Download or read book Shakespeare in a Divided America written by James Shapiro and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year • A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • A New York Times Notable Book A timely exploration of what Shakespeare’s plays reveal about our divided land. “In this sprightly and enthralling book . . . Shapiro amply demonstrates [that] for Americans the politics of Shakespeare are not confined to the public realm, but have enormous relevance in the sphere of private life.” —The Guardian (London) The plays of William Shakespeare are rare common ground in the United States. For well over two centuries, Americans of all stripes—presidents and activists, soldiers and writers, conservatives and liberals alike—have turned to Shakespeare’s works to explore the nation’s fault lines. In a narrative arching from Revolutionary times to the present day, leading scholar James Shapiro traces the unparalleled role of Shakespeare’s four-hundred-year-old tragedies and comedies in illuminating the many concerns on which American identity has turned. From Abraham Lincoln’s and his assassin, John Wilkes Booth’s, competing Shakespeare obsessions to the 2017 controversy over the staging of Julius Caesar in Central Park, in which a Trump-like leader is assassinated, Shakespeare in a Divided America reveals how no writer has been more embraced, more weaponized, or has shed more light on the hot-button issues in our history.
Download or read book Shakespeare and the Making of America written by Kevin J. Hayes and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utilising new and original research, Kevin J. Hayes looks at the role and influence of Shakespeare in eighteenth century America. Hayes, winner of the 2018 George Washington Book Prize, offers an exciting new perspective on the history of both Shakespeare scholarship and the United States.
Download or read book Contested Will written by James Shapiro and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-04-19 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro explains when and why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote his plays.
Download or read book Selling Shakespeare written by Adam G. Hooks and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-15 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selling Shakespeare tells a story of Shakespeare's life and career in print, a story centered on the people who created, bought, and sold books in the early modern period. The interests and investments of publishers and booksellers have defined our ideas of what is 'Shakespearean', and attending to their interests demonstrates how one version of Shakespearean authorship surpassed the rest. In this book, Adam G. Hooks identifies and examines four pivotal episodes in Shakespeare's life in print: the debut of his narrative poems, the appearance of a series of best-selling plays, the publication of collected editions of his works, and the cataloguing of those works. Hooks also offers a new kind of biographical investigation and historicist criticism, one based not on external life documents, nor on the texts of Shakespeare's works, but on the books that were printed, published, sold, circulated, collected, and catalogued under his name.
Download or read book A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare written by James Shapiro and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 618 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize’s 25th Anniversary Winner of Winners award What accounts for Shakespeare’s transformation from talented poet and playwright to one of the greatest writers who ever lived? In this gripping account, James Shapiro sets out to answer this question, "succeed[ing] where others have fallen short." (Boston Globe) 1599 was an epochal year for Shakespeare and England. During that year, Shakespeare wrote four of his most famous plays: Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and, most remarkably, Hamlet; Elizabethans sent off an army to crush an Irish rebellion, weathered an Armada threat from Spain, gambled on a fledgling East India Company, and waited to see who would succeed their aging and childless queen. James Shapiro illuminates both Shakespeare’s staggering achievement and what Elizabethans experienced in the course of 1599, bringing together the news and the intrigue of the times with a wonderful evocation of how Shakespeare worked as an actor, businessman, and playwright. The result is an exceptionally immediate and gripping account of an inspiring moment in history.
Download or read book Memphis written by Beverly G. Bond and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a reputation as wide open as the waters of the Mississippi flowing past its bustling downtown district, Memphis is a city of contrasts and contradictions. From the darkness of epidemics and racial tension to its beacons of music and entreprenurial success, Memphis is a reflection of the true American experience. For many years it was a community functioning almost as two separate societies, yet the ties between the two create one resolute and dynamic city as it begins this new century.
Download or read book Weyward Macbeth written by S. Newstok and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Weyward Macbeth, a volume of entirely new essays, provides innovative, interdisciplinary approaches to the various ways Shakespeare's 'Macbeth' has been adapted and appropriated within the context of American racial constructions. Comprehensive in its scope, this collection addresses the enduringly fraught history of 'Macbeth' in the United States, from its appearance as the first Shakespearean play documented in the American colonies to a proposed Hollywood film version with a black diasporic cast. Over two dozen contributions explore 'Macbeth's' haunting presence in American drama, poetry, film, music, history, politics, acting, and directing — all through the intersections of race and performance.
Download or read book Shakespeare in America written by Alden T. Vaughan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-05 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a lively account of how American culture has embraced the English playwright and poet from colonial times to the present. It ranges widely, following the story of Shakespeare's reception in America from the scholarly - criticism, editions of the plays, and curricula - to the light-hearted - burlesques, musical comedies, and kitsch.
