Wartime Shakespeare

Performing Narratives of Conflict

Inbunden, Engelska, 2023

AvAmy Lidster,Amy (University of Oxford) Lidster

1 629 kr

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This is the first book-length, interdisciplinary study of how Shakespeare has been mobilized in performance at times of conflict spanning the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. It sets out a brand-new critical methodology that recognizes how wartime theatre is mediated by networks of production and reception that control its meaning and impact. Performances of Shakespeare's plays, like the texts themselves, do not have single or fixed meanings, and one production context often brings together conflicting agendas and responses. Amy Lidster explains how differing productions of Shakespeare shed light on issues at the heart of conflicts and negotiate concepts such as patriotism, commemoration, and propaganda. With wide-ranging transhistorical coverage, she argues that wartime Shakespeare is defined by its malleability and plural (mis)understandings, which determine its power to shape the experience of war, the political issues at stake during a period of crisis, and the construction of narratives of conflict.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2023-10-26
Mått158 x 235 x 22 mm
Vikt610 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor324
FörlagCambridge University Press
ISBN9781009356060

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Amy Lidster is Departmental Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Publishing the History Play in the Time of Shakespeare: Stationers Shaping a Genre (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and Authorships and Authority in Early Modern Dramatic Paratexts (forthcoming). She is co-editor of Shakespeare at War: A Material History (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

Introduction: a history of wartime production and reception; Part I: 1. Royal Shakespeare: Commemorating conflict during the Seven Years' War (1756-63); 2. Shakespeare as propaganda: British military performances during the American revolutionary war (1775-83); 3. 'Patriotic' Shakespeare and dialectics of conflict during the French revolutionary-Napoleonic wars (1792-1815); Interlude. Nostalgia, nation building and the Russian war (1853-56); Part 2: 4. Fragmenting Shakespeare(s) and the first world war (1914-18); 5. 'What we are fighting for': the state mobilization of Shakespeare during the second world war (1939-45); 6. 'Anti-war' Shakespeare: just war theory, sponsorship, and the impact of theatre during the Iraq war (2003-11); Conclusion: wartime Shakespeare – 'a playable surface'.

'Amy Lidster convincingly demonstrates how production and reception agents create a wartime Shakespeare more ideologically contested, and less consistently jingoistic, than we have recognized. Leading us from the Essex uprising in 1601 to the Iraq War at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Lidster is an able guide to a history of Shakespeare productions as open to interpretation as are the plays themselves.' Garrett Sullivan, Liberal Arts Professor of English, Pennsylvania State University