Shakespeare's Play Research Articles

Queen of Egypt and Queen of the Bey-Hive: Sophie Okonedo's Cleopatra at the National Theatre (2018)

Abstract: Combining the methods of traditional theater history with semiotics and digital cultural studies, this article focuses particularly on Simon Godwin's production of Antony and Cleopatra at the National Theatre (2018) and on the avowed inspiration of the Nigerian-Jewish-descended British actress Sophie Okonedo by the world-famous vocalist, digital producer, and media celebrity Beyoncé Knowles-Carter (usually known simply as Beyoncé). Godwin's production carefully used a multiethnic cast and placed particular emphasis upon the relationship between Cleopatra and other women, both allies and enemies, in part by strategically reassigning Dolabella's lines to Octavia and thus creating an encounter between Cleopatra and Octavia that never happens in the Folio text. The article speculates that using allusions to Beyoncé out of context (away from the rich intertext of the film Lemonade [2016], for example, and away from transnational Black feminist debate) and to a majority-white British audience membership risked diluting Beyoncé's nuanced and politicized commentary—and, perhaps, diminished the nuanced treatment of labor and gender in Shakespeare's play. The investigation concludes, however, with a reflection upon the pros and cons—for artists and for audiences—of foregrounding digital subcultures in this way on stage and in academia.

Unaccommodated Religion

Abstract Shakespeare's King Lear offers later writers a scaffolding on which to construct do-it-yourself religions that emerge when intentional and unintentional pilgrims venture, abdicate, or are expelled from existing institutional orders and discover the covenantal core of religion when they encounter Other dispossessed people. Shakespeare's play, in dialogue with the Book of Job, develops the idea of a suffering God that is latent in the Hebrew Bible. When students at the University of Michigan-Flint adapted the play to their contemporary environment, they began their own pilgrimages into a wounded city and family traumas. Without biblical literacy, they instinctively reached for John Keats’ Lear-inspired ‘Vale of Suffering’ letter and the Bible-belt inflected stories of Flannery O'Connor to reassemble Lear as a religious play for today.

Introduction

Introduction

The Way of the Bodhisattva

Abstract What can Buddhism offer contemporary religious understandings of King Lear? Shakespeare's great wisdom play has been viewed, more often than not, as pessimistic, even nihilistic, in its tragic rendering of the human condition. A Buddhist perspective challenges the premises of such a bleak reading by offering profound insight into how suffering gives rise to compassion, empathy and wisdom, rather than despair. Focusing particularly on the enigmatic spirituality and moral function of Edgar, this article illuminates his character through the revered teachings of a classic Indian text of Mahāyāna Buddhism, Shāntideva's Way of the Bodhisattva. Edgar appears in the heroic light of a bodhisattva, an enlightened being who seeks to alleviate the suffering of others. His journey exemplifies the human potential for moral transformation, selflessness and universal love in his responsiveness to the suffering of others who wander in a saṃsāric world of ignorance, attachment and aversion.

Devouring Hamlet: Cultural Anthropophagy as an Adaptation Methodology

This paper focuses on two film productions of the Shakespearean play Hamlet (1600-1601), both made in Brazil in the 1970s. It is my contention that A herança (“The Inheritance”), by Ozualdo Candeias (1970), and O jogo da vida e da morte (“The Game of Life and Death”), by Mario Kuperman (1971), constitute intertextual works which can be understood as transcultural, anthropophagic adaptations of the Shakespearean drama.

Panowie i państwo na Szekspirze: Czesław Miłosz i Roman Brandstaetter jako tłumacze Szekspirowskich dzieł w Polskiej Rzeczpospolitej Ludowej

(State)holders of Shakespeare: Czesław Miłosz and Roman Brandstaetter as Translators of Shakespeare Dramas in the Polish People’s Republic The paper aims to shed light on the relationship between Shakespeare, his translators, and the authorities of the Polish People’s Republic during the late 1940s and early 1950s. The case studies of Czesław Miłosz and Roman Brandstaetter will serve to illustrate both the artistic and supportive function of their translation endeavours completed under the patronage of the communist state. By delving into the rich archival material (published as well as unpublished), I would like to focus on the political and social circumstances that determined Miłosz’s and Brandstaetter’s routes towards translating Shakespeare.

