Download or read book Shakespeare and the American Nation written by Kim C. Sturgess and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-06-17 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do so many Americans celebrate Shakespeare, a long-dead English poet and playwright? By the nineteenth century newly-independent America had chosen to reject the British monarchy and Parliament, class structure and traditions, yet their citizens still made William Shakespeare a naturalized American hero. Today the largest group of overseas visitors to Stratford-upon-Avon, the Royal Shakespeare Company and Bankside's Shakespeare's Globe Theatre come from America. Why? Is there more to Shakespeare's American popularity than just a love of men in doublet and hose speaking soliloquies? This book tells the story of America's relationship with Shakespeare. The story of how and why Shakespeare became a hero within American popular culture. Sturgess provides evidence of a comprehensive nineteenth-century appropriation of Shakespeare to the cause of the American Nation and shows that, as America entered the twentieth century a new world power, for many Americans Shakespeare had become as American as George Washington.

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 American Nation written by Kim C. Sturgess and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Ayad Akhtar the American Nation and Its Others after 9 11 written by Lopamudra Basu and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2018-12-06 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ayad Akhtar, the American Nation, and Its Others After 9/11: Homeland Insecurity examines playwright and novelist Ayad Akhtar’s contributions to multiple genres including film and theatre. This book situates Akhtar’s oeuvre within the social and political context of post-9/11 American culture, marked by the creation of the Homeland Security State and the racialization of Muslims, Arabs, and South Asians. It departs from many traditional studies of 9/11 literature by challenging the binary of victim and perpetrator and examining the continuing impact of the event on questions of American nationalism and belonging. Tracing a literary genealogy for Akhtar, it explores a broad range of issues represented in Akhtar’s works such as globalization, the decline of American industry, terrorism, torture, generational conflicts, interracial love, gender and violence, the conflict between secular and religious values—all issues which affect American nationalism both within and outside the nation’s borders, and shape the lives of South Asian American Muslims. Employing the lenses of trauma studies, transnational feminism, postcolonial theory, and performance studies, this book is attentive to the controversial reception of Akhtar’s works and the paucity of authentic representation of Muslim Americans. It combines literary interpretations of Akhtar’s works with sociological analysis of post-9/11 racial formation, a personal interview with Akhtar, and observations of plays and post-play discussions.

Download or read book Arden Shakespeare Complete Works written by William Shakespeare and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-03-10 with total page 1382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This revised edition of the Arden Shakespeare Complete Works includes the full text of Double Falsehood, which was published in the Arden Third series to critical acclaim in 2010. The play is an eighteenth century rewrite of Shakespeare's "lost" play Cardenio and as such is a fascinating testament to the original. A short introduction outlines its complex textual history and the arguments for including it within the Shakespeare canon. The Complete Works contains the texts of all Shakespeare's plays, poems and sonnets, edited by leading Shakespeare scholars for the renowned Arden series. A general introduction gives the reader an overall view of how and why Shakespeare has become such an influential cultural icon, and how perceptions of his work have changed in the intervening four centuries. The introduction summarises the known facts about the dramatist's life, his reading and use of sources, and the nature of theatrical performance during his lifetime. Brief introductions to each play, written specially for this volume by the Arden General Editors, discuss the date and contemporary context of the play, its position within Shakespeare's oeuvre, and its subsequent performance history. An extensive glossary explains vocabulary which may be unfamiliar to modern readers.

