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The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture

Robert Shaughnessy, University of Kent, Canterbury
June 2007
Paperback
9780521605809

    This Companion explores the remarkable variety of forms that Shakespeare's life and works have taken over the course of four centuries, ranging from the early modern theatrical marketplace to the age of mass media, and including stage and screen performance, music and the visual arts, the television serial and popular prose fiction. The book asks what happens when Shakespeare is popularized, and when the popular is Shakespeareanized; it queries the factors that determine the definitions of and boundaries between the legitimate and illegitimate, the canonical and the authorized and the subversive, the oppositional, the scandalous and the inane. Leading scholars discuss the ways in which the plays and poems of Shakespeare, as well as Shakespeare himself, have been interpreted and reinvented, adapted and parodied, transposed into other media, and act as a source of inspiration for writers, performers, artists and film-makers worldwide.

    • Covers a wide range of popular manifestations of Shakespeare, past and present
    • Engages in dialogue across and between media forms
    • Contains a comprehensive bibliography, providing an authoritative overview of work in this field

    Reviews & endorsements

    '… Shakespeare and Popular Culture is a book that makes imperative reading for anyone who's remotely interested in literature, poetry, theatre, drama, the use of language, society at large and William Shakespeare's ever contagious and inexorable influence - upon all of the aforementioned and a whole lot more besides.' David Marx

    See more reviews

    Product details

    June 2007
    Paperback
    9780521605809
    306 pages
    225 × 155 × 18 mm
    0.41kg
    17 b/w illus.
    Available

    Table of Contents

    • Preface Robert Shaughnessy
    • 1. From popular entertainment to literature Diana E. Henderson
    • 2. Shakespeare abbreviated Peter Holland
    • 3. Shakespearean stars Barbara Hodgdon
    • 4. Shakespeare illustrated Stephen Orgel
    • 5. Shakespeare: myth and biographical fiction Douglas Lanier
    • 6. Narration and staging in Hamlet and its afternovels Laurie Osborne
    • 7. Shakespeare serialised: An Age of Kings Emma Smith
    • 8. Musical Shakespeares: attending to Ophelia, Juliet and Desdemona Stephen M. Buhler
    • 9. Shakespeare overheard: performances, adaptations and citations on radio Susanne Greenhalgh
    • 10. Shakespeare on the tourist trail Nicola J. Watson
    • 11. Performing Shakespeare in digital culture W. B. Worthen
    • 12. Shakespeare's popular face: from the playbill to the poster Carol Chillington Rutter
    • Further reading.
      Contributors
    • Robert Shaughnessy, Diana E. Henderson, Peter Holland, Barbara Hodgdon, Stephen Orgel, Douglas Lanier, Laurie Osborne, Emma Smith, Stephen M. Buhler, Susanne Greenhalgh, Nicola J. Watson, W. B. Worthen, Carol Chillington Rutter

    • Editor
    • Robert Shaughnessy , University of Kent, Canterbury

      Robert Shaughnessy is Professor of Theatre at the University of Kent.