning field of early modern horror for scholars and students.

Silvia Bigliazzi explores the dynamics between the individual and the collective in 16th century English tragedies in this vibrant study of the chorus in early modern tragedy. Employing a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, Bigliazzi examines the performative, political and cultural implications of chorality in early modern English tragedy over five decades.From the first English language translations of Seneca’s play, Troas, Horace’s Ars Poetica, and the reinvention of the Italo-Euripidean Jocasta to the use of prologue in plays like Romeo and Juliet and Pericles, Bigliazzi traces the appearance and transformation of the ancient Graeco-Roman chorus in early modern English theatre between the late 1590s to the mid-1590s. Through a reinterpretation of the ancient threnos/kommos and female lament to a regendering of collective or choric mourning in tragedies such as David and Bethsabe, Tamburlaine, Richard III and Romeo and Juliet. A nuanced understanding of tragedy and the politics of gendered choral performance emerges through a complex reworking of ancient models, where the essence of tragic drama was rooted in the interplay between the chorus and individual characters. From the early Inns of Court drama to Shakespeare, this study reveals a fresh understanding of early modern tragedy as part of a thrilling encounter between the ancient and the new.

Long held as Britain's 'national poet', Shakespeare’s role in the 2012 London Cultural Olympiad confirmed his status as a global icon in the modern world. From his prominent positioning in the Olympic and Paralympic ceremonies, to his major presence in the cultural programme surrounding the Games, including the Royal Shakespeare Company's World Shakespeare Festival and the Globe's Globe to Globe Festival, Shakespeare played a major role in the way the UK presented itself to its citizens and to the world.This collection explores the cultural forces at play in the construction, use and reception of Shakespeare during the 2012 Olympic Moment, considering what his presence says about culture, politics and identity in twenty-first century British and global life.

This book's underlying claim is that English Renaissance tragedy addresses live issues in the experience of readers and spectators today: it is not a genre to be studied only for aesthetic or “heritage” reasons. The book considers the way in which tragedy in general, and English Renaissance tragedy in particular, addresses ideas of freedom, understood both from an individual and a sociopolitical perspective. Tragedy since the Greeks has addressed the constraints and necessities to which human life is subject (Fate, the gods, chance, the conflict between state and individual) as well as the human desire for autonomy and self-direction. In short, English Renaissance Tragedy: Ideas of Freedom shows how the tragic drama of Shakespeare’s age addresses problems of freedom, slavery, and tyranny in ways that speak to us now.