In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Othello, love collides with violent conflict, creating a range of challenges and opportunities for filmmakers and their visions of the plays. Key to the plays are questions of identity, and the borders between Shakespeare’s lovers have been interpreted in the twenty-first century in profoundly political ways, resonating with inter-racial, caste and ethnic conflict, honour killings, domestic violence and discourses of sexual politics and gender identity. This chapter surveys the range of Romeo and Juliet and Othello on screen, considering some of the lesser-known and recent adaptations alongside the landmark films. While not exhaustive, it illustrates the scope and range of possibilities the plays have offered to filmmakers from various cultures.

On the origins, dissemination, and nature of the Wycliffite Bible and its many manuscripts – especially in the first half of the fifteenth century – and how it can be shown to be, in part, supported by the nobility, certainly aimed at erudite readers.

This chapter addresses aspects of the trans-cultural or merging process at play in Kurosawa’s three Shakespeare adaptations Kumonosu-j / Macbeth (1957), The Bad Sleep Well / Hamlet (1960) and Ran / King Lear (1985) in terms of narrative and thematic parallels, correspondences from local models to Shakespearean ones and symbolic collusions. For each film, the mode of representation is suggestive rather than literal. The play-film dialectical effects never produce the same pessimistic discourse as in the model text, but one essentially of the same nature and depth. Narrative shifts, radical dialogues transformations allow the necessary adjustments and seamless coalescence between Japanese cultural contexts and Shakespeare worlds. Thematic parallels highlight similar circular, tragic patterns. Various techniques and aesthetics (Noh, painterly effects) blend with the sheer cinematic to depict a dark human saga in realistic worlds verging on symbolism.

There are three truly pioneering versions of King Lear on film: Grigori Kozintsev’s Korol Lir (1970), Peter Brook’s King Lear (1971), and Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985).These adaptations not only represent the best versions of King Lear ever made but also rank among the most important Shakespeare films of all time.None of these films are inventive or subtle in their representation of women, nor are they sophisticated in their approach to gender roles in what is arguably Shakespeare’s most misogynistic play.Silent and obedient, Cordelia is in many ways the perfect Renaissance woman, while Goneril and Regan play the demons to her saint.These rigid binariesand the impossible subject positions they impose on women are the inventions of patriarchy, and of misogyny in particular.Of the three films that I will examine here, only one of them begins to challenge this disabling binary and the concomitant spectacle of patriarchy restored over women’s dead bodies.

Lauded in both the synagogue and the academy, Moses Maimonides remains the most influential philosopher to have emerged out of the Jewish tradition. Yet his radical conception of God’s unity and incorporeality informs a thoroughgoing rationalist reinterpretation of the language of Scripture that might be thought to denude God of his personal qualities. Framed around the first 5 of Maimonides' 13 principles of faith, we examine in this chapter Maimonides' views on God's unity and incorporeality, and the theory of divine attributes at the root of his radical biblical hermeneutic, explaining how, despite some pragmatic concessions to human frailty, Maimonides presents a biblical God who might easily be mistaken (though mistake it may not be) for the more rarefied and abstract God of Aristotle. In conclusion, we discuss, how in the face of such a view, Maimonides can nonetheless maintain a commitment to religious worship.

How institutional manuscript collections and archives emerged, and how some of the idiosyncratic systems in place within these establishments were created, helping to anchor the new manuscript scholar.

An audience follows a park ranger into the woods looking for wolves … A young Danish prince contemplates a skull in a dug-up grave … A wheelchair-bound blind man spars verbally with the carer who is about to leave him … A woman with a deformed spine is murdered by a fanatical doctor who wants to dissect her corpse … A bald, cancer-ridden woman recites the poetry of Donne as she lies dying … Two pairs of couples in Regency dress dance a waltz as the lights gradually fade …

Chapter 11: This chapter surveys intersections between views of acting and paradigms of science, and addresses views of the human. The chapter begins with a brief historical overview, starting with Plato and Aristotle and proceeding to early twentieth-century scientists such as Pavlov and Freud. The focus is on late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century cognitive sciences and neuroscience, which provide the actor with concrete, material information about how body and brain work. This helps to eliminate misapprehensions about how different aspects of the self operate and offers insight into imagination, intellect, emotion, memory, and language, among other aspects of our experience. The discussion addresses the fact of actors as complex processes, inextricably connected to each other and their environments, and how the actor might utilize the findings of science.

Chapter 12: This chapter shows how theatre operates as a kind of cognitive prosthetic, helping us stage and imagine what we are not yet able to see around us or within us. Committed to embodied and extended theories of cognition, the chapter examines the relationship between the stories told onstage across the centuries and the shifting conceptions of the self and the other. Through a kind of wormhole between King Lear, the pageant wagon of the medieval period, and the off-off-Broadway theatre of today, the chapter connects the theatrical innovations around personation, or the taking-on of a character, in these different periods to argue that the theatrical conventions that set up the relationship between character and actor display a changing notion of the self. This shifting of theatrical conventions generates discomfort at first, as spectators learn to consume stories in a new way; and the discomfort unveils what we need to learn next.

Chapter 2: This chapter begins by observing that the repertoire of science plays is dominated by works in which scientific issues are the subject of the drama, rather than a mode of exploration, in symbiotic relationship with those of the theatre itself. This kind of symbiosis can occur only if the collaborative process is set up at the outset, so that the script evolves in concert with all aspects of staging and enactment – a method pioneered by Theatre de Complicité, under the direction of its founder Simon McBurney. Taking as a case study McBurney’s stage adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s novel Beware of Pity, the chapter explores the question of how consciousness might be staged, rather than talked about. Central to the experiment is the process of working with metaphor, both as literary conceit and as an approach to theatrical realization.

Chapter 3: This chapter charts the intersections between theatre and science and explores how experience and experiment are interlinked in each domain. Looking at three key scientific ideas and theatrical moments, the chapter draws out contextual aspects of the science that reflect the scientific concerns of their moments. Exploring first a play from the early years of the recent resurgence in the interest in theatre and science, the chapter investigates how the biological and medical sciences with their obvious link to genetic testing and human experience are represented, and moves on to consider how science, gender, and life become crystal clear in early twenty-first century theatre. It concludes by looking at how theatre is shaped by the experience of climate change and its science in the 2010s through two very different plays, one a staged lecture and the other a production whose deliberate excess results in an expansive ‘epic’ theatrical form that appears to take precedence over the science.

Chapter 1: This chapter starts by tracing the development of objectivity in both science and theatre through classical and early modern theatre, in which it was a fairly unimportant epistemic virtue, into the late eighteenth century where objectivity begins to emerge through the idealizations of ‘Truth-to-Nature’ in biology and in literary and theatrical Romanticism. Although some conceptions of scientific objectivity and observation treat these as virtuous by the extent to which they rise above personal or historical bias, the practice and theory of both objectivity and observation have changed through history. Drawing on the work of Lorraine Daston and others, the chapter goes on to show that the emergence of modern (‘mechanical’) objectivity, and a new relationship with observation, mark both nineteenth-century science and Naturalist theatre. Making the comparison explains some of the antitheatrical claims of Naturalist authors and the contradictions of Naturalist practice. As nineteenth-century ‘objectivity’ is superseded, so the theatrical figuration of science gravitates towards areas of ambiguity, chaos, and indeterminacy.