Celebrating Shakespeare

On the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, this collection opens up the social practices of commemoration to new research and analysis. An international team of leading scholars explores a broad spectrum of celebrations, showing how key events - such as the Easter Rising in Ireland, the Second Vatican Council of 1964 and the Great Exhibition of 1851 - drew on Shakespeare to express political agendas. In the USA, commemoration in 1864 counted on him to symbolise unity transcending the Civil War, while the First World War pulled the 1916 anniversary celebration into the war effort, enlisting Shakespeare as patriotic poet. The essays also consider how the dream of Shakespeare as a rural poet took shape in gardens, how cartoons challenged the poet's élite status and how statues of him mutated into advertisements for gin and Disney cartoons. Richly varied illustrations supplement these case studies of the diverse, complex and contradictory aims of memorialising Shakespeare.

This book explores how Shakespeare is still alive as a global cultural icon, on the 400th anniversary of his death.

This original, witty, illustrated study offers the first analytical history of the rise and development of literary tourism in nineteenth-century Britain, associated with authors from Shakespeare, Gray, Keats, Burns and Scott, the Brontë sisters, and Thomas Hardy. Invaluable for the student of travel and literature of the nineteenth century.

"The year 2016 marks four hundred years since the death of William Shakespeare. To honour this milestone, the Fisher Library is mounting an exhibition commemorating the anniversary. The catalogue explores how Shakespeare's works shaped ideas of the world beyond England, how his plays imagined self and other through language, geography and mythology and how, in turn, the production of atlases, dictionaries, and histories influenced Shakespeare's world-making art. Highlights will include a selection of Shakespeare's printed plays and poems, from the First Folio of 1623 through to recent craft productions, including the sumptuous Play of Pericles (2009-2010) from British Columbia's Barbarian Press. In addition, the exhibition will feature early source material such as Holinshed's Chronicles (1587) and Plutarch's Lives (1579) along with a range of Renaissance genres and forms, from maps to Bibles to works of poetry, anatomy and heraldry. Later editions of Shakespeare and experiments with his works will also be prominently featured in the exhibition and accompanying catalogue."--

This essay collection examines the Shakespearian culture of Cold War Europe - Germany, France, UK, USSR, Poland, Spain and Hungary - from 1947/8 to the end of the 1970s. Written by international Shakespearians who are also scholars of the Cold War, the essays assembled here consider representative events, productions and performances as cultural politics, international diplomacy and sites of memory, and show how they inform our understanding of the political, economic, even military, dynamics of the post-war global order. The volume explores the political and cultural function of Shakespearian celebration and commemoration, but it also acknowledges the conflicts they generated across the European Cold War ‘theatre’, examining the impact of Cold War politics on Shakespearian performance, criticism and scholarship. Drawing on archival material, and presenting its sources both in their original language and in translation, it offers historically and theoretically nuanced accounts of Shakespeare’s international significance in the divided world of Cold War Europe, and its legacy today.

Shakespeare in Canada is the result of a collective desire to explore the role that Shakespeare has played in Canada over the past two hundred years, but also to comprehend the way our country’s culture has influenced our interpretation of his literary career and heritage. What function does Shakespeare serve in Canada today? How has he been reconfigured in different ways for particular Canadian contexts? The authors of this book attempt to answer these questions while imagining what the future might hold for William Shakespeare in Canada. Covering the Stratford Festival, the cult CBC television program Slings and Arrows, major Canadian critics such as Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan, the influential acting teacher Neil Freiman, the rise of Québécois and First Nation approaches to Shakespeare, and Shakespeare’s place in secondary schools today, this collection reflects the diversity and energy of Shakespeare’s afterlife in Canada. Collectively, the authors suggest that Shakespeare continues to offer Canadians “remembrance of ourselves.” This is a refreshingly original and impressive contribution to Shakespeare studies—a considerable achievement in any work on the history of one of the central figures in the western literary canon.

The worldwide commemorations of the three-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare's death were held amid the global upheaval of the First World War. As empires battled for world domination and nations sought self-determination, diverse communities vied to claim Shakespeare as their own, to underpin their sense of collective identity and cohesion. Unearthing previously unknown Tercentenary events in Europe, the British Empire, and the USA, Monika Smialkowska demonstrates that the 1916 Shakespeare commemorators did not speak with one unified voice. Tributes by marginalised social, ethnic, and racial groups often challenged the homogenising narratives of the official celebrations. Rather than the traditionally patriotic Bard, used to support totalising versions of national or imperial identity, this study reveals Shakespeare as a site of debate and contestation, in which diverse voices – local and global, nationalist and universalist, militant and pacifist – combined and clashed in a fascinating, open-ended dialogue.