Shakespeare For The E Generation

This important collection of essays from Shakespeare Survey, the first published in 1975, shows a full range of writing on Shakespeare and politics with shifts of focus as diverse as biography, text and contexts, language and film, and from perspectives that are literary, historical, religious, theoretical and cultural. A new introductory article by John J. Joughin provides a commentary on the essays, relates them to other work in the field and gives an over-view of the subject. The comprehensive collection is a stimulating and provocative introduction to a subject that is complex but never dull.

This interdisciplinary, transhistorical collection brings together international scholars from English literature, Italian studies, performance history, and comparative literature to offer new perspectives on the vibrant engagements between Shakespeare and Italian theatre, literary culture, and politics, from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. Chapters address the intricate, two-way exchange between Shakespeare and Italy: how the artistic and intellectual culture of Renaissance Italy shaped Shakespeare’s drama in his own time, and how the afterlife of Shakespeare’s work and reputation in Italy since the eighteenth century has permeated Italian drama, poetry, opera, novels, and film. Responding to exciting recent scholarship on Shakespeare and Italy, as well as transnational theatre, this volume moves beyond conventional source study and familiar questions about influence, location, and adaptation to propose instead a new, evolving paradigm of cultural interchange. Essays in this volume, ranging in methodology from archival research to repertory study, are unified by an interest in how Shakespeare’s works represent and enact exchanges across the linguistic, cultural, and political boundaries separating England and Italy. Arranged chronologically, chapters address historically-contingent cultural negotiations: from networks, intertextual dialogues, and exchanges of ideas and people in the early modern period to questions of authenticity and formations of Italian cultural and national identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. They also explore problems of originality and ownership in twentieth- and twenty-first-century translations of Shakespeare’s works, and new settings and new media in highly personalized revisions that often make a paradoxical return to earlier origins. This book captures, defines, and explains these lively, shifting currents of cultural interchange.

Shaul Bassi is Associate Professor of English and Postcolonial Literature at Ca'Foscari University of Venice, Italy. His publications include Visions of Venice in Shakespeare, with Laura Tosi, and Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures, with Annalisa Oboe.

An up-to-date survey of Shakespeare's King Lear on screen and the aesthetic, social and political issues raised by screen versions.

Would you call studying Shakespeare an exercise in futility? Or an imposition of colonialism even after the sun has sunk deep for the Britishers? Why should we wrack our brains to understand an archaic language? Why, in our post-colonial times, would we wish to know what an English dramatist of the 16th century wrote about? Well, do read his plays, despite their sometimes-archaic language, to know the answers to those questions. They have so much to tell us about the ways of men and women, of rulers and governments, of illusions and delusions, of love and war, of order and anarchy! Sounds as if I am talking about current times? You think you’re living in tempestuous times? Well, so had Shakespeare. And the times haven’t changed! Because, men and women, despite everything, haven’t changed! Don’t believe me. Find out for yourselves. Just pick up Shakespeare Then and Again: The Tempest and see this play is a mirror for us. This book is meant for Shakespearean fans as well as sceptics, students, teachers, et al. And the answers to so many questions are not blowin’ in the wind but are to be found in this play.

Artificial Generation: Photogenic French Literature and the Prehistory of Cinematic Modernity looks at nineteenth-century literary representation and film theory, arguing that the depth of amalgamation that occurred within literary representation during this era is a key aesthetic tradition that continues to inform movies and contemporary culture today.