The Annenbergs


Book Description

"This is the colorful and dramatic biography of two of America's most controversial entrepreneurs: Moses Louis Annenberg, 'the racing wire king, ' who built his fortune in racketeering, invested it in publishing, and lost much of it in the biggest tax evasion case in United States history; and his son, Walter, launcher of TV Guide and Seventeen magazines and former ambassador to Great Britain."--Jacket.







Shakespeare, from Stage to Screen


Book Description

How is a Shakespearean play transformed when it is directed for the screen? In this 2004 book, Sarah Hatchuel uses literary criticism, narratology, performance history, psychoanalysis and semiotics to analyse how the plays are fundamentally altered in their screen versions. She identifies distinct strategies chosen by film directors to appropriate the plays. Instead of providing just play-by-play or film-by-film analyses, the book addresses the main issues of theatre/film aesthetics, making such theories and concepts accessible before applying them to practical cases. Her book also offers guidelines for the study of sequences in Shakespearean adaptations and includes examples from all the major films from the 1899 King John, through the adaptations by Olivier, Welles and Branagh, to Taymor's 2000 Titus and beyond. This book is aimed at scholars, teachers and students of Shakespeare and film studies, providing a clear and logical apparatus with which to examine Shakespearean screen adaptations.




Tragic Instance


Book Description

"Tragic Instance follows Shakespeare's progress through his tragedies. The book accepts Kenneth Muir's prescription, "There is no such thing as Shakespearian Tragedy: there are only Shakespearian tragedies." Accordingly, each of the tragedies, from Titus Andronicus to Coriolanus, is studied in order of composition. Richard III and Richard II are included because each is described as "tragedy" on the title page. No larger unity is seen. The play is everything that is the case."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved




Shakespeare's Mystery Play


Book Description

Through considerable detective work, this work sets out to show that Julius Caeser was the first play performed at the new Globe Theatre on 12 June 1599. Drawing on many areas of expertise, which are rarely allied in Shakespeare scholarship to such an extent, including biblical, liturgical, social and theatrical history, the author sheds new light not only on Julius Caeser but on a variety of accepted beliefs. These include: why Hamlet was not crowned king when his father died; why Brutus would not swear to murder Caeser; why the Elizabethan authorities retained the Julian calender; and why the orthodox dates of the first composition of both Twelfth Night and Hamlet can be called into question.




Translation, Poetics, and the Stage


Book Description

This book establishes an analytical model for the description of existing translations in their historical context within a framework suggested by systemic concepts of literature. It argues against mainstream 20th-century translation theory and, by proposing a socio-cultural model of translation, takes into account how a translation functions in the receiving culture. The case studies of successive translations of "Hamlet" in France from the eighteenth century neoclassical version of Jean-Francois Ducis to the 20th-century Lacanian, post-structuralist stage production of Daniel Mesguich show the translator at work. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of the changing theatrical and literary norms to which translators through the ages have been bound by the expectations both of their audiences and the literary establishment.




Shakespeare's Feminine Endings


Book Description

Philippa Berry draws on feminist theory, postmodern thought and queer theory, to challenge existing critical notions of what is fundamental to Shakespearean tragedy. She shows how, through a network of images clustered around feminine or feminized characters, these plays 'disfigure' conventional ideas of death as a bodily end, as their figures of women are interwoven with provocative meditations upon matter, time, the soul, and the body. The scope of these tragic speculations was radical in Shakespeare's day; yet they also have a surprising relevance to contemporary debates about time and matter in science and philosophy.




Love + Marriage = Death


Book Description

A pioneering interdisciplinary scholar examines the roles of images in the construction of stereotypes of the Jew’s body in 20th-century art and literature.




Medusa's Mirrors


Book Description

The question of selfhood in Renaissance texts constitutes a scholarly and critical debate of almost unmanageable proportions. The author of this work begins by questioning the strategies with which male writers depict powerful women. Although Spenser's Britomart, Shakespeare's Cleopatra, and Milton's Eve figure selfhood very differently and to very different ends, they do have two significant elements in common: mirrors and transformations that diminish the power of the female self.




There's a Double Tongue


Book Description

The pun is as old as Babel, and inveterate punsters like Shakespeare clearly never lacked translators. This book critically examines the evergreen cliché that wordplay defies translation, replacing it by a theory and a case study that aim to come to grips with the reality of wordplay and its translation. What are the possible modes of wordplay translation? What are the various, sometimes conflicting constraints prompting translators in certain situations to go for one strategy rather than another? Ample illustration is provided from Hamlet and other Shakespearean texts and several Dutch, French, and German renderings. The study exemplifies how theory can usefully be integrated into a description-oriented approach to translation. Much of the argument also rests on the definition of wordplay as an open-ended and historically variable category. The book's concerns range from the linguistic and textual properties of Shakespeare's punning and its translation to matters of historical poetics and ideology. Its straightforward approach shows that discourse about wordplay doesn't need to rely on stylistic bravura or abstract speculation. The book is concluded by an anthology of the puns in Hamlet, including a brief semantic analysis of each and a generous selection of diverse translations.