The Intertextuality of The Merchant of Venice in the Mansion of the Sad Birds

Intertextuality is the connection between a text with the previous and contemporary texts. Specifically, the reader should find the connection between the texts based on his or her enlightenment. According to intertextuality, a text cannot be produced without the reflection of the earlier texts. Moreover, this study is an attempt to display the connection and likeness of Shakespeare’s play, The Merchant of Venice, in Bakhtiyar Ali’s novel, the Mansion of the Sad Birds. Precisely, we can see Shakespeare's play in many scenes and dialogues of Bakhtiyar’s novel. Nevertheless, he has inventively made use of them to augment his novel.

Communications

Communications Alden T. Vaughan and Miles P. Grier To the Editor: The recent announcement that the 2022 Douglass Adair Memorial Award winner is "Staging the Cherokee Othello: An Imperial Economy of Indian Watching" by Miles P. Grier in the January 2016 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly prompts me to submit a minor correction. Professor Grier wonders if a book that Virginia Mason Vaughan and I coauthored, Shakespeare in America, "doubt[s] the veracity of the story" (78) regarding the Cherokee performance of 1752, the principal subject of his article. Interested readers will find the episode discussed in our book on pp. 22–23.1 Alden T. Vaughan Columbia University, emeritus Response to Letter to the Editor: I met Professors Alden and Virginia Mason Vaughan in May of 2016 when Virginia and I spoke on the same panel at "America's Shakespeare," an event sponsored by the Brown University Library and Rhode Island Historical Society. On that occasion, Alden informed me of the substance of this letter. I had written that the Vaughans' Shakespeare in America "omit[ted] the Cherokees from their discussion of the first season of professional theater offered in North America" (78) in 1752. I speculated in the article that perhaps this omission indicated that they doubted the veracity of the Virginia Gazette's report. He noted that they do discuss the incident several pages later. I was mortified, at first. How could I have made such an error? When I got my hands on a copy, I realized that I was not entirely wrong. After moving from that first season of 1752 to the 1770s, the Vaughans include an interlude without a subheading, stepping out of the chapter's chronological order to loop back and cover together all the records of Cherokees at colonial American playhouses. [End Page 428] I addressed the matter. For the revised version of the article, appearing in my book Inkface: "Othello" and White Authority in the Era of Atlantic Slavery (forthcoming from University of Virginia Press in late 2023), I moved the Vaughans' book from a footnote listing scholars who pass over the Cherokees' interruption of the 1752 performance of Othello to one containing those who give credence to the Virginia Gazette's implication that the empress of the Cherokees could not grasp the concept of playacting. That decision reflects the fact that the Vaughans eventually credit the "veracity" of the Virginia Gazette's short article on the interrupted performance. At first, though, they adopt a neutral stance: "What the Indians thought of Shakespeare's play is unrecorded, but a newspaper reported that they expressed 'great surprise' at the Harlequin pantomime afterpiece, 'as did the fighting with naked swords on the stage, which occasioned the empress to order some about her to go and prevent their killing one another.'" Here, the Vaughans decline to speculate on what motivated the surprised expressions and the command to intervene in the action. However, later they write that British Atlantic playhouses hosted "overflow audiences [who] came to ogle exotic strangers struggling to comprehend Shakespearian drama." While their choice of "exotic" suggests that the authors are ventriloquizing an imperial view that they do not share, the phrase "struggling to comprehend Shakespearian drama" transforms an inference that depends upon the reliability of the Gazette's depiction into a fact.2 The Cherokees who attended the command performance at Williamsburg in 1752 were seasoned diplomats representing a sovereign polity. Since they were not subject to the pressure to "comprehend Shakespearian drama" familiar to modern-day ticketholders or students taking a compulsory course, I decided a different question was in order. Rather than asking whether Cherokees had enough Anglo cultural competency to understand the speech and action of Othello, I asked whether the Virginia Gazette could be relied upon to "comprehend" what in Othello could have provoked chief Amouskositte's wife to disrupt the ceremonies surrounding negotiations to establish diplomatic and economic ties between her people and Virginia. I concluded that it was likely that the spectacle of a blacked-up personage's arrest at the hands of an armed white guard signaled to her that Virginia would insist on jurisdiction over Cherokees accused of crimes...

Cultivation of Intercultural Communication Competence via College English Extra-Curriculum—Taking Shakespeare Drama Club of USST as an Example

Cultivation of Intercultural Communication Competence via College English Extra-Curriculum—Taking Shakespeare Drama Club of USST as an Example

Fissured legacies in Roysten Abel's In Othello

In Othello (2003) offers both a critique and inadvertent affirmation of racial and colonial hierarchies and a reflection on the postcolonial nation. The film fosters Orientalist sensibilities via a fetishisation of ‘otherness’, in order to subvert it. It is a hybrid and ambivalent production in which the characters possess intersectional identities that are always multiple, in line with Hindu philosophy. This hybridity can also be observed in the mixture of traditions on which the film is based, and as such, it serves as a ‘rhizomatic interrelation’. The film shows how Shakespeare's play may provide a meditation on the Indian nation, where issue ssuch as transgressive romance, ostracisation, and gender roles remain unsettled.