Download or read book Shakespeare s Tribe written by Jeffrey Knapp and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most contemporary critics characterize Shakespeare and his tribe of fellow playwrights and players as resolutely secular, interested in religion only as a matter of politics or as a rival source of popular entertainment. Yet as Jeffrey Knapp demonstrates in this radical new reading, a surprising number of writers throughout the English Renaissance, including Shakespeare himself, represented plays as supporting the cause of true religion. To be sure, Renaissance playwrights rarely sermonized in their plays, which seemed preoccupied with sex, violence, and crime. During a time when acting was regarded as a kind of vice, many theater professionals used their apparent godlessness to advantage, claiming that it enabled them to save wayward souls the church could not otherwise reach. The stage, they argued, made possible an ecumenical ministry, which would help transform Reformation England into a more inclusive Christian society. Drawing on a variety of little-known as well as celebrated plays, along with a host of other documents from the English Renaissance, Shakespeare's Tribe changes the way we think about Shakespeare and the culture that produced him. Winner of the Best Book in Literature and Language from the Association of American Publishers' Professional/Scholarly division, the Conference on Christianity and Literature Book Award, and the Roland H. Bainton Prize for Literature from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference.

Download or read book Here in This Island We Arrived written by Elisabeth H. Kinsley and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Elisabeth H. Kinsley weaves the stories of racially and ethnically distinct Shakespeare theatre scenes in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Manhattan into a single cultural history, revealing how these communities interacted with one another and how their work influenced ideas about race and belonging in the United States during a time of unprecedented immigration. As Progressive Era reformers touted the works of Shakespeare as an “antidote” to the linguistic and cultural mixing of American society, and some reformers attempted to use the Bard’s plays to “Americanize” immigrant groups on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, immigrants from across Europe appropriated Shakespeare for their own ends. Kinsley uses archival material such as reform-era handbooks, theatre posters, playbills, programs, sheet music, and reviews to demonstrate how, in addition to being a source of cultural capital, authority, and resistance for these communities, Shakespeare’s plays were also a site of cultural exchange. Performances of Shakespeare occasioned nuanced social encounters between New York’s empowered and marginalized groups and influenced sociocultural ideas about what Shakespeare, race, and national belonging should and could mean for Americans. Timely and immensely readable, this book explains how ideas about cultural belonging formed and transformed within a particular human community at a time of heightened demographic change. Kinsley’s work will be welcomed by anyone interested in the formation of national identity, immigrant communities, and the history of the theatre scene in New York and the rest of the United States.

Download or read book Shakespeare in America An Anthology from the Revolution to Now LOA 251 written by Various and published by Library of America. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthology that traces how Shakespeare has shaped American history and culture—featuring pieces by Founding Fathers, Orson Welles, and other noteworthy figures “The history of Shakespeare in America,” writes James Shapiro in his introduction to this groundbreaking anthology, “is also the history of America itself.” Shakespeare was a central, inescapable part of America’s literary inheritance, and a prism through which crucial American issues—revolution, slavery, war, social justice—were refracted and understood. In tracing the many surprising forms this influence took, Shapiro draws on many genres—poetry, fiction, essays, plays, memoirs, songs, speeches, letters, movie reviews, comedy routines—and on a remarkable range of American writers from Emerson, Melville, Lincoln, and Mark Twain to James Agee, John Berryman, Pauline Kael, and Cynthia Ozick. Americans of the revolutionary era ponder the question “to sign or not to sign;” Othello becomes the focal point of debates on race; the Astor Place riots, set off by a production of Macbeth, attest to the violent energies aroused by theatrical controversies; Jane Addams finds in King Lear a metaphor for American struggles between capital and labor. Orson Welles revolutionizes approaches to Shakespeare with his legendary productions of Macbeth and Julius Caesar; American actors from Charlotte Cushman and Ira Aldridge to John Barrymore, Paul Robeson, and Marlon Brando reimagine Shakespeare for each new era. The rich and tangled story of how Americans made Shakespeare their own is a literary and historical revelation. As a special feature, the book includes a foreword by Bill Clinton, among the latest in a long line of American presidents, including John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and Abraham Lincoln, who, as the collection demonstrates, have turned to Shakespeare’s plays for inspiration.

