Recontextualizing Indian Shakespeare Cinema in the West


Book Description

Featuring case studies, essays, and conversation pieces by scholars and practitioners, this volume explores how Indian cinematic adaptations outside the geopolitical and cultural boundaries of India are revitalizing the broader landscape of Shakespeare research, performance, and pedagogy. Chapters in this volume address practical and thematic concerns and opportunities that are specific to studying Indian cinematic Shakespeares in the West. For instance, how have intercultural encounters between Indian Shakespeare films and American students inspired new pedagogic methodologies? How has the presence and popularity of Indian Shakespeare films affected policy change at British cultural institutions? How can disagreement between eastern and western perspectives on the politics of a Shakespeare film become the site for productive cross-cultural dialogue? This is the first book to explore such complex interactions between Indian Shakespeare films and Western audiences to contribute to the assessment of the new networks that have emerged as a result of Global Shakespeare studies and practices. The volume argues that by tracking critical currents from India towards the West new insights are afforded on the wider field of Shakespeare Studies - including feminist Shakespeares, translation in Shakespeare, or the study of music in Shakespeare - and are shaping debates on the ownership and meaning of Shakespeare itself. Contributing to the current studies in Global Shakespeare, this book marks a discursive shift in the way Shakespeare on Indian screen is predominantly theorised and offers an alternative methodology for examining non-Anglophone cinematic Shakespeares as a whole.




Recontextualizing Indian Shakespeare Cinema in the West


Book Description

Featuring case studies, essays, and conversation pieces by scholars and practitioners, this volume explores how Indian cinematic adaptations outside the geopolitical and cultural boundaries of India are revitalizing the broader landscape of Shakespeare research, performance, and pedagogy. Chapters in this volume address practical and thematic concerns and opportunities that are specific to studying Indian cinematic Shakespeares in the West. For instance, how have intercultural encounters between Indian Shakespeare films and American students inspired new pedagogic methodologies? How has the presence and popularity of Indian Shakespeare films affected policy change at British cultural institutions? How can disagreement between eastern and western perspectives on the politics of a Shakespeare film become the site for productive cross-cultural dialogue? This is the first book to explore such complex interactions between Indian Shakespeare films and Western audiences to contribute to the assessment of the new networks that have emerged as a result of Global Shakespeare studies and practices. The volume argues that by tracking critical currents from India towards the West new insights are afforded on the wider field of Shakespeare Studies - including feminist Shakespeares, translation in Shakespeare, or the study of music in Shakespeare - and are shaping debates on the ownership and meaning of Shakespeare itself. Contributing to the current studies in Global Shakespeare, this book marks a discursive shift in the way Shakespeare on Indian screen is predominantly theorised and offers an alternative methodology for examining non-Anglophone cinematic Shakespeares as a whole.




Shakespeare Studies


Book Description

Shakespeare Studies is an annual peer-reviewed volume featuring work of performance scholars, literary critics and cultural historians. The journal focuses primarily on Shakespeare and his contemporaries but embraces theoretical and historical studies of socio-political, intellectual and artistic contexts that extend well beyond the early modern English theatrical milieu. In addition to articles, Shakespeare Studies offers unique opportunities for extended intellectual exchange through its thematically-focused forums, and includes substantial reviews. An international editorial board maintains the quality of each volume so that Shakespeare Studies may serve as a reliable resource for all students of Shakespeare and the early modern period – for research scholars as well as teachers, actors and directors. Volume 52 includes a Forum devoted the "Second Acts" of Shakespeare scholars with contributions from Mary Thomas Crane, Ayanna Thompson, Emily C. Bartels, Carla Della Gatta, Mary Jo Kietzman, Gina Bloom, Kevin Windhauser, Brinda Charry, Andrew J. Hartley, and Emma Whipday. Volume 52 includes contributions from the Next Generation Plenary of the Shakespeare Association of America as well as articles by Kinga Földváry ("From Melodrama to Tragedy and Back – Closing the Melodramatic Gap between Bollywood and Hollywood Shakespeare Adaptations"), Laura Higgins ("Locating Herself, Finding Her Voice: Mapping the Queen's Story in Shakespeare's Richard II"), Wesley Kisting ("The Theater of Conscience: Reforming Punishment in Measure for Measure"), Wolfgang G. Müller ("The Political Philosophies of Brutus and Cassius in Julius Caesar and the Theory of Preventive Tyrannicide"), and Greg M. Colón Semenza ("'Please, just no Shakespeare': Station Eleven's Utopian Economy of Cultural Distinction"). Book reviews consider important publications on Shakespeare and university drama; Shakespeare and race; textual studies, editing and performance; poetry, science and the sublime; and entertaining uncertainty in early modern theater.




