Shakespeare's History Plays: Performance, Translation and Adaptation in Britain and Abroad - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 052182902X ISBN 13: 9780521829021

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2004

Synopsis

This 2004 volume, with a foreword by Dennis Kennedy, addresses a range of attitudes to Shakespeare's English history plays in Britain and abroad from the early seventeenth century to the present day. It concentrates on the play texts as well as productions, translations and adaptations of them. The essays explore the multiple points of intersection between the English history they recount and the experience of British and other national cultures, establishing the plays as genres not only relevant to the political and cultural history of Britain but also to the history of nearly every nation worldwide. The plays have had a rich international reception tradition but critics and theatre historians abroad, those practising 'foreign' Shakespeare, have tended to ignore these plays in favour of the comedies and tragedies. By presenting the British and foreign Shakespeare traditions side by side, this volume seeks to promote a more finely integrated world Shakespeare.

About this title

About the Authors

Ton Hoenselaars is Associate Professor in the English Department at Utrecht University. He is the author of Images of Englishmen and Foreigners in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (1992). He is also editor and co-editor of a number of collections including Shakespeare's Italy (1993, revised edition 1997), Reclamations of Shakespeare (1994), and 400 Years of Shakespeare in Europe (2003).

Dennis Kennedy's books include The Spectator and the Spectacle: Audiences in Modernity and Postmodernity, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance, Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of Twentieth-Century Performance, Foreign Shakespeare, and Granville Barker and the Dream of Theatre. Shakespeare in Asia: Contemporary Performance is due late 2009 (edited with Yong Li Lan). He has twice been a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities in the USA, twice won the Freedley Award for theatre history, received the Chancellor's Distinguished Research Award at the University of Pittsburgh, the Berkeley Fellowship at Trinity College Dublin, and was elected to the Royal Irish Academy and Academia Europaea. His own plays have been performed in New York, London, and many other places, and he has frequently worked as a dramaturg and director in professional theatres.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 052182902X
• ISBN 13: 9780521829021
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 302
• Editor: Hoenselaars Ton