Shakespeare, Dissent and the Cold War (Palgrave Shakespeare Studies) - Softcover

Thomas, Alfred

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1349494151 ISBN 13: 9781349494156

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014

Synopsis

Shakespeare, Dissent and the Cold War is the first book to read Shakespeare's drama through the lens of Cold War politics. The book uses the Cold War experience of dissenting artists in theatre and film to highlight the coded religio-political subtexts in Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth and The Winter's Tale.

About this title

Review:

"Thomas has written a lively, intelligent, and interesting study of the politics of Shakespearean drama and its relationship to the literature and theater of Cold-War (and post-Cold-War) Europe. He examines Shakespeare's deliberate employment of religio-political codes that call attention to the persecution of English Catholics, the repressive practices of the English government and the socially disruptive effects of religious antagonisms. In analyzing Russian film versions of Hamlet and King Lear as indirect criticisms of the Soviet system, the Czech-English playwright Tom Stoppard's Cahoot's Macbeth in the context of post-1968 Czech political resistance, and Ingeborg Bachmann's poem 'Bohemia Lies on the Sea,' Thomas highlights the political potential of Shakespearean drama that can be translated into powerful political protest and analysis in changed (modern) circumstances." - Arthur Marotti, Wayne State University, USA

About the Author:

Alfred Thomas is Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, having previously taught at Rutgers, Harvard and Berkeley, USA. He is the author of seven books, including A Blessed Shore: England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare (2007) and Prague Palimpsest: Writing, Memory, and the City (2010).

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1349494151
• ISBN 13: 9781349494156
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 275