Re-presenting Shylock: An Examination of Post-Holocaust and Adaptation in The Merchant of Venice Play and Film Adaptations

This paper examines the depiction of Jews, particularly the character of Shylock, in William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice in comparison with those of two adaptations: Arnold Wesker's play The Merchant and Michael Radford's film The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare's original work has been the subject of much scholarly discussion, with some perceiving it as perpetuating negative stereotypes and others as offering a nuanced and complex view of the character. Wesker's adaptation reinterprets the portrayal of Jews to challenge the negative representation in Shakespeare's play, highlighting themes of love, family, and relationships. Radford's film, on the other hand, offers a more nuanced and dynamic portrayal of the Jewish community than we are used to seeing in representations on film, and sheds light on the impact of anti-Semitic prejudice. It focuses on highlighting the Jewish/Christian disagreement and the extent to which Jews are victimized in Shakespeare's play, using filmic techniques to create a powerful representation with a deeper understanding of justice, discrimination, and dehumanization. Both adaptations offer a more nuanced portrayal of the Jewish community and challenge negative stereotypes perpetuated by Shakespeare's original work.

Duality in Hamlet's Character: Good and Evil Nature

Duality means having an opposite or contrasting quality or characteristic. Duality in Hamlet's character means that he possesses a certain quality or characteristic in his action, while in the same action, he conveys a completely opposite quality or characteristic. Shakespeare mysteriously creates his characters in his play: Hamlet, a character in Shakespeare's play Hamlet, conveys contrasting stable dual qualities – good and evil nature – that make him both hero and villain. Throughout the play, his actions portray his courage, sacrifice, nobility, moral integrity, and determination, as well as his pride, vindictiveness, ambition, indifference, and unholiness. The author thoroughly read the play and studied the character intensively. The article focuses on the duality – opposite balanced characteristics – of Hamlet, which makes the audience pliable with his completely contradictory characteristics of him.

“LOOK WITH THINE EARS”: THE DEPRECATION OF OCULARCENTRIC CULTURE IN WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S KING LEAR

In his groundbreaking research on the broad phenomenon of Western visual culture in important intellectual eras, Martin Jay touches on the abundance of ocular references in Renaissance literature and cites the example of William Shakespeare whose works are replete with visual metaphors. Notwithstanding extensive research on the role of vision in Shakespeare’s works, it seems that scant attention has been paid to the Bard’s deprecation of ocularcentric culture. Shakespeare was, admittedly, not the first writer who depicted and challenged the biased privileging of sight in Western culture, but the present study focuses on the example of King Lear to show that Shakespearean drama played a significant role in reflecting the dire consequences of ocularcentrism in society. Drawing on first-hand Renaissance accounts of vision, Martin Jay’s exhaustive research into the history of ocularcentrism in the West, and James Shapiro’s historical account of the year Shakespeare’s King Lear was first performed, this study employs a New Historicist methodology to examine how Shakespearean drama marks both a turn away from the traditional hegemony of vision and a turning point in the criticism of modern ocularcentric culture in the West. We conclude that King Lear serves, among other things, to remind us that visual subjugation transcends the boundaries of time and culture and that we could all ourselves be Lears or Gloucesters, deluded by the proverbial concept that “seeing is believing”

Milton’s Hamlet: The Tragedy of Adam Unparadized

ABSTRACT Shakespeare’s Hamlet was one of seventeenth-century England’s most popular plays, and, as the First Folio of the Philadelphia Free Library confirms, it was a Shakespearean drama with which Milton was deeply engaged. With Hamlet in mind, this article examines the degree to which Shakespearean tragedy qualifies Milton’s classical understanding of the genre and, more importantly, allows us insight into the relationship between tragedy and grace. What emerges is the profoundly agonistic but creative relationship between such influences as Shakespeare and Luther at the climax of Paradise Lost—so much so that without them Milton’s great work of art would have neither the same affective nor epistemological power. The argument falls into two parts: the first focuses on a specific network of contexts for Milton’s representation of the Fall as a tragedy, and the second on Adam and Eve’s response to that tragedy.

