Bücher der Reihe The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series on Shakespeare and the Stage

This volume extends the reach of the American Shakespeare Center, which provides the finest in Shakespearean and Elizabethan dramatic performance and scholarship. These 28 essays, originally presented on the Blackfriars stage, bring together scholars and practitioners, often promoting ideas that can be translated into classroom experiences.

Hamlet stands as a high water mark of canonical art, yet it has equally attracted rebels and experimenters, those avant-garde writers, dramatists, performers, and filmmakers who, in their adaptations and appropriations, seek new ways of expressing innovative and challenging thoughts in the hope that they can change perceptions of their own world. One reason for this, as the book argues, is that the source text that is their inspiration was written in the same spirit. Hamlet as a work of art exhibits many aspects of the ';vanguard' movements in every society and artistic milieux, an avant-garde vision of struggle against conformity, which retains an edge of provocative novelty. Accordingly, it has always inspired unorthodox adaptations and can be known by a neglected portion of the company it keeps, the avant-garde in every age. After placing Hamlet alongside ';cutting edge' works in Shakespeare's time, such as Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, chapters deal with the ways in which experimental writers, theatre practitioners, and film-makers have used the play down to the present day to develop their own avant-garde visions. This is a part of the uncanny ability of Shakespeare's Hamlet to be ';ever-now, ever-new.'

This book collects essays by actors, directors, scholars, and teachers who are exploring the ways in which the plays of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries were-and still are-performed.

This book explores the many different ways that we can understand the concept of "literary influence," considering both the pressures exerted upon a work at the time of its creation as well as the pressures that continue to be exerted upon it and that it in turn exerts upon other works in the course of its literary or performance history.

This volume extends the reach of the American Shakespeare Center, which provides the finest in Shakespearean and Elizabethan dramatic performance and scholarship. These 28 essays, originally presented on the Blackfriars stage, bring together scholars and practitioners, often promoting ideas that can be translated into classroom experiences.

Appropriating Shakespeare: A Cultural History of Pyramus and Thisbe argues that the vibrant, transformative history of Shakespeare's play-within-a-play from A Midsummer Night's Dream across four centuries allows us to see the way in which Shakespeare is used to both create and critique emergent cultural trends. Because of its careful distinction between ';good' and ';bad' art, Pyramus and Thisbe's playful meditation on the foolishness of over-reaching theatrical ambition is repeatedly appropriated by artists seeking to parody contemporary aesthetics, resulting in an ongoing assessment of Shakespeare's value to the time. Beginning with the play's own creation as an appropriation of Ovid, designed to keep the rowdy clown in check, Appropriating Shakespeare is a wide-ranging study that charts Pyramus and Thisbe's own metamorphosis through opera, novel, television, and, of course, theatre. This unique history illustrates Pyramus and Thisbe's ability to attract like-minded, experimental, genre-bending artists who use the text as a means of exploring the value of their own individual craft. Ultimately, what this history reveals is that, in excerpt, Pyramus and Thisbe affirms the place of artist as both consumer and producer of Shakespeare.