Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Reconstructions of the Globe: A Retrospective
- ‘Useful in the Year 1999’: William Poel and Shakespeare’s ‘Build of Stage’
- Reconstructing the Globe: Constructing Ourselves
- From Liturgy to the Globe: the Changing Concept of Space
- The Arithmetic of Memory: Shakespeare’s Theatre and the National Past
- Maximal and Minimal Texts: Shakespeare v. the Globe
- William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet: Everything’s Nice in America?
- Which is the Jew that Shakespeare Knew?: Shylock on the Elizabethan Stage
- A Little Touch of Harry in the Light: Henry V at the New Globe
- Gulls, Cony-Catchers and Cozeners: Twelfth Night and the Elizabethan Underworld
- The Globe, the Court and Measure for Measure
- Macbeth and the Antic Round
- Macbeth / Umabatha: Global Shakespeare in a Post-Colonial Market
- When All is True: Law, History and Problems of Knowledge in Henry VIII
- ‘All which it inherit’: Shakespeare, Globes and Global Media
- ‘Delicious traffick’: Alterity and Exchange on Early Modern Stages
- The 1998 Globe Season
- Shakespeare Performances in England, 1998
- Professional Shakespeare Productions in the British Isles January-December 1997
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespeare Studies 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage
- 3 Editions and Textual Studies
- Books Received
- Index
2 - Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2007
- Frontmatter
- Reconstructions of the Globe: A Retrospective
- ‘Useful in the Year 1999’: William Poel and Shakespeare’s ‘Build of Stage’
- Reconstructing the Globe: Constructing Ourselves
- From Liturgy to the Globe: the Changing Concept of Space
- The Arithmetic of Memory: Shakespeare’s Theatre and the National Past
- Maximal and Minimal Texts: Shakespeare v. the Globe
- William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet: Everything’s Nice in America?
- Which is the Jew that Shakespeare Knew?: Shylock on the Elizabethan Stage
- A Little Touch of Harry in the Light: Henry V at the New Globe
- Gulls, Cony-Catchers and Cozeners: Twelfth Night and the Elizabethan Underworld
- The Globe, the Court and Measure for Measure
- Macbeth and the Antic Round
- Macbeth / Umabatha: Global Shakespeare in a Post-Colonial Market
- When All is True: Law, History and Problems of Knowledge in Henry VIII
- ‘All which it inherit’: Shakespeare, Globes and Global Media
- ‘Delicious traffick’: Alterity and Exchange on Early Modern Stages
- The 1998 Globe Season
- Shakespeare Performances in England, 1998
- Professional Shakespeare Productions in the British Isles January-December 1997
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespeare Studies 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage
- 3 Editions and Textual Studies
- Books Received
- Index
Summary
“You go not till I set you up a glass / Where you may see the inmost part of you” (Hamlet 3.4.19-20) Peter Holland concludes his book English Shakespeares by praising foreign productions for 'rightly showing us that not everybody's Shakespeare is the one we possessively think we know' (p. 269). Several recent publications show the effects of Shakespeare's transposition within German, French, Russian and Irish cultures, past and present. In Redefining Shakespeare: Literary Theory and Theatre Practice in the German Democratic Republic, J. Lawrence Gunter and Andrew M. McLean have brought together an illuminating range of essays and interviews with theatre practitioners which chart the changing production styles in the former East Germany in relation to their political contexts. For me at least, much of this was undiscovered country. A useful chronology of key productions and events from 1945 to 1990 sets a historical framework for the development of a tradition in which the German Shakespeare Society, and the work of Brecht and Robert Weimann are shown to be important influences. Weimann's own lucid essay gives 'a personal retrospect' of how 'Shakespeare' has been redefined over the period, assessing the 'uncanny threshold between unorthodoxy and complicity' (p. 137) unique to theatre practice in the GDR.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Shakespeare Survey , pp. 283 - 302Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999