In this study of Shakespeare's visual culture Frederick Kiefer looks at the personified characters created by Shakespeare in his plays, his walking, talking abstractions. These include Rumour in 2 Henry IV, Time in The Winter's Tale, Spring and Winter in Love's Labour's Lost, Revenge in Titus Andronicus, and the deities in the late plays. All these personae take physical form on the stage: the actors performing the roles wear distinctive attire and carry appropriate props. The book seeks to reconstruct the appearance of Shakespeare's personified characters; to explain the symbolism of their costumes and props; and to assess the significance of these symbolic characters for the plays in which they appear. To accomplish this reconstruction, Kiefer brings together a wealth of visual and literary evidence including engravings, woodcuts, paintings, drawings, tapestries, emblems, civic pageants, masques, poetry and plays. The book contains over forty illustrations of personified characters in Shakespeare's time.

As a regular reviewer for Shakespeare Survey and the BBC, Holland has examined the variety, the strengths and the problems of English productions. His introductory chapter points to themes which are taken up in the detailed accounts that follow: the size and scale of different theatres, the difficulties of over-familiarity, the power of director's theatre, the possibilities of design, the excitement of new actors, the discoveries of regionalism and the variety of playing spaces in which Shakespeare is performed. The main part of the book is a chronological account of productions which charts the work of several English companies, including the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal National Theatre, Cheek by Jowl, Northern Broadsides and the English Shakespeare Company. A final chapter compares the English experience with productions elsewhere, including America, France, Germany and Russia.

Drawing on the poetics of intertextuality and profiting from the more recent concepts of cultural mobility and permeability between cultures in the early modern period, this volume’s tripartite structure considers the relationship between Renaissance material arts, theatre, and emblems as an integrated and intermedial genre, explores the use and function of Italian visual culture in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, and questions the appropriation of the arts in the production of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. An afterword, a rich bibliography of primary and secondary literature, and a detailed Index round off the volume.

Bringing together methods, assumptions and approaches from a variety of disciplines, Geraldo U. de Sousa's innovative study explores the representation, perception, and function of the house, home, household, and family life in Shakespeare's great tragedies. Concentrating on King Lear, Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth, de Sousa's examination of the home provides a fresh look at material that has been the topic of fierce debate. Through a combination of textual readings and a study of early modern housing conditions, accompanied by analyses that draw on anthropology, architecture, art history, the study of material culture, social history, theater history, phenomenology, and gender studies, this book demonstrates how Shakespeare explores the materiality of the early modern house and evokes domestic space to convey interiority, reflect on the habits of the mind, interrogate everyday life, and register elements of the tragic journey. Specific topics include the function of the disappearance of the castle in King Lear, the juxtaposition of home-centered life in Venice and nomadic, 'unhoused' wandering in Othello, and the use of special lighting effects to reflect this relationship, Hamlet's psyche in response to physical space, and the redistribution of domestic space in Macbeth. Images of the house, home, and household become visually and emotionally vibrant, and thus reflect, define, and support a powerful tragic narrative.

Can postmodern accounts of the gaze - deriving from the psychoanalytic theories of Freud, Lacan, Fanon, and Riviere - tell us anything about those structures of vision prior to, and repressed by, modernity? Shakespeare's Visual Regime examines the tragedies, histories, and Roman plays for an emergent early modern spectatorial subject, thereby locating Shakespearean theatre within those discourses most crucial to the contemporary exposition and disruption of regimes of vision: perspective painting, cartography, optics, geometry, Puritan anti-theatrical polemic, and the occult.

This volume offers a comprehensive array of readings of 'skin' in Shakespeare's works, a term that embraces the human and animal, noun and verb. Shakespeare / Skin departs from previous studies as it deliberately and often explicitly engages with issues of social and racial justice. Each of the chapters interrogates and centres 'skin' in relation to areas of expertise that include performance studies, aesthetics, animal studies, religious studies, queer theory, Indigenous studies, history, food studies, border studies, postcolonial studies, Black feminism, disease studies and pedagogy. By considering contemporary understandings of skin, this volume examines how the literature of the early modern past creates paths to constructing racial hierarchies. With contributors from the USA, UK, South Africa, India, Sri Lanka, Singapore and Australia, chapters are informed by an array of histories, shedding light on how skin was understood in Shakespeare's time and at key moments during the past 400 years in different media and cultures. Chapters include considerations of plays such as Titus Andronicus, The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream, and work by Borderlands Theater, Los Colochos and Satyajit Ray, among many others. For researchers and instructors, this book will help to shape teaching and inform research through its modelling of antiracist critical practice. Collectively, the chapters in this collection allow us to consider how sustained attention to skin via cross-historical and innovative approaches can reveal to us the various uses of Shakespeare that shed light on the fraught nature of our interrelatedness. They set a path for readers to consider how much skin they have in the game when it comes to challenging structures of racism.

This book offers fresh, critical insights into Shakespeare in Hong Kong, Japan, and Taiwan. It recognises that Shakespeare in East Asian education is not confined to the classroom or lecture hall but occurs on diverse stages. It covers multiple aspects of education: policy, pedagogy, practice, and performance. Beyond researchers in these areas, this book is for those teaching and learning Shakespeare in the region, those teaching and learning English as an Additional Language anywhere in the world, and those making educational policies, resources, or theatre productions with young people in East Asia.

For close to two hundred years, the ideas of Shakespeare have inspired incredible work in the literature, fiction, theater, and cinema of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. From the novels of Lao She and Lin Shu to Lu Xun's search for a Chinese "Shakespeare," and from Feng Xiaogang's martial arts films to labor camp memoirs, Soviet-Chinese theater, Chinese opera in Europe, and silent film, Shakespeare has been put to work in unexpected places, yielding a rich trove of transnational imagery and paradoxical citations in popular and political culture. Chinese Shakespeares is the first book to concentrate on both Shakespearean performance and Shakespeare's appearance in Sinophone culture and their ambiguous relationship to the postcolonial question. Substantiated by case studies of major cultural events and texts from the first Opium War in 1839 to our times, Chinese Shakespeares theorizes competing visions of "China" and "Shakespeare" in the global cultural marketplace and challenges the logic of fidelity-based criticism and the myth of cultural exclusivity. In her critique of the locality and ideological investments of authenticity in nationalism, modernity, Marxism, and personal identities, Huang reveals the truly transformative power of Chinese Shakespeares.

The Oxford Handbooks to Shakespeare are designed to record past and present investigations and renewed and revised judgments by both familiar and younger Shakespeare specialists. Each of these volumes is edited by one or more internationally distinguished Shakespeareans; together, they comprehensively survey the entire field. Shakespearean performance criticism has firmly established itself as a discipline accessible to scholars and general readers alike. And just as performances of the plays expand audiences' understanding of how Shakespeare speaks to them, so performance criticism is continually shifting the contours of the discipline. The 36 contributions in this volume represent the most current approaches to Shakespeare in performance. They are divided into four parts. Part I explores how experimental modes of performance ensure Shakespeare's contemporaneity. Part II tackles the burgeoning field of reception: how and why audiences respond to performances as they do. Part III addresses the ways in which technology has revolutionized our access to Shakespeare, both through the mediums of film and sound recording and through digitalization. Part IV grapples with 'global' Shakespeare, considering matters of cultural appropriation in productions played for international audiences. Together, these ground-breaking essays attest to the richness and diversity of Shakespearean performance criticism as it is practiced today