Download or read book Shakespeare and Modern Culture written by Marjorie Garber and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2009-12-01 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of the world's premier Shakespeare scholars comes a magisterial new study whose premise is "that Shakespeare makes modern culture and that modern culture makes Shakespeare." Shakespeare has determined many of the ideas that we think of as "naturally" true: ideas about human character, individuality and selfhood, government, leadership, love and jealousy, men and women, youth and age. Marjorie Garber delves into ten plays to explore the interrelationships between Shakespeare and contemporary culture, from James Joyce's Ulysses to George W. Bush's reading list. From the persistence of difference in Othello to the matter of character in Hamlet to the untimeliness of youth in Romeo and Juliet, Garber discusses how these ideas have been re-imagined in modern fiction, theater, film, and the news, and in the literature of psychology, sociology, political theory, business, medicine, and law. Shakespeare and Modern Culture is a brilliant recasting of our own mental and emotional landscape as refracted through the prism of the protean Shakespeare.
Download or read book Shakespeare Alive written by Joseph Papp and published by Bantam. This book was released on 1988-01-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Joseph Papp, American’s foremost theater producer, and writer Elizabeth Kirkland: a captivating tour through the world of William Shakespeare. Discover the London of Shakespeare's time, a fascinating place to be—full of mayhem and magic, exploration and exploitation, courtiers and foreigners. Stroll through narrow, winding streets crowded with merchants and minstrels, hoist a pint in a rowdy alehouse, and hurry across the river to the open-air Globe Theater to see that latest play written by a young man named Will Shakespeare. Shakespeare Alive! spirits you back to the very years of that London—as everyday people might have experienced it. Find out how young people fell in love, how workers and artists made ends meet, what people found funny and what they feared most. Go on location with an Elizabethan theater company to learn how plays were produced, where Shakespeare’s plots came from and how he transformed them. Hear the music of Shakespeare’s language and words we still use today that were first spoken in his time. Open the book and elbow your way into the Globe with the groundlings. You’ll be joining one of the most democratic audiences the theater has ever known—alewives, apprentices, shoemakers and nobles—in applauding the dazzling wordplay and swordplay brought to you by William Shakespeare.
Download or read book The Book of Will written by Lauren Gunderson and published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc.. This book was released on 2018-06-18 with total page 95 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Without William Shakespeare, we wouldn’t have literary masterpieces like Romeo and Juliet. But without Henry Condell and John Heminges, we would have lost half of Shakespeare’s plays forever! After the death of their friend and mentor, the two actors are determined to compile the First Folio and preserve the words that shaped their lives. They’ll just have to borrow, beg, and band together to get it done. Amidst the noise and color of Elizabethan London, THE BOOK OF WILL finds an unforgettable true story of love, loss, and laughter, and sheds new light on a man you may think you know.
Download or read book Latin American Shakespeares written by Bernice W. Kliman and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Latin American Shakespeares is a collection of essays that treats the reception of Shakespeare in Latin American contexts. Arranged in three sections, the essays reflect on performance, translation, parody, and influence, finding both affinities to and differences from Anglo integrations of the plays. Bernice J. Kliman is Professor Emeritus at Nassau Community College. Rick J. Santos teaches at Nassau Community College.
Download or read book This Is Shakespeare written by Emma Smith and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An electrifying new study that investigates the challenges of the Bard’s inconsistencies and flaws, and focuses on revealing—not resolving—the ambiguities of the plays and their changing topicality A genius and prophet whose timeless works encapsulate the human condition like no other. A writer who surpassed his contemporaries in vision, originality, and literary mastery. A man who wrote like an angel, putting it all so much better than anyone else. Is this Shakespeare? Well, sort of. But it doesn’t tell us the whole truth. So much of what we say about Shakespeare is either not true, or just not relevant. In This Is Shakespeare, Emma Smith—an intellectually, theatrically, and ethically exciting writer—takes us into a world of politicking and copycatting, as we watch Shakespeare emulating the blockbusters of Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd (the Spielberg and Tarantino of their day), flirting with and skirting around the cutthroat issues of succession politics, religious upheaval, and technological change. Smith writes in strikingly modern ways about individual agency, privacy, politics, celebrity, and sex. Instead of offering the answers, the Shakespeare she reveals poses awkward questions, always inviting the reader to ponder ambiguities.
