Negotiating Shakespeare's Language in Romeo and Juliet: Reading Strategies from Criticism, Editing and the Theatre - Brossura

Hunter, Lynette

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1138259594 ISBN 13: 9781138259591

Casa editrice: Routledge, 2016

Riassunto

Through exciting and unconventional approaches, including critical/historical, printing/publishing and performance studies, this study mines Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to produce new insights into the early modern family, the individual, and society in the context of early modern capitalism. Inspired by recent work in cultural materialism and the material book, it also foregrounds the ways in which the contexts and the text itself become available to the reader today. The opening material on critical/historical approaches focuses on the way that readers have frequently read and played the text to explore issues that cluster around the family, marriage, gender and sexuality. Chapter two, on the ways that actors today inhabit character and create behaviour, provides intertextual comment on acting in the early modern period, and the connections between acting and social behaviour that inform self-image and the performance of identity both then and now. The third chapter on printing/publishing approaches to the text offers a detective story about the differences between Quarto One and Quarto Two, that focuses on the curious appearance in Quarto Two of material related to the law at word, phrase, line and scene level. The next three chapters integrate a close study of the language of the play to negotiate its potential significance for the present in the areas of: Family, Marriage, Gender and Sexuality; Identity, Individualism and Humanism; and the Law, Religion and Medicine. Among the startling aspects of this book are that it: - takes the part of Juliet far more seriously than other criticism has tended to do, attributing to her agency and aspects of character that develop the part suddenly from girl to woman; - recognizes the way the play explores early modern identity, becoming a handbook for individualism and humanism in the private domestic setting of early capitalism; and - brings to light the least recognized element in the play at the moment, its demonstration of the emerging structures of state power, governance by law, the introduction of surveillance, detection and witness, and the formation of what we now call the 'subject'. The volume includes on DVD a scholarly edition with commentary of the text of Romeo & Juliet, which re-instates many of the original early modern versions of the play.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull'autore

Lynette Hunter, Professor of Dramatic Art, University of California -Davis, USA. Peter Lichtenfels, Head of Department of Theatre and Dance, University of California-Davis, USA.

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Routledge
• Data di pubblicazione: 2016
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1138259594
• ISBN 13: 9781138259591
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 254
• Contatto del produttore: Taylor and Francis, GPSR Taylor and Francis; gpsr@taylorandfrancis.com; ; Taylor & Francis Verlag GmbH, Kaufingerstraße 24; München; 80331; Germania