Download or read book Shakespeare in the Movies written by Douglas Brode and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2000-04-27 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare is now enjoying perhaps his most glorious--certainly his most popular--filmic incarnation. Indeed, the Bard has been splashed across the big screen to great effect in recent adaptations of Hamlet, Henry V, Othello, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, Richard II, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and of course in the hugely successful Shakespeare in Love. Unlike previous studies of Shakespeare's cinematic history, Shakespeare in the Movies proceeds chronologically, in the order that plays were written, allowing the reader to trace the development of Shakespeare as an author--and an auteur--and to see how the changing cultural climate of the Elizabethans flowered into film centuries later. Prolific film writer Douglas Brode provides historical background, production details, contemporary critical reactions, and his own incisive analysis, covering everything from the acting of Marlon Brando, Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, and Gwyneth Paltrow, to the direction of Orson Welles, Kenneth Branagh, and others. Brode also considers the many films which, though not strict adaptations, contain significant Shakespearean content, such as West Side Story and Kurosawa's Ran and Throne of Blood. Nor does Brode ignore the ignoble treatment the master has sometimes received. We learn, for instance, that the 1929 version of The Taming of the Shrew (which featured the eyebrow-raising writing credit: "By William Shakespeare, with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor"), opens not so trippingly on the tongue--PETRUCHIO: "Howdy Kate." KATE: "Katherine to you, mug." For anyone wishing to cast a backward glance over the poet's film career and to better understand his current big-screen popularity, Shakespeare in the Movies is a delightful and definitive guide.

Download or read book Shakespeare in American Life written by Folger Shakespeare Library and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Published in conjunction with the exhibition Shakespeare in American Life presented at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, from 8 March through 18 August 2007, in celebration of the Library's 75th anniversary"-- back of title page.

Download or read book Between Nations written by David Baker and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1997-12-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fusing historiography with literary criticism, Between Nations produces an array of unexpected readings of early modern texts. Starting from the premise that England has never been able to emerge or define itself in isolation from its neighbors on the British Isles, this book places Renaissance England and its literature at a meeting of English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh histories. It ranges from the late sixteenth through the late seventeenth centuries and deals with the "reigns" of three monarchs and one regicide—those of Elizabeth I, James I, Charles II, and Oliver Cromwell. However, it shifts the domain they ruled from the customary center into interactions between England and the other British polities. The author argues that England was able to develop into what we call a "nation" only in and by means of its relations with the other proto-"nations" that often it was also suppressing. Among the authors who served one or more of the four English rulers are Shakespeare, Spenser, and Marvell, who are studied here in the way they responded to the complexities of British history that encompassed their "nation." They not only participated in nation building/destroying, but their works are shown often to be meditations on that process and their own roles in the process. In Henry V, for example, Shakespeare both produces a vision of an ideal Britain and inscribes into his play the voices of various British peoples that are meant to be subsumed. Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland, which is often taken as an anti-Gaelic screed, is more plausibly seen as a text compounded of heterogeneous cultural influences, many of them originating from within Ireland. The complexity of the text reflects Spenser's own situation as a colonial official exiled from one British nation, England, to another, Ireland. In "An Horation Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland," Marvell explicitly considers the consequences of a campaign that historians have called the "War of the Three Kingdoms." In that, and in a later poem, "The Loyal Scot," Marvell emerges as a shrewd commentator on the British politics of his day. Throughout, the book demonstrates that historical readings of this period's English literary works can be as multivalent and multicentric as the British history that produced them.

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 s England written by Louis B. Wright and published by New Word City. This book was released on 2016-10-06 with total page 95 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When William Shakespeare was about twenty, his life changed forever. He left Stratford and walked to London, where he became the world's greatest playwright. Here is his little-told story of Shakespeare, presented against the colorful tapestry of his England, the kingdom under Elizabeth I and James I. In the reigns of those monarchs, the nation was emerging from centuries of medieval turmoil. The small island that had changed so little since the Norman Conquest of 1066 suddenly became a center of international adventure, political experimentation, and artistic development. Young Shakespeare was fortunate to be in England, and in London, when he was. The first professional theatre opened in the capital in 1576; he arrived, stage-struck and in search of a job, around 1587. He retired to Stratford as a wealthy gentleman in 1611, only a generation before the theatres of England were closed by the Puritans. During Shakespeare's London years, England seethed with plots and intrigue and throbbed with pageantry; everywhere a writer looked there was a scene to fire his imagination. Like Sir Walter Raleigh and other daring contemporaries, William Shakespeare was, indeed, an Elizabethan who took advantage of his time.