Download or read book Lincoln and the American Founding written by Lucas E. Morel and published by Southern Illinois University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-22 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this persuasive work of intellectual history, Lucas E. Morel argues that the most important influence on Abraham Lincoln’s political thought and practice was what he learned from the leading figures of and documents from the birth of the United States. In this systematic account of those principles, Morel compellingly demonstrates that to know Lincoln well is to understand thoroughly the founding of America. With each chapter describing a particular influence, Morel leads readers from the Founding Father, George Washington; to the founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and Constitution; to the founding compromise over slavery; and finally to a consideration of how the original intentions of the Founding Fathers should be respected in light of experience, progress, and improvements over time. Within these key discussions, Morel shows that without the ideals of the American Revolution, Lincoln’s most famous speeches would be unrecognizable, and the character of the nation would have lost its foundation on the universal principles of human equality, individual liberty, and government by the consent of the governed. Lincoln thought that the principles of human equality and individual rights could provide common ground for a diverse people to live as one nation and that some old things, such as the political ideals of the American founding, were worth preserving. He urged Americans to be vigilant in maintaining the institutions of self-government and to exercise and safeguard the benefits of freedom for future generations. Morel posits that adopting the way of thinking and speaking Lincoln advocated, based on the country’s founding, could help mend our current polarized discourse and direct the American people to employ their common government on behalf of a truly common good.
Download or read book Women Making Shakespeare written by Gordon McMullan and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-12-02 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women Making Shakespeare presents a series of 20-25 short essays that draw on a variety of resources, including interviews with directors, actors, and other performance practitioners, to explore the place (or constitutive absence) of women in the Shakespearean text and in the history of Shakespearean reception - the many ways women, working individually or in communities, have shaped and transformed the reception, performance, and teaching of Shakespeare from the 17th century to the present. The book highlights the essential role Shakespeare's texts have played in the historical development of feminism. Rather than a traditional collection of essays, Women Making Shakespeare brings together materials from diverse resources and uses diverse research methods to create something new and transformative. Among the many women's interactions with Shakespeare to be considered are acting (whether on the professional stage, in film, on lecture tours, or in staged readings), editing, teaching, academic writing, and recycling through adaptations and appropriations (film, novels, poems, plays, visual arts).
Download or read book Will in the World How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare Anniversary Edition written by Stephen Greenblatt and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2010-05-03 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named One of Esquire's 50 Best Biographies of All Time The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, reissued with a new afterword for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. A young man from a small provincial town moves to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, becomes the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time. How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained? Stephen Greenblatt brings us down to earth to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life, could have become the world’s greatest playwright.
Download or read book Shakespeare Einstein and the Bottom Line written by David L. KIRP and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can you turn an English department into a revenue center? How do you grade students if they are "customers" you must please? How do you keep industry from dictating a university's research agenda? What happens when the life of the mind meets the bottom line? Wry and insightful, Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line takes us on a cross-country tour of the most powerful trend in academic life today--the rise of business values and the belief that efficiency, immediate practical usefulness, and marketplace triumph are the best measures of a university's success. With a shrewd eye for the telling example, David Kirp relates stories of marketing incursions into places as diverse as New York University's philosophy department and the University of Virginia's business school, the high-minded University of Chicago and for-profit DeVry University. He describes how universities "brand" themselves for greater appeal in the competition for top students; how academic super-stars are wooed at outsized salaries to boost an institution's visibility and prestige; how taxpayer-supported academic research gets turned into profitable patents and ideas get sold to the highest bidder; and how the liberal arts shrink under the pressure to be self-supporting. Far from doctrinaire, Kirp believes there's a place for the market--but the market must be kept in its place. While skewering Philistinism, he admires the entrepreneurial energy that has invigorated academe's dreary precincts. And finally, he issues a challenge to those who decry the ascent of market values: given the plight of higher education, what is the alternative? Table of Contents: Introduction: The New U Part I: The Higher Education Bazaar 1. This Little Student Went to Market 2. Nietzsche's Niche: The University of Chicago 3. Benjamin Rush's "Brat": Dickinson College 4. Star Wars: New York University Part II: Management 101 5. The Dead Hand of Precedent: New York Law School 6. Kafka Was an Optimist: The University of Southern California and the University of Michigan 7. Mr. Jefferson's "Private" College: Darden Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Virginia Part III: Virtual Worlds 8. Rebel Alliance: The Classics Departments of Sixteen Southern Liberal Arts Colleges 9. The Market in Ideas: Columbia University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 10. The British Are Coming-and Going: Open University Part IV: The Smart Money 11. A Good Deal of Collaboration: The University of California, Berkeley 12. The Information Technology Gold Rush: IT Certification Courses in Silicon Valley 13. They're All Business: DeVry University Conclusion: The Corporation of Learning Notes Acknowledgments Index Reviews of this book: An illuminating view of both good and bad results in a market-driven educational system. --David Siegfried, Booklist Reviews of this book: Kirp has an eye for telling examples, and he captures the turmoil and transformation in higher education in readable style. --Karen W. Arenson, New York Times Reviews of this book: Mr. Kirp is both quite fair and a good reporter; he has a keen eye for the important ways in which bean-counting has transformed universities, making them financially responsible and also more concerned about developing lucrative specialties than preserving the liberal arts and humanities. Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line is one of the best education books of the year, and anyone interested in higher education will find it to be superior. --Martin Morse Wooster, Washington Times Reviews of this book: There is a place for the market in higher education, Kirp believes, but only if institutions keep the market in its place...Kirp's bottom line is that the bargains universities make in pursuit of money are, inevitably, Faustian. They imperil academic freedom, the commitment to sharing knowledge, the privileging of need and merit rather than the ability to pay, and the conviction that the student/consumer is not always right. --Glenn C. Altschuler, Philadelphia Inquirer Reviews of this book: David Kirp's fine new book, Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line, lays out dozens of ways in which the ivory tower has leaned under the gravitational influence of economic pressures and the market. --Carlos Alcal', Sacramento Bee Reviews of this book: The real subject of Kirp's well-researched and amply footnoted book turns out to be more than this volume's subtitle, 'the marketing of higher education.' It is, in fact, the American soul. Where will our nation be if instead of colleges transforming the brightest young people as they come of age, they focus instead on serving their paying customers and chasing the tastes they should be shaping? Where will we be without institutions that value truth more than money and intellectual creativity more than creative accounting? ...Kirp says plainly that the heart of the university is the common good. The more we can all reflect upon that common good--not our pocketbooks or retirement funds, but what is good for the general mass of men and women--the better the world of the American university will be, and the better the nation will be as well. --Peter S. Temes, San Francisco Chronicle Reviews of this book: David Kirp's excellent book Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line provides a remarkable window into the financial challenges of higher education and the crosscurrents that drive institutional decision-making...Kirp explores the continuing battle for the soul of the university: the role of the marketplace in shaping higher education, the tension between revenue generation and the historic mission of the university to advance the public good...This fine book provides a cautionary note to all in higher education. While seeking as many additional revenue streams as possible, it is important that institutions have clarity of mission and values if they are going to be able to make the case for continued public support. --Lewis Collens, Chicago Tribune Reviews of this book: In this delightful book David Kirp...tells the story of markets in U.S. higher education...[It] should be read by anyone who aspires to run a university, faculty or department. --Terence Kealey, Times Higher Education Supplement The monastery is colliding with the market. American colleges and universities are in a fiercely competitive race for dollars and prestige. The result may have less to do with academic excellence than with clever branding and salesmanship. David Kirp offers a compelling account of what's happening to higher education, and what it means for the future. --Robert B. Reich, University Professor, Brandeis University, and former U.S. Secretary of Labor Can universities keep their purpose, independence, and public trust when forced to prove themselves cost-effective? In this shrewd and readable book, David Kirp explores what happens when the pursuit of truth becomes entwined with the pursuit of money. Kirp finds bright spots in unexpected places--for instance, the emerging for-profit higher education sector--and he describes how some traditional institutions balance their financial needs with their academic missions. Full of good stories and swift character sketches, Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line is engrossing for anyone who cares about higher education. --Laura D'Andrea Tyson, former Chair, Council of Economic Advisers David Kirp wryly observes that "maintaining communities of scholars is not a concern of the market." His account of the state of higher education today makes it appallingly clear that the conditions necessary for the flourishing of both scholarship and community are disappearing before our eyes. One would like to think of this as a wake-up call, but the hour may already be too late. --Stanley Fish, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the University of Illinois at Chicago This is, quite simply, the most deeply informed and best written recent book on the dilemma of undergraduate education in the United States. David Kirp is almost alone in stressing what relentless commercialization of higher education does to undergraduates. At the same time, he identifies places where administrators and faculty have managed to make the market work for, not against, real education. If only college and university presidents could be made to read this book! --Stanley N. Katz, Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies, Princeton University Once a generation a book brilliantly gives meaning to seemingly disorderly trends in higher education. David Kirp's Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line is that book for our time [the early 21st century?]. With passion and eloquence, Kirp describes the decline of higher education as a public good, the loss of university governing authority to constituent groups and external funding sources, the two-edged sword of collaboration with the private sector, and the rise of business values in the academy. This is a must read for all who care about the future of our universities. --Mark G. Yudof, Chancellor, The University of Texas System David Kirp not only has a clear theoretical grasp of the economic forces that have been transforming American universities, he can write about them without putting the reader to sleep, in lively, richly detailed case studies. This is a rare book. --Robert H. Frank, Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University David Kirp wanders America's campuses, and he wonders--are markets, management and technology supplanting vision, values and truth? With a large dose of nostalgia and a penchant for academic personalities, he ponders the struggles and synergies of Ivy and Internet, of industry and independence. Wandering and wondering with him, readers will feel the speed of change in contemporary higher education. --Charles M. Vest, President, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
