Essential Shakespeare: The Arden Guide to Text and Interpretation

317 Pages·2013·1.74 MB·English

by  Bickley

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Essential
Shakespeare
The Arden Guide to
Text and Interpretation
Pamela Bickley and
Jenny Stevens

CONTENTS
How to use this book
Introduction
Interpreting Shakespeare
Locating Shakespeare
Reading Shakespeare
Performing Shakespeare
1 A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Transformations, illusions, festivity
Bakhtin and the carnivalesque
Shakespeare’s sources: Ovid
A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Rhyme, rhythm and metre
Peter Brook’s Dream (1970)
2 Much Ado About Nothing: Exploring language and gender
Linguistics and the literary text
Female talk and marital suitability
Analysing the play’s opening scene: Two different approaches
Shakespeare Retold (2005)
3 Twelfth Night: Disguises and desires
Cross-dressing and Queer theory
Twelfth Night and romantic comedy: Defining genre
Song in Twelfth Night
Renaissance Theatre Company production for stage and screen (1987/8)
4 Measure for Measure (and its problems …)
Reading Shakespeare psychoanalytically
Tensions between the old and the new: Measure for Measure and the Bible
Measure for Measure’s troubling final act
Making Shakespeare ‘fit’: William Davenant’s The Law Against Lovers
(1662)
5 Hamlet: A play of ‘perpetual modernity’
The rise of the Shakespeare film
Revenge and the early modern audience
‘Who’s there?’ Questions in Hamlet
Ghosts on screen: Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000)
6 Othello: Sex, race and suggestibility
Presentism: ‘The new kid on the Shakespeare block’
Sexuality in Othello
Othello and the power of language
Orson Welles’s Othello (1952)
7 King Lear: ‘That things might change, or cease’
Marxist readings
Early modern ideas of authority and duty
Quarto and Folio texts
Kozintsev’s King Lear (1970)
8 Macbeth: Kingship and witchcraft
Macbeth and masculinities
Macbeth the ‘Jamesian’ play
Imagery in Macbeth
Polanski’s Macbeth (1971)
9 Antony and Cleopatra: The legendary on stage
East meets West: A postcolonial view
Acting the woman’s part: Shakespeare’s boy players
The Shakespearean soliloquy
The all-male Antony and Cleopatra at Shakespeare’s Globe (1999)
10 King Richard II: The performance of majesty
Deconstruction and Shakespeare
Clothes and the early modern theatre
Shakespeare’s all-verse drama
‘Girlie’ Shakespeare: Deborah Warner’s Richard II at the Cottesloe (1995)
11 Richard III: History’s monster or charismatic villain?
New historicism
History and historiography: Early modern approaches
Richard’s dramatic dialogue
Richard III as the fascist 1930s: Loncraine’s film (1995)
12 Cymbeline: ‘An experimental romance’?
British Studies and the ‘Welsh play’
The advent of the Blackfriars theatre
Cymbeline’s dramatic structure
‘Not an evening for purists’: Kneehigh Theatre’s Cymbeline (2006/7)
13 The Winter’s Tale: Tyranny, trials, time
Feminism/s
Madness and melancholy
Time and place
BBC Shakespeare and Jane Howell’s The Winter’s Tale (1981)
14 The Tempest: Where ‘Thought is free’
Genre theory
The masque
Tone
Shakespeare and opera: Thomas Adès’s The Tempest (2004)
Glossary of critical terms used in this book
Abbreviations
References
Index
HOW TO USE
THIS BOOK
The purpose of this book is to introduce students new to undergraduate
Shakespeare study to fourteen of the most commonly studied plays. Significant
areas of recent critical debate are introduced, explained and put into practice, and
the contexts in which the plays were written and performed are explored.
Worked examples of close analysis demonstrate different ways of approaching
both text and performance.
Each chapter is arranged through four discrete sections:
• critical theory and practice
• early modern contexts
• close reading
• performance and production
These sections can be read horizontally across the book, giving a comprehensive
overview of each of these aspects of Shakespeare studies. At the same time,
individual chapters provide a thought-provoking way in to the play itself.
The Further Thinking section at the foot of each chapter offers suggestions
for making connections across texts and for trying out some of the critical
approaches discussed. Each chapter concludes with ‘Afterlives’: brief references
to some of the re-inventions of the plays as entirely new works of art.
Introduction
Interpreting Shakespeare
One of the challenges involved in moving from pre-university to undergraduate
study is shifting away from an intense focus on a relatively narrow range of
prose, poetry and drama texts to a more expansive study of topic areas, not
necessarily organized by work or author. This broadening out includes becoming
familiar with a variety of critical perspectives and their terminologies. First
encounters with contemporary criticism can be disorientating, akin to arriving in
an unknown country. Its language can be formidably technical and its conceptual
underpinnings can seem rather ‘foreign’, derived as they sometimes are from
knowledge areas such as the natural and human sciences. However, getting to
grips with the ideas and idiom of modern criticism and with the increasingly
interdisciplinary nature of literary study is an important part of undergraduate
learning. Each chapter of this book offers a brief introduction to one critical
approach at work in current Shakespeare studies, followed by a practical
example. Some critical practices have been selected for their undisputed
influence on Shakespearean scholarship, while others have been included to
represent new and emerging fields of interpretation.
The organization of the book means that the fourteen critical approaches
demonstrated appear as discrete academic fields. The truth is, though, that what
are often presented as separate schools of thought, regularly cross their own
perceived borders, branching out to form new and highly stimulating modes of
interpretation. Academic readings of Shakespeare can also be highly combative
(indeed, critical discourse is sometimes described in terms of wars, battles and
conflict). Yet whether friendly or hostile, critical approaches are constantly in
dialogue with each other, ensuring that literary scholarship never grows
complacent or falls behind the times.
Each chapter opens with what is no more than a snapshot of a particular
reading approach and a demonstration of how it might be applied to the
Shakespeare text. Taken in their entirety, these sections offer an overview of