#james shapiro

[shakespearenews]

What Shakespeare Got Right About PTSD

A new production of Othello foregrounds what the play’s earliest audiences recognized: the psychological costs of war.

Producers and directors have made efforts in recent years to capture what it must have felt like to see Shakespeare’s plays in his own day: original pronunciation and costuming, playhouses built to resemble the open-air Globe. But there are other, less palpable features of playgoing back then, including the collective experience of the recent war and pandemic. Shakespeare understood what spoke to his times; he knew, too, that those who warily returned to the reopened Globe to see his new play would have recognized the trauma at the core of Othello’s tragedy.

shakespearenews.com

[lizbennett2013]

Shakespeare Appreciation Week 2020

(organized by @harry-leroy)

Day Six: (Non-Shakespeare) Shakespeare Day

Alright friends, time to go through my favorite Shakespeare-related things that aren’t Shakespeare. In this case, I’m looking at books, because otherwise we’d be here for the rest of the day.

Specifically, I chose a mix of fiction and nonfiction/academic books, because a) I’m an academic who studies Shakespeare and b) these are some of my favorite books of all time. Anyway.

Queens of Innis Lear - Tessa Gratton (not pictured)

So if you haven’t figured this out yet based on my posts all week, I really like King Lear. But I’m also picky about my Shakespeare adaptations, because sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t (thus why Queens is on the list but Lady Hotspur is not). Queens works so beautifully because it maintains, for the most part, the plot of Shakespeare’s play, while also breathing life into those characters that don’t get enough fleshing out on stage - I’m talking detailed backstories for Goneril, Regan, Ban (Edmund), Lear’s wife, Ban’s mother, Kent, and Lear himself. Just. Wow. What a concept. Also, the three women are all women of color, which is an A+ change to the narrative and adds to the struggles they have fitting into the predominantly white population they are raised in. Also for all you Edmund/Cordelia shippers out there, this is the book for you.

If We Were Villains - M. L. Rio

This book. This book is one of my all-time favorites. I reread it at least once a year. As a Shakespeare nerd who also loves performance, I don’t think I could’ve asked for something more beautiful. And the prose? A++. Think The Secret History, but about Shakespeare actors instead - seven seniors at a small liberal arts college are performing Julius Caesar when one of their cast mates is found dead. Twists and turns ensue, along with performances of Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet, and King Lear. I just...I don’t have the words to express how much I love this book. Just read it.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead - Tom Stoppard

Ah, the classic Shakespeare but not text. This one is dear to my heart because I got the chance to play Rosencrantz during a production my sophomore year of undergrad. I love my disaster boys. And I love the way the play deals with whether or not the past can be changed, and asks what went wrong for R&G. Also the lines are freaking poetic and they make me cry.

To Be or Not to Be - Ryan North

It’s choose your own adventure Shakespeare! This one is Hamlet. Pick one of the play’s characters at the beginning, and make choices that affect the story’s outcome! Ophelia is by far my favorite in this one.

1599 and The Year of Lear - James Shapiro (not pictured)

If you want really fun, intensely focused histories of early modern theatre while also discussing Shakespeare’s plays in historical context, look no further. Easy to read, and a good place to start if you’re new to Shakespeare and want more context (or if you’re like me and have a history and English background and want them to mesh together all the time).

Shakesqueer - ed. Madhavi Menon

This is one of the two academic books on this list. Shakesqueer is a queer theory text which uses theoretical readings to interpret each of Shakespeare’s plays and his poetry through a queer lens. I’ve talked about it before, but it’s super readable, even if you don’t have a lot of background in queer theory (which I didn’t, the first time I read it).

Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page - Tiffany Stern

Tiffany Stern is one of my favorite scholars, and her work in this book is some of my favorite. Basically, she works through original practice traditions, examining the ways the text of Shakespeare’s plays may have changed from performance to its printed form. Also there is (I kid you not) a fascinating chapter on typeface and the methods used for printing books and pamphlets.

