Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation

ISBN-13: 9780415308687 / Angielski / Miękka / 2008 / 216 str.

M.J. Kidnie

Opis

In Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation, Margaret Jane Kidnie presents a rigorous and engaging exploration of what it is that distinguishes the Shakespearean work from its apparent other, the adaptation. Kidnie brings current debates in performance criticism into contact with recent developments in textual studies to show that the mutually defining categories of work and adaptation are unfixed, the products of ongoing and sometimes conflicting debates, arguments, and desires. Adaptation emerges as the conceptually necessary but culturally fraught category that results from partial or occasional failures to recognise a shifting work in its textual-theatrical instance(s).

This theoretical argument about the identity of works and the nature of text and performance is pursued in relation to instances as diverse as theatrical productions by the Royal Shakespeare Company to Djanet Sears’ prequel to Othello, from the BBC’s Shakespeare Reshaped to the Reduced Shakespeare Company, and from Robert Lepage’s one-man Hamlet to recent print editions of the complete works. These new readings of key productions are accessible as independent analyses, but taken as a whole, build up a persuasive picture of the cultural and intellectual processes that currently determine how the authentically Shakespearean is distinguished from the fraudulent and adaptive.

Recenzje

'Kidnie's study presents original, sophisticated and profoundly intelligent answers to important questions.  Its scope is ambitious and requires a set of skills which few Shakespearean scholars possess: unusually, Kidnie is as much at home in performance studies and in textual studies; she is keenly attuned to the practicalities of actual performances as well as to the theorization of performancel she is incisive on political issues relating to contemporary dramatic writings as on the questions of how media impact the production of Shakespeare.' - English Studies

Spis treści

Introduction: The Problem of Adaptation  1 – Surviving Performance: Shakespeare’s Contested Works  2 – Defining the Work through Production, or What Adaptation is Not  3 – Entangled in the Present: Shakespeare and the Politics of Production  4 – Adapting Media: ShakespeaRe-Told by the BBC  5 – Textual Origins

O autorze

Margaret Jane Kidnie is Associate Professor of English at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. She has edited early modern drama and prose, and has published widely on performance, adaptation, textual studies, and editorial practice. She is currently editing A Woman Killed with Kindness for the Arden Early Modern Drama series.