Download or read book Shakespeare and Politics written by Bruce E. Altschuler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-17 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Shakespeare, more than any other author, was able to capture the essence of human nature in all its manifestations. His political plays offer enduring insights into our humanity, our vanity, our noble and baser drives, what makes us great, and what makes us loathsome. He tells us about ourselves and about our world. This volume gleans valuable lessons from the writings of William Shakespeare and applies them to contemporary politics. Original chapters covering over a dozen different plays take up perennial political themes including power and leadership, corruption and virtue, war and peace, evil and liberty, persuasion and polarization, and empire and global overreach.Features of the text:

Download or read book Shakespeare and Marx written by Gabriel Egan and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2004-09-30 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marxist cultural theory underlies much teaching and research in university departments of literature and has played a crucial role in the development of recent theoretical work. Feminism, New Historicism, cultural materialism, postcolonial theory, and queer theory all draw upon ideas about cultural production which can be traced to Marx, and significantly each also has a special relation with Renaissance literary studies. This book explores the past and continuing influence of Marx's ideas in work on Shakespeare. Marx's ideas about cultural production and its relation to economic production are clearly explained, together with the standard terminology and concepts such as base/superstructure, ideology, commodity fetishism, alienation, and reification. The influence of Marx's ideas on the theory and practice of Shakespeare criticism and performance is traced from the Victorian age to the present day. The continuing importance of these ideas is illustrated via new Marxist readings of King Lear, Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, Timon of Athens, The Comedy of Errors, All's Well that Ends Well, and The Winter's Tale.

Download or read book Operation Shakespeare written by John Shiffman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-08-25 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A Pulitzer Prize finalist presents the rare and intimate narrative of a daring national security sting designed to protect US soldiers, sailors, and pilots from the greatest danger they face on the battlefield--an enemy equipped with American-made weapons and technology. In Operation Shakespeare, investigative journalist John Shiffman traces an audacious and high-risk undercover operation--from Philadelphia to Shiraz to London to Beverly Hills to Tbilisi and Dubai. The sting is launched by an elite undercover Homeland Security unit created to stop the Iranians, Russians, Chinese, Pakistanis, and North Koreans from acquiring sophisticated American-made electronics capable of guiding missiles, jamming radar, and triggering countless weapons--from wireless IEDs to nuclear bombs. The US agents must outwit not only enemy brokers, but American manufacturers and global bankers too willing to put profit over national security. The three-year sting in Operation Shakespeare climaxes when the US agents lure the Iranian broker to a former Soviet republic with the promise of American-made radar, fighter-jet and missile components, then secretly drag him back to the United States, where he is held in secret for two years. The laptop the Iranian carries into the sting provides the CIA with a treasure trove, a virtual roadmap to Tehran's clandestine effort to obtain US military technology. Tenacious, richly detailed, broad in scope, and emotionally powerful--and boasting unprecedented access to the government agents fighting this shadow war, as well as the captured Iranian arms broker--Operation Shakespeare is a fast-paced and masterful account of the covert effort to preserve American military supremacy, and to protect US troops"--

Download or read book Engendering a Nation written by Jean E. Howard and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-09-11 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engendering a Nation adopts a sophisticated feminist analysis to examine the place of gender in contesting representations of nationhood in early modern England. Plays featured include: * King John * Henry VI, Part I * Henry VI, Part II * Henry, Part III * Richard III * Richard II * Henry V. It will be a must for students and scholars interested in the cultural and social implications of Shakespeare today.