Popular Shakespeare

In recent years, the 'Popular Shakespeare' phenomenon has become ever more pervasive: in fringe productions, mainstream theatre, or the mass media, Shakespeare is increasingly constructed as an authentic part of popular culture. A vivid account of Shakespeare in performance since the 1990s, this book examines what 'Shakespeare' means to us today.

Shakespeare and Superman? Shakespeare and The Twilight Zone? Shakespeare and romance novels? What is Shakespeare doing in modern popular culture? In the first book-length study to consider the modern 'Shakespop' phenomenon broadly, Douglas Lanier examines how our conceptions of Shakespeare's works and his cultural status have been profoundly shapes by Shakespeare's diffuse presence in such popular forms as films, comic books, TV shows, mass-market fiction, children's books, kitsch, and advertising. Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture offers an overview of issues raised in Shakespeare's appropriation in twentieth-century popular culture, amd argues that Shakespeare's appearances in these media can be seen as a form of cultural theorizing, a means by which popular culture thinks through its relationship to high culture. Through a series of case studies, the book examines how popular culture actively constructs, contests, uses, and perpetuates Shakespeare's cultural authority.

Breaking new ground by considering productions of popular culture from above, rather than from below, this book draws on theorists of cultural studies, such as Pierre Bourdieu, Roger Chartier and John Fiske to synthesize work from disparate fields and present new readings of well-known literary works. Using the literature of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson, Mary Ellen Lamb investigates the social narratives of several social groups – an urban, middling group; an elite at the court of James; and an aristocratic faction from the countryside. She states that under the pressure of increasing economic stratification, these social fractions created cultural identities to distinguish themselves from each other – particularly from lower status groups. Focusing on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream and Merry Wives of Windsor, Spenser's Faerie Queene, and Jonson's Masque of Oberon, she explores the ways in which early modern literature formed a particularly productive site of contest for deep social changes, and how these changes in turn, played a large role in shaping some of the most well-known works of the period.

This Companion explores the remarkable variety of forms that Shakespeare's life and works have taken over the course of four centuries, ranging from the early modern theatrical marketplace to the age of mass media, and including stage and screen performance, music and the visual arts, the television serial and popular prose fiction. The book asks what happens when Shakespeare is popularized, and when the popular is Shakespeareanized; it queries the factors that determine the definitions of and boundaries between the legitimate and illegitimate, the canonical and the authorized and the subversive, the oppositional, the scandalous and the inane. Leading scholars discuss the ways in which the plays and poems of Shakespeare, as well as Shakespeare himself, have been interpreted and reinvented, adapted and parodied, transposed into other media, and act as a source of inspiration for writers, performers, artists and film-makers worldwide.

A study of the meaning of Shakespeare's musical imagery in his plays and poems.

What can developments in contemporary linguistics and language theory reveal about Shakespeare's language in the plays? Shakespeare's Common Language demonstrates how methods borrowed from language criticism can illuminate the surprising expressive force of Shakespeare's common words. With chapters focused on different approaches based in language theory, the book analyses language change in Coriolanus; discourse analysis in Troilus and Cressida; pragmatics in Richard II; and various aspects of grammar in As You Like It. In mapping the tools of linguistics and language theory onto the study of literature, and employing finely-grained close readings of dialogue, Shakespeare's Common Language frames a methodology that offers a fresh approach to reading dramatic language.

Societies and entire nations draw their identities from certain founding documents, whether charters, declarations, or manifestos. The Book of Common Prayer figures as one of the most crucial in the history of the English-speaking peoples. First published in 1549 to make accessible the devotional language of the late Henry the VIII's new church, the prayer book was a work of monumental religious, political, and cultural importance. Within its rituals, prescriptions, proscriptions, and expressions were fought the religious wars of the age of Shakespeare. This diminutive book--continuously reformed and revised--was how that age defined itself. In Shakespeare's Common Prayers, Daniel Swift makes dazzling and original use of this foundational text, employing it as an entry-point into the works of England's most celebrated writer. Though commonly neglected as a source for Shakespeare's work, Swift persuasively and conclusively argues that the Book of Common Prayer was absolutely essential to the playwright. It was in the Book's ambiguities and its fierce contestations that Shakespeare found the ready elements of drama: dispute over words and their practical consequences, hope for sanctification tempered by fear of simple meaninglessness, and the demand for improvised performance as compensation for the failure of language to fulfill its promises. What emerges is nothing less than a portrait of Shakespeare at work: absorbing, manipulating, reforming, and struggling with the explosive chemistry of word and action that comprised early modern liturgy. Swift argues that the Book of Common Prayer mediates between the secular and the devotional, producing a tension that makes Shakespeare's plays so powerful and exceptional. Tracing the prayer book's lines and motions through As You Like It, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, Othello, and particularly Macbeth, Swift reveals how the greatest writer of the age--of perhaps any age--was influenced and guided by its most important book.