Performing Transversally - Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future (2025)

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Shakespeare on Screen: A Second Update (2002-16)

José Ramón Díaz Fernández

The ESSE Messenger, 2016

The present article seeks to provide a comprehensive annotated guide to the publications related to the field of Shakespeare on Screen for the period 2002-16. Conceived as an update to two articles previously published in The European English Messenger, its entries have been classified and annotated in four categories: the first section includes a list of bibliographies, filmographies and databases; the second features monographs and collections of essays focusing exclusively or substantially on the subject whereas the third deals with representative journals and specific journal issues. Published screenplays and other works on the making of the films are listed in the fourth section. A thoroughly revised, expanded and updated versión was published in the French journal Cahiers Élisabéthains in a special issue on Shakespeare on screen in the digital era (2021).

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Introduction: Sailing along Intermedial Rivers

Monica Chesnoiu

Multicultural Shakespeare

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Filming Shakespeare, from Metatheatre to Metacinema, Peter Lang, 2008.

Agnieszka Rasmus

2008

Filming Shakespeare, from Metatheatre to Metacinema is the first book-length study of Shakespeare film adaptations concerned with metacinematic criticism. The volume offers a thoroughly researched and extensive survey of reflexivity in Shakespeare on screen, providing the reader with comprehensive and easily readable case studies of major and obscure productions from silent era to the present day. Topics include the ontology of the photographic image, the silent era, cinema as death, Hollywood, counter-cinema, ideology, film genre, and theatrical vs. cinematic illusion. Considering Shakespeare criticism as well as film theory and history, the essays are aimed at students, teachers, scholars, and enthusiasts of Shakespeare and film. Contents: Shakespeare – Adaptation – Metatheatre – Metacinema – Reflexivity – Silent Film – Hollywood – Counter-Cinema – Theatrical vs. Cinematic Space – Illusion – Alienation – Spectator – Film Genre – Ideology – Cinema as Death – Soliloquies – Asides – Direct Address – Film-within-the-Film – Framing Devices.

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"'For Such a Sight Will Blind a Father's Eye': The Spectacle of Suffering in Taymor's Titus" in Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future

Bryan Reynolds

Disrupting the cinematic narrative of Julie Taymor's Titus (1999), an adaptation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, is a nightmare sequence in which the newly crowned empress, Tamora, stands face-to-face with her enemy, Titus. Images of dismembered limbs engulfed in flames appear in the background, sailing forward, until they inundate the screen behind the characters' silhouetted profiles. 1 Invoking the murders of Tamora's eldest son Alarbus and Titus's youngest son Mutius, the flying, burning body parts symbolize the powerfulness, unpleasantness, and mysteriousness of the creative process, harkening back, via homage to the horror of Seneca, to the ritualistic, religious roots of theater in the Greek festival of Dionysus. In Titus, especially in such magnificent scenes as this, Taymor combines a slew of culturally rich metaphors, in effect demonstrating what transversal theory calls "investigative-expansive wherewithal" and the "principle of translucency." (See photo 9.1.)

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Shakespeare and Digital Performance in Practice

Erin Sullivan

2022

Shakespeare and Digital Performance in Practice explores the impact of digital technologies on the theatrical performance of Shakespeare in the twenty-first century, both in terms of widening cultural access and developing new forms of artistry. Through close analysis of dozens of productions, both high-profile and lesser known, it examines the rise of live broadcasting and recording in the theatre, the growing use of live video feeds and dynamic projections on the mainstream stage, and experiments in born-digital theatre-making, including social media, virtual reality, and video-conferencing adaptations. In doing so, it argues that technologically adventurous performances of Shakespeare allow performers and audiences to test what they believe theatre to be, as well as to reflect on what it means to be present—with a work of art, with others, with oneself—in an increasingly online world.

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"Friend or Fo, Shakespeare's Ends is the Means: Revising Early Modern English Iconography, Elisabetta Points Toward the Critical Future" from Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future

Bryan Reynolds

Dario Fo and Franca Rame, Italy's infamous married political satirists, have spent over four decades performing and politicking, using the stage to enact a Gramscian reclaiming of popular culture that simultaneously addresses pertinent sociopolitical issues with the goal of empowering the masses. Taking a nonliterary approach to the theatrical text, Fo and Rame place the immediacy of the issues and the theatrical expectations of their audiences above the posterity of the script, creating what they call "throwaway plays." These are plays written to address current sociopolitical issues that are purposefully left "open" to revision in response to unfolding national and international events and the reactions of their audiences during performances. Their "throwaway theatre" 1 is rooted in popular Italian theatrical traditions, such as the improvisatory, audiencecentered commedia dell'arte, and is purposefully crafted to provoke the spectators into taking a critical stance on their political and social surroundings. Self-fashioned as a modern-day guillare (medieval strollingplayer), 2 Fo advertises his and Rame's "illegitimate" theater as defiant of both the authorities in Italy and the common scholarly perspective of the theatrical text as a fixed and unalterable entity that functions as the centerpiece of a performance event.

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‘A Stage of the Mind’: Hamlet on Post-War British Radio

Susanne Greenhalgh

2011

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Post-Textual Shakespeare

Douglas Lanier

Shakespeare Survey

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The Accented Voice in Audiovisual Shakespeare

Irene Ranzato

The Dialects of British English in Fictional Texts, 2021

The reflections contained in this chapter take the cue from the evidence, sustained with various nuances by more than one author, that, in Elizabethan times, there was not a dialect literature so understood and that “dialects, for Renaissance authors, have nothing to do with ‘home’” (Blank 1996, 3). The lack of connection between dialectal features and regionality arguably applies also to the plays of William Shakespeare: the voices of his non-standard characters are mainly portrayed in terms of class dialects rather than regional dialects (Delabastita 2002, 305) and draw on stereotypes as means to construe individual characterisations and create humorous situations. As Blank goes on to state, “juxtaposing a peasant dialect with the King’s English was, often enough, played for laughs” (Blank 1996, 3). In a way which is perhaps counter-intuitive, given the premises, this chapter will not be concerned with the comparatively few examples of non-standard varieties included in Shakespeare’s plays. This is rather the starting point of an investigation which involves some of the plays’ contemporary afterlives – namely film and television adaptations – and which could be summarised in the following research query: what happens when Shakespearean texts are adapted into audiovisual narratives in which accents and dialects are consistently and sometimes unexpectedly used? Audiovisual adaptations, not only of Shakespeare’s plays, but of the classics in general, often showcase characters speaking with marked accents and/or in dialect even when in the original texts these same characters are not identified by any distinct regional trait. In this chapter I will consider some significant adaptations from both cinema and television in order to highlight some relevant typecastings and understand the function of a given variety in the audiovisual texts, even when, as is generally the case, there is no indication of regionality in the respective Shakespeare’s plays. The latter ‘originals’ have in fact been chosen as a privileged site for investigation exactly because of their comparative lack of non-standard varieties with respect to other more diatopically varied examples in English literature. The addition of regional voices in the relative audiovisual adaptations, conspicuous as it is, renders their function arguably more revealing to the scholar’s eye. Conversely, the use of dialects has rarely been foregrounded in the analysis of these Shakespearean afterlives, neither in relation to the source text nor to their contemporary import. The adoption of this viewpoint will hopefully add facets and further problematise the topic of multilingualism in Shakespeare.

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"Inspriteful Ariels: Transversal Tempest" in Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future

Bryan Reynolds

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Performing Transversally - Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future (2025)
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