Shakespeare's Rugby Wars


Book Description




Shakespeare's Sports Canon


Book Description

It took Shakespeare 25 years to create his legacy of 38 plays and five years for Coculuzzi and Toner to destroy it. Shakespeare?s Sports Canon transforms the Complete Works of William Shakespeare into a hilarious hybrid of improvised sporting play and spectacle theatre. Presented as live UCSN (Upstart Crow Sports Network) broadcasts, the Sports Canon includes:Shakespeare?s Rugby Wars: the Wars of the Roses tetralogy presented as a rugby match as Team Lancaster and Team York scrum it out for the British Crown and Rugby Supremacy;Shakespeare?s World Cup: the famous four Tragedies as Team Denmark, England, Scotland, and Italy kick out the blank verse for Top Tragic Cup;Shakespeare?s Gladiator Games: the Roman and Greek plays as a traditional Roman Ludi where Gladiators vie for the coveted wooden Rudis...and with it their freedom;Shakespeare?s Comic Olympics: all of the Comedies and Romances as Olympic events as Athletes strive to overcome comic feats of timing in their quest for Ring Finger Gold;Shakespeare?s NHL (National History League): the leftover Histories as a tribute to Canadian street hockey and homage to the Original Six as hockey's Historical Heroes faceoff for Lord Stanley's impressive Cup.




The Boys of Shakespeare's School in the First World War


Book Description

Like many young men of the time, the boys of King Edward VI School saw the outbreak of the First World War as an opportunity for bravery and excitement. By the time the Armistice was signed in late 1918, thirty-one old boys and one Master had been killed. For such a small grammar school the cost was significant, as too were the number of awards for gallantry, including a Victoria Cross. Set against Stratford-upon-Avon and the boys' schooldays, this intriguing book details the boys' war and their involvement in the major battles on the Western Front, in Italy, Salonika, Macedonia, Gallipoli, Bulgaria and Russia. Ultimately a tragic and moving account, it captures the heart of a small community and represents the sense of adventure with which young men went to war.




A Lifetime with Shakespeare


Book Description

Written by the only American to direct and fight-choreograph all of Shakespeare's plays, this text represents an expert and practical guide to the Bard's oeuvre. From the Henry VI plays through The Tempest, each play is explored in its full theatrical complexity, with particular attention paid to directorial and acting challenges, character quirks and development, and the particularities of Shakespearean language. Directing successes are recounted, but the failures are not shied away from, making this work indispensable for anyone interested in producing plays by Shakespeare.




War and Nation in the Theatre of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries


Book Description

This original study explores a vital aspect of early modern cultural history: the way that warfare is represented in the theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The book contrasts the Tudor and Stuart prose that called for the establishment of a standing army in the name of nation, discipline and subjectivity, and the drama of the period that invited critique of this imperative. Barker examines contemporary dramatic texts both for their radical position on war and, in the case of the later drama, for their subversive commentary on an emerging idealisation of Shakespeare and his work.The book argues that the early modern period saw the establishment of political, social and theological attitudes to war that were to become accepted as natural in succeeding centuries. Barker's reading of the drama of the period reveals the discontinuities in this project as a way of commenting on the use of the past within modern warfare. The book is also a survey and analysis of literary theory over the last tw







Shakespeare's Apprenticeship


Book Description

The contents of the Shakespeare canon have come into question in recent years as scholars add plays or declare others only partially his work. Now, new literary and historical evidence demonstrates that five heretofore anonymous plays published or performed during his lifetime are actually his first versions of later canonical works. Three histories, The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, The True Tragedy of Richard the Third, and The Troublesome Reign of John; a comedy, The Taming of a Shrew; and a romance, King Leir, are products of Shakespeare's juvenile years. Later in his career, he transformed them into the plays that bear nearly identical titles. Each is strikingly similar to its canonical counterpart in terms of structure, plot and cast, though the texts were entirely rewritten. Virtually all scholars, critics and editors of Shakespeare have overlooked or disputed the idea that he had anything to do with them. This addition of five plays to the Shakespeare canon introduces a new facet to the authorship debate, and supplies further evidence that the real Shakespeare was Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford.







War and Games


Book Description

These comparative studies focus on the relationship between war and games in an effort to achieve an understanding of the phenomenon of war, in order ultimately to avoid it. Out of the ten studies on war and games in this volume, the first five are historical, the next two are by anthropologists, and the last three concern modern war games. The purpose of this comparative study is to focus on the relationship between war and games by highlighting their differences and similarities in an effort better to understand the phenomenon of war. Americans and Europeans contribute studies on war and games in ancient Greece, the lack ofmilitary games in Byzantium, jousts in the middle ages, 'flower wars' and the Aztec and Maya ball game, games in pre-industrial societies and their relation to war, and aspects of computer and video games. Contributors T.B.ALLEN, T.J. CORNELL, M. HERMAN, BRUCE M. KNAUFT, C.M.MAZZUCCHI, P.A.G. SABIN, A.A. SHELTON, DAVID TURTON, T. ZOTZ.




The Great White Bard


Book Description

SHAKESPEARE: increasingly irrelevant or lone literary genius of the Western canon? 'Powerful and illuminating' James Shapiro, author of 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, winner of the Baillie Gifford 'Winner of Winners' 2023 Professor Farah Karim-Cooper grew up loving the Bard, perhaps because Romeo and Juliet felt Pakistani to her. But why was being white as a ‘snowy dove’ essential to Juliet’s beauty? Combining piercing analysis of race, gender and otherness in beloved plays from Othello to The Tempest with a radical reappraisal of Elizabethan London, The Great White Bard entreats us neither to idealise nor to fossilise Shakespeare but instead to look him in the eye and reckon with the discomforts of his plays, playhouses and society. If we persist in reading Shakespeare as representative of only one group, as the very pinnacle of the white Western canon, then he will truly be in peril. But if we dare to bring Shakespeare down from his plinth, we might unveil a playwright for the twenty-first century. We might expand and enrich his extraordinary legacy. We might even fall in love with him all over again. *** A TIME MAGAZINE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 'Insightful, passionate, piled with facts and has a warm, infectious love for theatre and Shakespeare running through every chapter.' ADRIAN LESTER, CBE 'Dive in and your whole cultural landscape will be refreshed and reframed... A challenging, riveting read, The Great White Bard reminds us how powerful the stories we tell can be on our lives.' ADJOA ANDOH 'Vivid… a thorough analysis but also a kind of love letter… Karim-Cooper sees Shakespeare as holding a mirror to this society, with his plays interrogating live issues around race, identity and the colonial enterprise… Her arguments come to feel essential and should be absorbed by every theatre director, writer, critic, interested in finding new ways into the work.’ GUARDIAN 'There are plenty of books on Shakespeare: but this one is different. This is Shakespeare as we’ve (most of us) never been willing to see him – and the works emerge from the analysis as newly complicit, powerful and yet recuperative.' EMMA SMITH, AUTHOR OF PORTABLE MAGIC