Author: Various
Publisher: Library of America
ISBN: 1598534637
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 688
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Book Description
“The history of Shakespeare in America,” writes James Shapiro in his introduction to this groundbreaking anthology, “is also the history of America itself.” Shakespeare was a central, inescapable part of America’s literary inheritance, and a prism through which crucial American issues—revolution, slavery, war, social justice—were refracted and understood. In tracing the many surprising forms this influence took, Shapiro draws on many genres—poetry, fiction, essays, plays, memoirs, songs, speeches, letters, movie reviews, comedy routines—and on a remarkable range of American writers from Emerson, Melville, Lincoln, and Mark Twain to James Agee, John Berryman, Pauline Kael, and Cynthia Ozick. Americans of the revolutionary era ponder the question “to sign or not to sign;” Othello becomes the focal point of debates on race; the Astor Place riots, set off by a production of Macbeth, attest to the violent energies aroused by theatrical controversies; Jane Addams finds in King Lear a metaphor for American struggles between capital and labor. Orson Welles revolutionizes approaches to Shakespeare with his legendary productions of Macbeth and Julius Caesar; American actors from Charlotte Cushman and Ira Aldridge to John Barrymore, Paul Robeson, and Marlon Brando reimagine Shakespeare for each new era. The rich and tangled story of how Americans made Shakespeare their own is a literary and historical revelation. As a special feature, the book includes a foreword by Bill Clinton, among the latest in a long line of American presidents, including John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and Abraham Lincoln, who, as the collection demonstrates, have turned to Shakespeare’s plays for inspiration.
Author: James Shapiro
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781461958574
Category : Theater and society
Languages : en
Pages : 785
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Book Description
This anthology traces the surprising story of how Americans made Shakespeare their own through a wide range of genres. The writers included range from the 1800s to the present day, and offer testimony to Shakespeare's profound and enduring influence.
Author: Alden T. Vaughan
Publisher: Oxford Shakespeare Topics
ISBN: 0199566380
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
This book is a lively account of how American culture has embraced the English playwright and poet from colonial times to the present. It ranges widely, following the story of Shakespeare's reception in America from the scholarly - criticism, editions of the plays, and curricula - to the light-hearted - burlesques, musical comedies, and kitsch.
Author: James Shapiro
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525522298
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322
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Book Description
One of the New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year • A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • A New York Times Notable Book A timely exploration of what Shakespeare’s plays reveal about our divided land. “In this sprightly and enthralling book . . . Shapiro amply demonstrates [that] for Americans the politics of Shakespeare are not confined to the public realm, but have enormous relevance in the sphere of private life.” —The Guardian (London) The plays of William Shakespeare are rare common ground in the United States. For well over two centuries, Americans of all stripes—presidents and activists, soldiers and writers, conservatives and liberals alike—have turned to Shakespeare’s works to explore the nation’s fault lines. In a narrative arching from Revolutionary times to the present day, leading scholar James Shapiro traces the unparalleled role of Shakespeare’s four-hundred-year-old tragedies and comedies in illuminating the many concerns on which American identity has turned. From Abraham Lincoln’s and his assassin, John Wilkes Booth’s, competing Shakespeare obsessions to the 2017 controversy over the staging of Julius Caesar in Central Park, in which a Trump-like leader is assassinated, Shakespeare in a Divided America reveals how no writer has been more embraced, more weaponized, or has shed more light on the hot-button issues in our history.
Author: James Shapiro
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780571235797
Category : English drama
Languages : en
Pages : 423
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Book Description
"An intimate portrait of one of Shakespeare's most inspired moments: the year of King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. 1606, while a very good year for Shakespeare, is a fraught one for England. Plague returns. There is surprising resistance to the new king's desire to turn England and Scotland into a united Britain. And fear and uncertainty sweep the land and expose deep divisions in the aftermath of the failed terrorist attack that came to be known as the Gunpowder Plot. James Shapiro deftly demonstrates how these extraordinary plays responded to the tumultuous events of this year, events that in unexpected ways touched upon Shakespeare's own life ... [and] profoundly changes and enriches our experience of his plays--Publisher's description.
Author: James Shapiro
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416541632
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 356
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Book Description
Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro explains when and why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote his plays.
Author: Andrew Delbanco
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674006034
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 518
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Book Description
From John Winthrop and Anne Bradstreet to Emerson, Hawthorne, Dickinson, and Thoreau to Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and John Updike, this anthology provides a collective self-portrait of the New England mind from the Puritans to the present. 9 halftones.
Author: John Hollander
Publisher: Sterling Publishing Company, Inc.
ISBN: 9781402705175
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 64
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Book Description
Contains a collection of poetry that spans two centuries and provides a diverse point of view of American life. American Poetry offers a collection of 26 verses by our finest poets, all with their unique perspective on the land they loved and accompanied by remarkable paintings that enhance the meaning of the words. Here, beautifully illustrated, are such unforgettable works.
Author: Lukas Erne
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107354552
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Shakespeare and the Book Trade follows on from Lukas Erne's groundbreaking Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist to examine the publication, constitution, dissemination and reception of Shakespeare's printed plays and poems in his own time and to argue that their popularity in the book trade has been greatly underestimated. Erne uses evidence from Shakespeare's publishers and the printed works to show that in the final years of the sixteenth century and the early part of the seventeenth century, 'Shakespeare' became a name from which money could be made, a book trade commodity in which publishers had significant investments and an author who was bought, read, excerpted and collected on a surprising scale. Erne argues that Shakespeare, far from indifferent to his popularity in print, was an interested and complicit witness to his rise as a print-published author. Thanks to the book trade, Shakespeare's authorial ambition started to become bibliographic reality during his lifetime.
Author: Russ McDonald
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9780631234883
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 952
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Book Description
Shakespeare: Criticism and Theory is an anthology of the most significant essays and book chapters published on Shakespeare in the second half of the twentieth century. An anthology of about 50 of the most significant essays and book chapters published on Shakespeare in the second half of the twentieth century. Introduces students to the variety of theoretical positions, thematic claims, methodologies, and modes of argument in Shakespeare criticism over the last 50 years. Critical views represented range from the old style historicism of E.M.W. Tillyard and the new criticism of William Empson to the new historicism of Stephen Greenblatt and the feminist perspective of Catherine Belsey. Pieces are organised into categories of critical thought and introduced in clear language. Most pieces are reproduced in their entirety.
