Performing Shakespeare in Europe

Triaging Shakespeare

Dear Ben, I just got the reviews back on my grant proposal for Hamlet, the new play I was telling you about. I applied to the National Institutes of Health in America this time—the RFA said they’re interested in creative new ideas and all that rot but they’re just as conservative as here in England. It wasn’t even discussed! I’ll wager it was those scoundrels Beaumont and Fletcher that sank it....

Melville / Shakespeare

That Melville's Moby Dick contains nearly measureless references to the reading of Shakespeare is an old story featuring the whaling epic's persistent Shakespearean verbal echoes, the composition and sequencing of scenes, and the construction of Ahab as a tragic hero-villain, his shipmen as "knights and squires" and heroic commoners all caught in a tragic drama of the excesses and shortcomings ...

Shakespeare in the Weimar Republic

Underwater Women in Shakespeare Films

In his paper, "Underwater Women in Shakespeare Films," Charles Ross looks at the film tradition of representing the social oppression of women by scenes submersion, a trope that has its literary roots in the classics, the French Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the novel. Ross argues that unlike classic directors such as Kurosawa, Kozintsev, and Polanski, modern filmmakers not only like to enh...

Shakespeare, Text and Paratext

The early modern dramatic paratext is a rich and varied repository of tributes to patrons and readers, where dramatists negotiated or parodied their attitudes towards dramatic publication and their reliance on the medium of print as a source of income and literary reputation. However, the lack of signed dedications or addresses to the reader in the early editions of Shakespeare’s plays has defl...