Oxford Shakespeare Topics provides students, teachers, and interested readers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship. Each book is written by an authority in its field, and combines accessible style with original discussion of its subject. Notes and a critical guide to further reading equip the interested reader with the means to broaden research. This is the first full account of Shakespeare's impact on the whole of Eastern and East Central Europe up to the present day. Starting with the tours of the English Comedians on the Continent during Shakespeare's lifetime and shortly after his death, it traces their routes as far as Poland (Gd nsk, Warsaw) and the core of the Habsburg Empire (Prague, Vienna, Graz). Later chapters explore the profound Shakespearean influence on Russian drama, literature, and criticism since the 18th centuryTsarina Catherine II's Russian adaptations of Merry Wives and Timon, Tolstoy's attack on King Lear, Stanislavsky's interpretation of Hamlet and Othelloand Shakespeare's major role in the national revivals in Poland, the Czech lands, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and Bulgaria. Chapters on Shakespeare after the Bolshevik revolution and behind the Iron Curtain deal with the appropriation of his plays for political interpretations but also with the ways his humanism became an increasingly inspiring voice of dissent from Stalinist totalitarianism. This book evaluates the Shakespearean achievements of the film-maker Grigori Kozintsev, the poet and translator Boris Pasternak, the composers Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitry Shostakovich, and the stage designer Josef Svoboda as well as the more controversial contributions of the critic Jan Kott and the playwright and director Bertold Brecht.

This study explores how Eastern European spaces and meanings are constituted in specific cultural contexts in early modern English drama. Focusing on the ways in which these texts integrate the articulation of Eastern European space and geography into a variety of interpretative conventions, the book develops ways of thinking critically and reflexively about the production of knowledge and identity in Shakespeare and his contemporaries through representations of space in drama.

This broad ranging account explores Shakespeare's impact across Eastern Europe, from the tours of the English Comedians in his own time to today. It shows how his plays were appropriated for political ends, but also how his humanism inspired dissent.

While the focus is predominantly on Bulgaria, its particular experience is considered as representative of the entire Soviet bloc, to which it belonged for four and a half long decades. And its multiple links with partner-countries in this fold are always kept in view."--BOOK JACKET.

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This book brings together a selection of essays on the reception and dissemination of Shakespeare’s plays in England and beyond from the 17th century to the present. Written from the perspective of a nation or cluster of nations in which Shakespeare has been used either to reflect, legitimize or challenge different versions of authoritarian rule, each of the chapters offers a picture of Shakespeare as unwitting commentator on some of the most significant and unsettling political events in Europe and elsewhere. Illustrating and analyzing changing attitudes to Shakespeare and his work in various tyrannical and post-tyrannical contexts in both Western and Eastern Europe, North Africa and South America, the volume provides insights into issues like the role of censorship and self-censorship in the revision and production of Shakespearean material; institutional controls on the dissemination and publication of Shakespeare’s work; assumptions and techniques in the staging of his plays; state intervention in the elaboration of a Shakespeare “canon”; the role of Shakespeare in the construction of identity under tyranny; and the pertinence or otherwise of the subversion/containment paradigm following events such as the collapse of communism and the so-called “Arab Spring”.

"This volume's main focus is on the ways in which, over the past 400 years, Shakespeare has played a role of significance within a European framework, particularly where a series of political events and ideologically based developments were concerned, such as the early modern wars of religion, the emergence of "the nation" during the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the First and Second World Wars, the process of European unification during the 1990s, the attack on the World Trade Center in New York, and Britain's participation in the war in Iraq." "The whole of the collection and particularly the opening section clearly invites a European and even a global perspective." "This book convincingly demonstrates that Shakespeare, both at the level of his meaning in his own time and at that of his reception in later ages, should no longer be studied only in relation to particular nations, but as Dirk Delabastita argues, also at various supranational levels." --Book Jacket.

Detached from Shakespeare’s English, Hamlet has been rewritten numerous times in European languages, the various translations into any one language jostling with each other for dominance and spawning new Hamlets that depart decisively from Shakespeare as a source. This book focuses on the rich tradition of drawing from Hamlet in European cultures to produce new, independent works, which include Hamlet theatre, Hamlet ballet, Hamlet poetry, Hamlet fiction, Hamlet essays and Hamlet films. It examines how the myth of Hamlet has crossed back and forth over Europe’s linguistic borders for four hundred years, repeatedly reinvigorated by being bent to specific geo-political and cultural locations. The enquiries in this book show how, in the process of translation, adaptation and reinventing, Hamlet has become the common cultural currency of Europe.

Structured around modes in which one might encounter Asian-themed performances and adaptations, Shakespeare and East Asia identifies four themes that distinguish post-1950s East Asian cinemas and theatres from works in other parts of the world: Japanese formalistic innovations in sound and spectacle; reparative adaptations from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong; the politics of gender and reception of films and touring productions in South Korea and the UK; and multilingual, diaspora works in Singapore and the UK. These adaptations break new ground in sound and spectacle; they serve as a vehicle for artistic and political remediation or, in some cases, the critique of the myth of reparative interpretations of literature; they provide a forum where diasporic artists and audiences can grapple with contemporary issues; and, through international circulation, they are reshaping debates about the relationship between East Asia and Europe. Bringing film and theatre studies together, this book sheds new light on the two major genres in a comparative context and reveals deep structural and narratological connections among Asian and Anglophone performances. These adaptations are products of metacinematic and metatheatrical operations, contestations among genres for primacy, or experimentations with features of both film and theatre.

From the aftermath of World War II to the convulsions of Brexit, festivals have deployed Shakespeare as a model of inclusive and progressive theatre to seek cultural solutions to Europe's multi-faceted crises. Shakespeare on European Festival Stages is the first book to chart Shakespeare's presence at continental European festivals. It examines the role these festivals play in European socio-cultural exchanges, and the impact festivals make on the wider production and circulation of staged Shakespeare across the continent. This collection offers authoritative, lively and informed accounts of the production of Shakespeare at the following festivals: the Avignon Festival and Le Printemps des comédiens in Montpellier (France), the Almagro festival (Spain), Shakespeare at Four Castles (Czech Republic and Slovakia), the International Shakespeare Festival in Craiova (Romania), the Shakespeare festivals in Elsinore (Denmark), Gdansk (Poland), Gyula (Hungary), Itaka (Serbia), Neuss (Germany), Patalenitsa (Bulgaria), Rome and Verona (Italy). Shakespeare on European Festival Stages is essential reading for students, scholars and practitioners interested in Shakespeare in performance, in translation and in a post-national Shakespeare that knows no borders and belongs to all of Europe.