Author: Irene Rima Makaryk
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442644028
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
Shakespeare's works occupy a prismatic and complex position in world culture: they straddle both the high and the low, the national and the foreign, literature and theatre. The Second World War presents a fascinating case study of this phenomenon: most, if not all, of its combatants have laid claim to Shakespeare and have called upon his work to convey their society's self-image. In wartime, such claims frequently brought to the fore a crisis of cultural identity and of competing ownership of this 'universal' author. Despite this, the role of Shakespeare during the Second World War has not yet been examined or documented in any depth. Shakespeare and the Second World War provides the first sustained international, collaborative incursion into this terrain. The essays demonstrate how the wide variety of ways in which Shakespeare has been recycled, reviewed, and reinterpreted from 19391945 are both illuminated by and continue to illuminate the War today.
Author: Richard Pearson
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
ISBN: 1783830565
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 358
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Book Description
“The story of the King Edward VI grammar school in Stratford-upon-Avon and its sacrifice in the Second World War . . . a heavy price for just one school.” —War History Online Like the Great War generation before them, the Old Boys of King Edward VI School, Stratford-upon-Avon, (known as Shakespeare’s School) answered the Nations call to arms in 1939. Over the next six years, no less than fifty-two of these young men fought and died for their Country. This evocative and carefully researched book tells each one’s story. The author paints a picture of the character of the individual concerned, along with his family background, his contribution to the School and, most importantly, his war service and the circumstances of his death. Some perished in lonely cockpits during the Battle of Britain and the Bombing campaign. Others fought and died at sea whether on Atlantic convoys, the Mediterranean campaign or in the Far East. The soldiers among them fell in the glare of the Western Desert fighting the Germans and Italians and in the unforgiving jungles of Burma repulsing the Japanese. In one case, death came in a German concentration camp. Who can tell what influence the strong ethos of this small grammar school with its enduring values of decency and comradeship had played during the years of hostilities on both those who made the supreme sacrifice and others who were fortunate enough to survive? What is certain is that the example set by those former members of Shakespeare’s School whose stories are told in this book must never be forgotten by their successors.
Author: Robert Sawyer
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137582189
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 314
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Book Description
Shakespeare Between the World Wars draws parallels between Shakespearean scholarship, criticism, and production from 1920 to 1940 and the chaotic years of the Interwar era. The book begins with the scene in Hamlet where the Prince confronts his mother, Gertrude. Just as the closet scene can be read as a productive period bounded by devastation and determination on both sides, Robert Sawyer shows that the years between the World Wars were equally positioned. Examining performance and offering detailed textual analyses, Sawyer considers the re-evaluation of Shakespeare in the Anglo-American sphere after the First World War. Instead of the dried, barren earth depicted by T. S. Eliot and others in the 1920s and 1930s, this book argues that the literary landscape resembled a paradoxically fertile wasteland, for just below the arid plain of the time lay the seeds for artistic renewal and rejuvenation which would finally flourish in the later twentieth century.
Author: Nicholas Shakespeare
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062297058
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 366
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Book Description
When Nicholas Shakespeare stumbled across a box of documents belonging to his late aunt, Priscilla, he was completely unaware of where this discovery would take him and what he would learn about her hidden past. The glamorous, mysterious figure he remembered from his childhood was very different from the morally ambiguous young woman who emerged from the trove of love letters, photographs, and journals, surrounded by suitors and living the dangerous existence of a British woman in a country controlled by the enemy. He had heard rumors that Priscilla had fought in the Resistance, but the truth turned out to be far more complicated. As he investigated his aunt's life, dark secrets emerged, and Nicholas discovered the answers to the questions over which he'd been puzzling: What caused the breakdown of Priscilla's marriage to a French aristocrat? Why had she been interned in a prisoner-of-war camp, and how had she escaped? And who was the "Otto" with whom she was having a relationship as Paris was liberated? Piecing together fragments of one woman's remarkable and tragic life, Priscilla is at once a stunning story of detection, a loving portrait of a flawed woman trying to survive in terrible times, and a spellbinding slice of history.
Author: Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108905331
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
During World War Two, many British writers and thinkers turned to Shakespeare in order to articulate the values for which their nation was fighting. Yet the cinema presented moviegoers with a more multifaceted Shakespeare, one who signalled division as well as unity. Shakespeare and British World War Two Film models a synchronic approach to adaptation that, by situating the Shakespeare movie within histories of film and society, avoids the familiar impasse in which the playwright's works are the beginning, middle and end of critical study. Through close analysis of works by Laurence Olivier, Leslie Howard, Humphrey Jennings, and the partners Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, among others, this study demonstrates how Shakespeare served as a powerful imaginative resource for filmmakers seeking to think through some of the most pressing issues and problems that beset wartime British society.
Author: Amy Lidster
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009356070
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 325
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Book Description
This is the first sustained study of how Shakespeare has been mobilized during conflicts spanning the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. It draws on interdisciplinary research to develop an innovative critical methodology that reveals the creativity and diversity of wartime theatre production and its variable impacts.
Author: Katherine West Scheil
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108416691
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 297
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Book Description
Examines representations of Anne Hathaway from the eighteenth century to contemporary portrayals in theatre, biographies and novels.
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Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Author: Dirk Delabastita
Publisher: Associated University Presse
ISBN: 9780874130041
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 398
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Book Description
"This volume's main focus is on the ways in which, over the past 400 years, Shakespeare has played a role of significance within a European framework, particularly where a series of political events and ideologically based developments were concerned, such as the early modern wars of religion, the emergence of "the nation" during the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the First and Second World Wars, the process of European unification during the 1990s, the attack on the World Trade Center in New York, and Britain's participation in the war in Iraq." "The whole of the collection and particularly the opening section clearly invites a European and even a global perspective." "This book convincingly demonstrates that Shakespeare, both at the level of his meaning in his own time and at that of his reception in later ages, should no longer be studied only in relation to particular nations, but as Dirk Delabastita argues, also at various supranational levels." --Book Jacket.
Author: Patrick Gray
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1789202639
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 170
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Book Description
How does Shakespeare represent war? This volume reviews scholarship to date on the question and introduces new perspectives, looking at contemporary conflict through the lens of the past. Through his haunting depiction of historical bloodshed, including the Trojan War, the fall of the Roman Republic, and the Wars of the Roses, Shakespeare illuminates more recent political violence, ranging from the British occupation of Ireland to the Spanish Civil War, the Balkans War, and the past several decades of U. S. military engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Can a war be just? What is the relation between the ruler and the ruled? What motivates ethnic violence? Shakespeare’s plays serve as the frame for careful explorations of perennial problems of human co-existence: the politics of honor, the ethics of diplomacy, the responsibility of non-combatants, and the tension between idealism and Realpolitik.