Milton, Shakespeare, and the English Grammar of Possibility

ABSTRACT This article considers Milton’s art in relation to modality and the evolving grammar of possibility in Early Modern English. Specifically, it reads the surprisingly complex modal auxiliary verbs, may and its rival can, as keywords in poetic scenes of mental deliberation. A comparative analysis of Shakespearean drama sets the scene, demonstrating how the polysemy of may contributes not only to a psychology of potential action in Brutus’s deliberation over Caesar’s assassination but also to his political conceptions. In Milton’s Sonnet 8, by comparison, the ascendance of ability-can over may affirms the poet’s power and the potential reach of the English language. In the translated epigraph to Areopagitica, genuine liberty finds definition in the interplay of a distinctive English liberty-may with a meritocratic ability can-and-will. Can and will are again lead performers in the deliberative interrogation of divine agency in Paradise Regained, whereas the role of might is questioned in Milton’s tragic depiction of fallen agency in Samson Agonistes.

All for Love and Antony and Cleopatra - A Comparative Study

Shakespeare's fantastic play "Antony and Cleopatra" is one of the greatest tragedies ever written in literature. Shakespeare's play contrasts passion and accountability. How the two most memorable characters desired to be, each other's yet were unable to be because of their circumstances. One of Dryden's objectives in creating the play was to demonstrate the vital force of love. After being banished, Cleopatra decides to return to Antony. She and Alexas try to make up a narrative about Cleopatra committing herself in her room to make Antony feel horrible (Dryden, 2021). After learning that Cleopatra murdered herself, Antony commits a clandestine suicide and collapses. Shakespeare's plays adopt a more specific, historical viewpoint than Dryden's plays, which are more of a romantic tragedy. The main distinction between Dryden's plays and Shakespeare's is this. Whether one favours Dryden's or Shakespeare's staging of the action, it goes without saying that the poetry—the dialogue—in both plays is of the highest grade and is predominantly written in iambic pentameter. To produce black verse in the manner of the "divine" Shakespeare, Dryden deviated from the rhyme scheme that had been established in his initial poem (Putra, 2022). Despite the fact that the main plot of "All for Love" by Dryden and "Antony and Cleopatra" by Shakespeare are the same, there are several significant distinctions between the two works' narrative strategies.

Intertekstualnost u drami Dva plemenita rođaka

The central plot of Fletcher and Shakespeare's play The Two Noble Kinsmen derives from Chaucer's The Knight's Tale, so it could be interpreted through the theory of intertextuality and transtextuality. The prototext of these literary works is identical, but it has been modified over the centuries. It has changed from a mythological story into a universal symbol of love, friendship, authority, honor, and death. Apart from the permutation of texts by different authors, The Two Noble Kinsmen is also a curious collection of Shakespeare's earlier works, despite the frequent contestation of his contribution to this play. Such self-citation is an interesting phenomenon, especially if we consider the fact that this play is Shakespeare's last work and not The Tempest, as traditionally stated in literary histories. Therefore, this paper aims to determine the similarities and differences between Chaucer's famous story and Fletcher and Shakespeare's play, to point out the degree of intertextuality in it, and to highlight the original dramatic episodes and characters, their function, meaning, and significance. With the assumption that Fletcher and Shakespeare intentionally and purposefully chose the mode of adaptation and transformation of the famous Chaucer's text, the obtained results indicate that certain elements were modified due to the requirements of the dramatic form and its theatrical function, but also for commercial and socio-political reasons. The transposition of the well-known ancient story into Renaissance England, with new episodes and characters in the subplot, offers a different and somewhat subversive picture of conventional social norms and relations.

Theoretical and Practical Problems of Rendering the Clown’s Discourse in Shakespeare's Dramas into Arabic

Theoretical and Practical Problems of Rendering the Clown’s Discourse in Shakespeare's Dramas into Arabic

London and Cockney in Shakespeare's Plays

London and Cockney in Shakespeare's Plays

Образ Сесилии Невилл, герцогини Йоркской в пьесе У. Шекспира «Ричард III» и в романе Ш. Пэнмэн “The Sunne in Splendour”

The article discusses the images of Cecily Neville, Duchess of York in W. Shakespeare's play "Richard III" and Sharon Penman's novel "The Sunne in Splendour". Despite the "alternative" interpretation of the events and characters of the War of the Roses, Sharon Penman creates an image of the heroine in some respect similar to Shakespeare's: a wise, knowing mother, courageously bearing the blows of fate. However, the wisdom of Cecily Neville’s wisdom in Sharon Penman’s novel is also the ability to find balance between the standards of the historical era with love for children and self–realization.