Performing Shakespeare in India


Book Description

This book is envisaged as an intervention in the ongoing explorations in social and cultural history, into questions of what constitutes Indianness for the colonial and the postcolonial subject and the role that Shakespeare plays in this identity formation. Performing Shakespeare in India presents studies of Indian Shakespeare adaptations on stage, on screen, on OTT platforms, in translation, in visual culture and in digital humanities and examines the ways in which these construct Indianness. Shakespeare in India has had multiple local interpretations in different media and equally wide-ranging responses, be it the celebration of Shakespeare as a bishwokobi (world poet) in 19th-century Bengal, be it in the elusive adaptation of Shakespeare in Meitei and Tangkhul tribal art forms in Manipur, or be it in the clamour of a boisterous Bollywood musical. In the response of diasporic theatre professionals, or in Telugu and Kannada translations, whether resisted or accepted with open arms, Shakespeare in India has had multiple local interpretations in different media. All the essays are connected by the common thread of extraordinary negotiations of postcolonial identity formation in language, in politics, in social and cultural practices, or in art forms.




Reconstructing Shakespeare in the Nordic Countries


Book Description

Examining the changing reception of Shakespeare in the Nordic countries between 1870 and 1940, this follow-up volume to Disseminating Shakespeare in the Nordic Countries focuses on the broad movements of national revivalism that took place around the turn of the century as Finland and Norway, and later Iceland, were gaining their independence. The first part of the book demonstrates how translations and productions of Shakespeare were key in such movements, as Shakespeare was appropriated for national and political purposes. The second part explores how the role of Shakespeare in the Nordic countries was partly transformed in the 1920s and 1930s as a new social system emerged, and then as the rise of fascism meant that European politics cast a long shadow on the Nordic countries and substantially affected the reception of Shakespeare. Contributors trace the impact of early translations of Shakespeare's works into Icelandic, the role of women in the early transmission of Shakespeare in Finland and the first Shakespeare production at the Finnish Theatre, and the productions of Shakespeare's plays at the Norwegian National Theatre between 1899 and the outbreak of the Great War. In Part Two, they examine the political overtones of the 1916 Shakespeare celebrations in Hamlet's 'hometown' of Elsinore, Henrik Rytter's translations of 23 Shakespeare plays into Norwegian to assess their role in his poetics and in Scandinavian literature, the importance of the 1937 production of Hamlet in Kronborg Castle starring Laurence Olivier, and the role of Shakespeare in general and Hamlet in particular in Swedish Nobel laureate Eyvind Johnson's early work where it became a symbol of post-war passivity and rootlessness.




Contemporary Readings in Global Performances of Shakespeare


Book Description

A concise guide to global performances of Shakespeare, this volume combines methodologies of dramaturgy, film and performance studies, critical race and gender studies and anthropological thick description. This companion guides students from critical methodologies through big pictures of global Shakespeare to case studies that employ these methodologies. It uses a site-specific lens to examine global performances of Shakespeare on stage, on radio and on screen. As well as featuring methodological chapters on modernist adaptations, global cinema, multilingual productions and Shakespeare in translation, the volume includes short histories of adaptations of Shakespeare in Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Arab world, India, the Slavic world, Iran, Afghanistan and the Farsi-speaking diaspora. It uses these micro-historical narratives to demonstrate the value of local knowledge by analysing the relationships between Shakespeare and his modern interlocutors. Finally, thematically organized case studies apply the methodologies to analyse key productions in Brazil, Korea, Yemen, Kuwait, China and elsewhere. The final chapter considers pedagogical strategies in a global setting. These chapters showcase the how of global Shakespeare studies: how do minoritized artists and audiences engage with Shakespeare? And how do we analyse the diverse and polyphonic performances with an eye towards equity and social justice?




