Shakespeare in America (Oxford Shakespeare Topics)

This book traces Shakespeare's contributions to America's cultural history from the colonial era to the present, with substantial attention to theatre history, publishing history, and criticism. It identifies four broad themes that distinguish Shakespeare in the United States from the dramatist's reception in other countries. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Americans in search of self-improvement took a utilitarian approach to the plays, mining them for moral insights and everyday wisdom; beginning in the nineteenth century, American entrepreneurs collected, edited, and adapted Shakespeare for their own pleasure and profit; while America's public schools and theatre practitioners sought to make the works widely accessible; and throughout American history, Americans have had fun with Shakespeare in spoofs, parodies, and other appropriations and the collection of Shakespeare kitsch. Shakespeare in America also examines America's evolving awareness of Shakespeare, initially through the importation of his writings in the early eighteenth century, the staging a few decades later of English adaptations of the plays, and in the nineteenth century and beyond, through the promotion of Shakespeare and his works at Lyceums, Chautauquas, Shakespeare Clubs (both scholarly men's associations and more socially-oriented women's clubs), and America's literary 'renaissance' as championed by Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, and others. The nineteenth century also witnessed growing attention to Shakespeare in schools, especially in William H McGuffey's Readers, and later in colleges, while simultaneously American familiarity with Shakespeare encouraged burlesques on stage, including the popular 'black' minstrel shows of the 1840s through 1870s. The twentieth century witnessed new organizations for promoting Shakespeare, such as the Shakespeare Association of America, and new venues for amateur and professional performances, such as Shakespeare summer festivals beginning in the 1930s and still going strong; and in new media for enjoying Shakespeare, such as feature films, Broadway musicals, and, toward the end of the twentieth century, radical adaptations of the plays on stage, on film, and in fiction, often aimed at persuading American youth that Shakespeare speaks to them. The story of Shakespeare in America is ever-changing.

Literature & Fiction

Vaughan, Alden T.

Vaughan, Virginia Mason

Dramas & Plays

Oxford University Press

Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800 examines early modern English actors' impersonations of black Africans. Those blackface performances established dynamic theatrical conventions that were repeated from play to play, plot to plot, congealing over time and contributing to English audiences' construction of racial difference. Vaughan discusses non-canonical plays, grouping of scenes, and characters that highlight the most important conventions - appearance, linguistic tropes, speech patterns, plot situations, the use of asides and soliloquies, and other dramatic techniques - that shaped the ways black characters were 'read' by white English audiences. In plays attended by thousands of English men and women from the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth, including Titus Andronicus, Othello and Oroonoko, blackface was a polyphonic signifier that disseminated distorted and contradictory, yet compelling, images of black Africans during the period in which England became increasingly involved in the African slave trade.

Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500–1800

Cambridge University Press

Shakespeare's Caliban examines The Tempest's "savage and deformed slave" as a fascinating but ambiguous literary creation with a remarkably diverse history. The authors, one a historian and the other a Shakespearean, explore the cultural background of Caliban's creation in 1611 and his disparate metamorphoses to the present time.

Shakespeare's Caliban: A Cultural History

Arts & Photography

Othello: A Contextual History

Shakespeare's Othello has exercised a powerful fascination over audiences with its portrayal of destructive jealousy. This study is a major exercise in the historicization of Othello in which the author examines contemporary writings and demonstrates how they were embedded in the text. Subsequent chapters analyze representations and interpretations from the Restoration to the present, using illustrations of performances and performers. Othello is revealed as a significant shaper of cultural meaning.

History & Criticism

Shakespeare's Othello has exercised a powerful fascination over audiences with its portrayal of destructive jealousy. This study is a major exercise in the historicization of Othello in which the author examines contemporary writings and demonstrates how they were embedded in the text. Subsequent chapters analyze representations and interpretations from the Restoration to the present, using illustrations of performances and performers. Othello is revealed as a significant shaper of cultural meaning.

Humor & Entertainment

Othello: New Perspectives

This anthology offers an exciting range of new critical responses to Shakespeare's most controversial tragedy. In her introduction, Virginia Mason Vaughan surveys the entire anthology, relating each new perspective to the traditional viewpoints of earlier twentieth-century critics. For the first half of the twentieth century, critics catalogued and analyzed Shakespeare's poetic language while they debated Othello's stature as a tragic hero and Iago's motivation as a villain. By contrast, the essays included in this volume reveal the play's dissonance's and ambiguities. They employ a variety of contemporary discourses - deconstruction, feminism, performance theory, speech act theory, and cultural poetics - to reexamine Othello. Throughout, they treat Shakespeare's tragedy as theatrical text, foregrounding its dramatic properties and exploiting current theories about performance to show how the play actually works.

UNKNO

Antony and Cleopatra: Language and Writing (Arden Student Skills: Language and Writing)

Reading Antony and Cleopatra is particularly challenging because of  Shakespeare's masterful embodiment of Rome and Egypt's contrasting worlds in language, structure, and characterization.Instead of seeing the interaction of Roman and Egyptian perspectives in Antony and Cleopatra as a type of double image of reality that changes as one moves from one location to another, students often find themselves compelled to pick sides. The more romantic opt for Cleopatra as the most sympathetic character, while the pragmatists dismiss her lifestyle as self-indulgent. The central challenge in reading this play, in other words, is to resist the compulsion to take sides and, instead, to adopt a 'both-and' point of view rather than an 'either-or' choice. The play's central binary - Rome vs. Egypt - is deeply embedded in its language and structure, yet the play consistently complicates our view of either side. The book encourages students to think outside the binary box, to understand, and to celebrate, Shakespeare's exploitation of the multivalent nature of language. As well as helping students to analyse the intricacy of Shakespeare's language in Antony and Cleopatra, each chapter's 'Writing matters' section enables students to develop their own writing strategies in coursework and examinations.

The Arden Shakespeare

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Books by Vaughan, Virginia Mason

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Vaughan, Virginia Mason. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Shakespeare in America (Oxford Shakespeare Topics)

Shakespeare in America (Oxford Shakespeare Topics)

Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500–1800

Shakespeare's Caliban: A Cultural History

Shakespeare's Caliban: A Cultural History

Othello: A Contextual History

Othello: A Contextual History

Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500–1800

Othello: New Perspectives

Antony and Cleopatra: Language and Writing (Arden Student Skills: Language and Writing)