This volume, with a foreword by Dennis Kennedy, addresses a range of attitudes to Shakespeare's English history plays in Britain and abroad from the early seventeenth century to the present day. It concentrates on the play texts as well as productions, translations and adaptations of them. The essays explore the multiple points of intersection between the English history they recount and the experience of British and other national cultures, establishing the plays as genres not only relevant to the political and cultural history of Britain but also to the history of nearly every nation worldwide. The plays have had a rich international reception tradition but critics and theatre historians abroad, those practising 'foreign' Shakespeare, have tended to ignore these plays in favour of the comedies and tragedies. By presenting the British and foreign Shakespeare traditions side by side, this volume seeks to promote a more finely integrated world Shakespeare.

How and why did Victorian culture make Shakespeare into a literary deity and his work into a secular Bible?

The idea of Shakespearean genius and sublimity is usually understood to be a product of the Romantic period, promulgated by poets such as Coleridge and Byron who promoted Shakespeare as the supreme example of literary genius and creative imagination. However, the picture looks very different when viewed from the perspective of the myriad theater directors, actors, poets, political philosophers, gallery owners, and other professionals in the nineteenth century who turned to Shakespeare to advance their own political, artistic, or commercial interests. Often, as in John Kemble’s staging of The Winter’s Tale at Drury Lane or John Boydell’s marketing of paintings in his Shakespeare Gallery, Shakespeare provided a literal platform on which both artists and entrepreneurs could strive to influence cultural tastes and points of view. At other times, Romantic writers found in Shakespeare’s works a set of rhetorical and theatrical tools through which to form their own public personae, both poetic and political. Women writers in particular often adapted Shakespeare to express their own political and social concerns. Taken together, all of these critical and aesthetic responses attest to the remarkable malleability of the Shakespearean corpus in the Romantic period. As the contributors show, Romantic writers of all persuasions”Whig and Tory, male and female, intellectual and commercial”found in Shakespeare a powerful medium through which to claim authority for their particular interests.

Focusing on England, Hungary and on some other European countries, the book explores the latent religious patterns in the appropriation of Shakespeare from the 1769 Stratford Jubilee to the tercentenary of Shakespeare's birth in 1864. It shows how the Shakespeare cult used quasi-religious (verbal and ritual) means of reverence, how it made use of some romantic notions, and how the ensuing quasi-transcendental authority was utilized for political purposes. The book suggests a theoretical framework and a comprehensive anthropological context for the interpretation of literature.

This book offers a collection of essays on Shakespeare's life and works in popular forms and media.

This volume contains a collection of essays on Shakespeare Jubilees around the world, from 1769 to 2014. The contributions range from the elaborate celebrations in Shakespeare's hometown to more modest festivities elsewhere; and from ambitious, theatrical, and politically loaded demonstrations to nationally colored, culturally distinct, and idiosyncratic commemorations. The variety of ways in which geographically distant countries have remembered Shakespeare has never before been the object of a comparative study. The book's essays will throw new light on Shakespeare as a shared international heritage. (Series: Studies on English Literature / Studien zur englischen Literatur - Vol. 27) [Subject: Literary Studies, Shakespearean Studies, Theater Studies]

Table of contents

This companion is the first book of its kind to focus on the whole of European Romanticism. Describes the way in which the Romantic Movement swept across Europe in the early nineteenth century. Covers the national literatures of France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia and Spain. Addresses common themes that cross national borders, such as orientalism, Napoleon, night, nature, and the prestige of the fragment. Includes cross-disciplinary essays on literature and music, literature and painting, and the general system of Romantic arts. Features 35 essays in all, from leading scholars in America, Australia, Britain, France, Italy, and Switzerland.

With Shakespeare's Eyes is the first monograph to focus exclusively on the relationship between the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin and Shakespeare. Taking into account contemporary perceptions of Shakespeare in print and on the Russian stage, O'Neil examines all levels of poetic influence of Shakespeare on Pushkin. In addition to untangling the central presence of Shakespeare on Pushkin's historical tragedy 'Boris Godunov'. O'Neil examines Shakepeare's influence in many other works by Pushkin, an influence that ranges from the textual to the conceptual. The Shakespeare plays addressed most closely in this book are 'Othello', 'Measure for Measure', and 'Julius Ceasar', all of which interact in a dynamic way with Pushkin's creative development. This book will help English readers understand better what it means to say Pushkin is 'the Shakespeare of Russia.' Catherine O'Neil is Assistant Professor of Russian at the University of Denver.

"This volume's main focus is on the ways in which, over the past 400 years, Shakespeare has played a role of significance within a European framework, particularly where a series of political events and ideologically based developments were concerned, such as the early modern wars of religion, the emergence of "the nation" during the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the First and Second World Wars, the process of European unification during the 1990s, the attack on the World Trade Center in New York, and Britain's participation in the war in Iraq." "The whole of the collection and particularly the opening section clearly invites a European and even a global perspective." "This book convincingly demonstrates that Shakespeare, both at the level of his meaning in his own time and at that of his reception in later ages, should no longer be studied only in relation to particular nations, but as Dirk Delabastita argues, also at various supranational levels." --Book Jacket.