Whaur's Yer Wullie Shakespeare Noo?': Literary Influence V

Literature Compass, 2006

This contribution to Literature Compass has a threefold purpose. First, it aims to do what it says in the title, and flag up recent approaches to British identities in Shakespeare studies. Secondly, it seeks to remind readers of an earlier and now largely forgotten tradition of nationalist criticism and scholarship preoccupied with the place of Britain-nation, state and empire-that flourished in the 1920s and 1930s. Thirdly, it endeavours to excavate some of the more obscure material on the subject that, because of its place of publication, may have been overlooked. The material collected here covers issues of borders, colonialism, culture, genre, identity, invasion, language, mapping, monarchy, plantation, union, and the matter of Britain, especially in the histories, though as will be seen this work encompasses most of Shakespeare's corpus. The short introductions to each section and the accompanying bibliography of over 300 items, ranging from notes and queries to substantial essays, is divided into six sections, beginning with a brief overview of the historical debate, then focusing on criticism dealing broadly with Britain, then embracing material ordered by constituent nation: England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. That there is an even spread of material under this handful of headings suggests that each and every nation within this multi-nation state, as well as the problematic and often contested whole, has attracted its fair share of critical concern. The Historical Background In recent years, historians and literary critics have become increasingly concerned with the make-up and break-up of the United Kingdom. The specter of an end to Britain has prompted the energetic exploration of British origins and identities. For historians, the early modern period is the time when the cultural and political foundations of modernity were laid, when nationhood and statehood were mapped out. Parallels drawn between the 1590s and the 1990s mean that the Renaissance, and in particular the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, have assumed a special relationship with the present. 'Topicality', the critical preoccupation with the ways in which Shakespeare's drama responds to the circumstances of its own time, now

2019

ESC: English Studies in Canada, 2009

College Literature, 2004

2017

Shakespeare, 2012

Some nights, I dreamed he'd written me. (Carol Ann Duffy, ''Anne Hathaway'') Shakespeare is the language equivalent of the Big Bang; his influence echoes through the language and literature of the modern world. With this evocative image Carol Ann Duffy opened her uproarious and tender conference plenary. It was borne out by the sheer range of Shakespeares to be found at the 2011 Cambridge Shakespeare Conference. Delegates identified the texts that sparked this Big Bang, in the Renaissance, medieval, biblical and classical sources that Shakespeare used. And forward to the present day the echo rings, in the enormous diversity of performative, aesthetic, critical and educational deployments, transpositions and adaptations of Shakespeare that the conference's seminars, workshops and plenaries explored. Duffy interwove her plenary with snatches from her long poetic narrative, ''The Laughter of Stafford Girl's High'', in which an attack of hysterical laughter runs rampant Á as ''a percussion of trills and whoops'' Á through a girls' public school. Indeed, such was the control that the Poet Laureate's reading exercised, it threatened for exquisite and transitory moments to recreate that laughter in the gripped audience of conference delegates who filled Homerton College auditorium. Again and again her deadpan voice clinched deliciously absurd rhymes. Yet her Big Bang thesis was also subtly sustained via her own writing. Her ''Anne Hathaway'' experiences Shakespeare's language like cosmic dust made sensuous reality: ''My lover's words / were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses / on these lips'' (''Anne Hathaway'' 30). Yet before hearing her Shakespearean themed poems collected this way, one might not have realized the extent to which Shakespeare recurs in Duffy's work. ''We are all children of Shakespeare'', she proffered. As if to demonstrate, she finished with a poignant, ambitious conjunction of Shakespearean registers. As the teachers of Stafford High enact their tragic and tearful departures from the school's forced closure, for the guffawing girls all is irresistibly comic. A simple geographical testament to the Shakespeare echo that sounds through the modern world was to be found in the extraordinary range of nations and continents from which scholars and practitioners had travelled to attend the conference. These delegates reflected Á and investigated Á how a globalized and

Notes and Queries, 2002

The two terms of this book's title-'culture' and 'myth'-map the territory of its contents, which span more or less a decade of work (1984-94) in a particular area of Shakespeare studies. The subtitle derives from a collection of essays by various hands, published in 1988 as The Shakespeare Myth. The term 'myth' was derived from Roland Barthes' Mythologies i was an attempt to identify a powerful cultural institution, constructed around the figure of Shakespeare, that could be analysed to some degree separately from the person of the Elizabethan dramatist, and the texts of his works. Traditional Shakespeare criticism, as it is still very widely practised, consists of reading and interpreting the plays and poems; seeking to unlock their intrinsic meanings by reference to the author's assumed 'intentions' or to the historical context in which he wrote; analysing the plays in relation to their origins in the Elizabethan theatre and so on. The Shakespeare Myth sought a different approach:

2016

This article engages with one of the current critical and bibliographical concerns of Shakespeare studies: the collaborative nature of Shakespeare’s work. Bibliographers have identified other hands in the fabric of Shakespeare’s plays. Here the focus is Shakespeare’s collaboration in the plays of others. Three such instances will be examined; The Book of Sir Thomas More, The Spanish Tragedy and The Chronicle History of King Lear. Substantially different as these cases may be, in all of them Shakespeare is working with the materials of others. Shakespeare’s King Lear is an adaptation of the older Leir play performed by the Queen’s Men and in that sense it is a deeply collaborative work. As this essay concludes, without a model there would be nothing to stimulate, or provoke or exceed. One of the major developments in the study of early modern drama over the past two decades has been an increased focus on the collaborative processes through which plays are brought to the public.1 Inst...