[petrichor-moonlight]

bit of english lit with boots :)

[his-quietus-make]

Love the thought of Shakespeare’s contemporary audience being totally sideswiped by the bloodbath at the end of King Lear, having been lulled into a false sense of security by its predecessor, Leir, which ended with the French army winning, Lear being reinstated as king, and Cordelia getting together with Edgar. Surprise, bitch - everybody dies...

(From James Shapiro’s 1606: William Shakespeare and The Year of Lear)

[hamletthedane]

S/o to that time I had to miss James Shapiro speaking at my school because I had a SHAKESPEARE 101 TEST of all things, but my friend said she’d buy me coffee bc I was bummed and lo and behold I walk into Starbucks and Shapiro is just chilling reading a Harold Bloom crit his laptop.

[If you think I didn't totally ask a well-known Shakespeare historian to sign my coffee cup, you'd be very wrong]

[shakespearenews]

Opinion | What Began as a War on Theater Won’t End There

The current politically-driven suppression of theater productions in high schools has a grim historical precedent.

It should come as no surprise, then, that in the Educational Theater Association’s most recent survey, 85 percent of American theater teachers expressed concern about censorship. Even Shakespeare is at risk: In Florida, new laws led to the restriction of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” to grades 10 through 12 and “Romeo and Juliet” could not be taught in full to avoid falling afoul of legislation targeting “sexual conduct.” Kill off young people’s exposure to theater, and you kill off a generation of playgoers, along with the empathy and camaraderie (already in short supply) that is intrinsic to theater. 

[shakespearenews]

Is Shakespeare the Ultimate Dead White Male?

On this episode of the Baillie Gifford Prize podcast, Read Smart, the prize’s 25th-anniversary “winner of winners,” James Shapiro, talks to

Razia Iqbal: What would you say to those people who argue that Shakespeare is the ultimate dead white male in the context of those arguments about the canon?

James Shapiro: After our conversation, I’m going to take the number one train downtown to the public theatre, where I’m working with a mostly African American cast on a production of Hamlet set in the American South in 2021. And that company, those actors, that director Kenny Leon, a major Broadway director, see Shakespeare as a way of expressing the cultural issues that matter most to Black people in America today.

So if you want to get rid of Shakespeare as a dead white man, you know, you’re not only have to argue with conservative politicians who fetishize Shakespeare, but with practicing artists who find his work a tremendous vehicle for expressing issues that might not otherwise be initially expressed.

[shakespearenews]

James Shapiro: Shakespeare Was NOT More Than One Person

In this episode of the Read Smart podcast, host Razia Iqbal will be speaking to James Shapiro, who won the prize in 2006 with 1599: A Year i

James Shapiro: I realized I knew almost nothing that I needed to know about a playwright who was so engaged with the social and the economic and the political crises of his time. And it set me in motion.

I’ll give one tiny bit from Hamlet simply because it comes to mind. And that is the opening scene when men are preparing against invasion.

And it’s a scene often enough cut in productions of the play. But if you were in England in 1599, in the summer of 1599, anticipating another Spanish armada landing on the shores, an opening scene in which men are standing guard against invasion would have been extremely, extremely real and vivid. So, yes, that is not set in England. The play is set in Scandinavia in a different time as well.

But that’s the kind of thing that Shakespeare would do to give an edge to his plays

---

James Shapiro: When Shakespeare came to London, there was a play called Hamlet on the boards, and we hear traces of it as late as 1596, when the play’s being performed and this play is now lost. They call it the murder Hamlet or earlier Hamlet.

And you can imagine Shakespeare as a young actor watching this play. Maybe he’s standing as a messenger in his first role. And we don’t know. Thinking, I can do something with this. This play is stale. It’s past sell by date. Why don’t I put into Hamlet‘s mouth soliloquies, long speeches in which he reveals what he’s thinking and how he’s thinking.

And you can start to see Shakespeare, who didn’t really like creating plots. He liked doing court renovations on somebody else’s story that needed fixing up. And he had a brilliant facility for how to transform a work that had been popular and make it ever more so. And it’s  extraordinary what he does.