Migrating Shakespeare


Book Description

Migrating Shakespeare offers the first study of the earliest waves of Shakespeare's migration into Europe. Charting the spread of the reception and production of his plays across the continent, it examines how Shakespeare contributed to national cultures and – in some cases – nation building. The chapters explore the routes and cultural networks through which Shakespeare entered European consciousness, from first translations to stage adaptations and critical response. The role of strolling players and actors, translators and printers, poets and dramatists, is chronicled alongside the larger political and cultural movements shaping nations. Each individual case discloses the national, literary and theatrical issues Shakespeare encountered, revealing not only how cultures have accommodated and adapted Shakespeare on their own terms but their interpretative contribution to the texts. Taken collectively the volume addresses key questions about Shakespeare's naturalization or reluctant accommodation within other cultures, inaugurating his present global reach.




Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare's Theatre


Book Description

What skills did Shakespeare's actors bring to their craft? How do these skills differ from those of contemporary actors? Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare's Theatre: Thinking with the Body examines the 'toolkit' of the early modern player and suggests new readings of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries through the lens of their many skills. Theatre is an ephemeral medium. Little remains to us of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries: some printed texts, scattered documents and records, and a few scraps of description, praise, and detraction. Because most of what survives are printed playbooks, students of English theatre find it easy to forget that much of what happened on the early modern stage took place within the gaps of written language: the implicit or explicit calls for fights, dances, military formations, feats of physical skill, song, and clowning. Theatre historians and textual editors have often ignored or denigrated such moments, seeing them merely as extraneous amusements or signs that the text has been 'corrupted' by actors. This book argues that recapturing a positive account of the skills and expertise of the early modern players will result in a more capacious understanding of the nature of theatricality in the period.




Shakespeare’s Others in 21st-century European Performance


Book Description

The Merchant of Venice and Othello are the two Shakespeare plays which serve as touchstones for contemporary understandings and responses to notions of 'the stranger' and 'the other'. This groundbreaking collection explores the dissemination of the two plays through Europe in the first two decades of the 21st-century, tracing how productions and interpretations have reflected the changing conditions and attitudes locally and nationally. Packed with case studies of productions of each play in different countries, the volume opens vistas on the continent's turbulent history marked by the instability of allegiances and boundaries, and shifting senses of identity in a context of war, decolonization and migration. Chapters examine productions in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Italy, France, Portugal and Germany to shed light on wide-scale European developments for the first time in English. In a final section, performance insights are offered by interviews with three directors: Karin Coonrod on directing The Merchant in Venice at the Venetian Ghetto in 2016, Plamen Markov on his 2020 Othello for the Varna Theatre (Bulgaria) and Arnaud Churin, whose Othello toured France in 2019. In drawing attention to the ways in which historical circumstances and collective memory shape and refashion performance, Shakespeare's Others in 21st-century European Performance offers a rich review of European theatrical engagements with Otherness in the productions of these two plays.




Women and Indian Shakespeares


Book Description

Women and Indian Shakespeares explores the multiple ways in which women are, and have been, engaged with Shakespeare in India. Women's engagements encompass the full range of media, from translation to cinematic adaptation and from early colonial performance to contemporary theatrical experiment. Simultaneously, Women and Indian Shakespeares makes visible the ways in which women are figured in various representational registers as resistant agents, martial seductresses, redemptive daughters, victims of caste discrimination, conflicted spaces and global citizens. In so doing, the collection reorients existing lines of investigation, extends the disciplinary field, brings into visibility still occluded subjects and opens up radical readings. More broadly, the collection identifies how, in Indian Shakespeares on page, stage and screen, women increasingly possess the ability to shape alternative futures across patriarchal and societal barriers of race, caste, religion and class. In repeated iterations, the collection turns our attention to localized modes of adaptation that enable opportunities for women while celebrating Shakespeare's gendered interactions in India's rapidly changing, and increasingly globalized, cultural, economic and political environment. In the contributions, we see a transformed Shakespeare, a playwright who appears differently when seen through the gendered eyes of a new Indian, diasporic and global generation of critics, historians, archivists, practitioners and directors. Radically imagining Indian Shakespeares with women at the centre, Women and Indian Shakespeares interweaves history, regional geography/regionality, language and the present day to establish a record of women as creators and adapters of Shakespeare in Indian contexts.