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The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance

Online ISBN:
9780191792151
Print ISBN:
9780199687169
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance

James C. Bulman (ed.)
James C. Bulman
(ed.)
English, Allegheny College
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James C. Bulman holds the Henry B. and Patricia Bush Tippie Chair in English at Allegheny College. General editor, with Carol Rutter, of the Shakespeare in Performance series for Manchester University Press, he has written a performance history of The Merchant of Venice (1991) and edited anthologies on Shakespeare on Television (with H. R. Coursen, UP of New England, 1988), Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance (Routledge, 1996), and Shakespeare Re-Dressed: Cross-Gender Casting in Contemporary Performance (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2007). His other books include a recent edition of King Henry IV, Part Two for The Arden Shakespeare Third Series (Bloomsbury, 2016). He is a former President of the Shakespeare Association of America.

Published online:
6 December 2017
Published in print:
23 November 2017
Online ISBN:
9780191792151
Print ISBN:
9780199687169
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

Shakespearean performance criticism has undergone a sea change in recent years, and strong tides of discovery are continuing to shift the contours of the discipline. The essays in this volume, written by scholars from around the world, reveal how these critical cross-currents are influencing the ways we now view Shakespeare in performance. Essays are divided into four groups. The first group interrogates how Shakespeare continues to achieve contemporaneity for Western audiences by exploring modes of performance, acting styles, and aesthetic choices that are regarded as experimental. The second group tackles the burgeoning field of reception: how and why audiences respond to performances, or actors to the conditions in which they perform; how immersive productions turn spectators into actors; how memory and cognition shape and reshape the performances we think we saw. The third group addresses the ways in which technology has altered our views of Shakespeare, both through the mediums of film and sound recording, and through digitalizing processes which have caused a profound reconsideration of what performance is and how it is accessed. The final group grapples with intercultural Shakespeare, considering not only matters of cultural hegemony and appropriation in a ‘global’ importation of non-Western productions to Europe and North America, but also how Shakespeare has been made ‘local’ in performances staged or filmed in African, Asian, and Latin American countries. Together, these groundbreaking essays attest to the richness and diversity of Shakespearean performance criticism as practised today, and point the way to critical continents not yet explored.

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