Shakespeare / Play: Contemporary Readings in Playing, Playmaking and Performance

(Hardback)

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Shakespeare / Play asks: what is (a) play How do Shakespeares plays engage with, and represent, early modern modes of play from jests, games, and toys, to music, spectacle, movement, animal-baiting and dance How have we played with Shakespeare in the centuries since And how does the structure of the plays experienced in the early modern playhouse shape our understanding of the form of a Shakespeare play today Shakespeare / Play brings together established and emerging scholars to respond to these questions, using approaches spanning theatre and dance history, cultural history, critical race studies, performance studies, disability studies, archaeology, material history, music, and literary analysis. Ranging across Shakespeare's dramatic oeuvre as well as early modern lost plays, dance notation, conduct books, jest books, and contemporary theatre and film, it includes consideration of Measure for Measure, Much Ado About Nothing, Titus Andronicus, The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear and The Merry Wives of Windsor, among others. The subject of this volume is reflected in its structure: Shakespeare / Play features substantial new essays across five acts, interwoven with seven shorter, playful pieces (a prologue, four act breaks, a jig and a curtain call), to offer new directions for research on Shakespearean playing, playmaking, and performance. In so doing, this volume interrogates the conceptions of playing of/in Shakespeare that shape how we perform, read, teach, and analyse Shakespeare today.

Author Bio

Emma Whipday is Senior Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at Newcastle University, UK. Her first book, Shakespeares Domestic Tragedies: Violence in the Early Modern Home (2019), is co-winner of the Shakespeares Globe Book Award 2020. Other publications include Teaching Shakespeare and His Sisters: An Embodied Approach (2023) and Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England: Actor, Audience and Performance (co-edited with Simon Smith, 2022). She is also a playwright; her play Shakespeares Sister (2016) won the Theatre Royal Haymarkets Masterclass Pitch Your Play award, and her play The Defamation of Cicely Lee won the American Shakespeare Centers 2019 Shakespeares New Contemporaries prize.