Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century: Criticism and Research
- Daddy’s Girls: Shakespearian Daughters and Eighteenth-Century Ideology
- Shakespeare and Clarissa: ‘General Nature’, Genre and Sexuality
- Early Georgian Politics and Shakespeare: The Black Act and Charles Johnson’s Love in a Forest (1723)
- Race Mattered: Othello in Late Eighteenth-Century England
- From Pericles to Marina: ‘While Women are to be had for Money, Love, or Importunity’
- ‘A Thousand Twangling Instruments’: Music and The Tempest on The Eighteenth-Centruy London Stage
- Double Falsehood and the Verbal Parallels with Shelton’s Don Quixote
- Eighteenth-Century Performances of Shakespeare Recorded in the Theatrical Portraits of the Garrick Club
- Eighteenth-Century Editing, ‘Appropriation’, and Interpretation
- Shakespeare Survey: Beginnings and Continuities
- Destined Livery? Character and Person in Shakespeare
- Prejudice and Law in The Merchant of Venice
- ‘Many A Civil Monster’: Shakespeare’s Idea of the Centaur
- Shakespeare’s International Currency
- Repeopling the Globe: The Opening Season at Shakespeare’s Globe, London 1997
- Shakespeare Performances in England, 1997
- Professional Shakespeare Productions in the British Isles, January–December 1996
- TheYear's Contributions to Shakespeare Studies: 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage
- 3 Editions and Textual Studies
- Books Received
- Index to Volume 51
- General Index to Volumes 41–50
Shakespeare’s International Currency
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2007
- Frontmatter
- Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century: Criticism and Research
- Daddy’s Girls: Shakespearian Daughters and Eighteenth-Century Ideology
- Shakespeare and Clarissa: ‘General Nature’, Genre and Sexuality
- Early Georgian Politics and Shakespeare: The Black Act and Charles Johnson’s Love in a Forest (1723)
- Race Mattered: Othello in Late Eighteenth-Century England
- From Pericles to Marina: ‘While Women are to be had for Money, Love, or Importunity’
- ‘A Thousand Twangling Instruments’: Music and The Tempest on The Eighteenth-Centruy London Stage
- Double Falsehood and the Verbal Parallels with Shelton’s Don Quixote
- Eighteenth-Century Performances of Shakespeare Recorded in the Theatrical Portraits of the Garrick Club
- Eighteenth-Century Editing, ‘Appropriation’, and Interpretation
- Shakespeare Survey: Beginnings and Continuities
- Destined Livery? Character and Person in Shakespeare
- Prejudice and Law in The Merchant of Venice
- ‘Many A Civil Monster’: Shakespeare’s Idea of the Centaur
- Shakespeare’s International Currency
- Repeopling the Globe: The Opening Season at Shakespeare’s Globe, London 1997
- Shakespeare Performances in England, 1997
- Professional Shakespeare Productions in the British Isles, January–December 1996
- TheYear's Contributions to Shakespeare Studies: 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage
- 3 Editions and Textual Studies
- Books Received
- Index to Volume 51
- General Index to Volumes 41–50
Summary
Answering a comparatively simple question, may sometimes help clarify a more difficult one. So by considering why Shakespeare, who wrote four hundred years ago, is more frequently performed than any other dramatist and staged in theatres all around the world, it may be possible to ask how present-day scholarship and criticism, a huge new industry, might best be employed.
Shakespeare's almost universal currency today makes theatre seem a backward-looking art: it has produced no other voice in our own time that is so widely acceptable. The most respected theatre directors turn repeatedly to Shakespeare's scripts as if nothing modern has so fired their imaginations. Giorgio Strehler, Ariane Mnouchkine, Peter Brook, Peter Stein, Suzuki Tadashi, Robert Lepage: all of these, each from a different country, have mined Shakespeare repeatedly for productions that are startling in effect, contentiously modern, and, often, sensuously beautiful as well.
Why should theatre be so fixated on Shakespeare, and variously so, all around the world? The easiest answer is to say that Shakespeare was a very wise man and a genius, but other geniuses of the theatre have not so transcended boundaries of language, race, social customs, politics, religious belief; and few writers of any kind have proved so immune to the changes brought about by time.
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- Shakespeare Survey , pp. 193 - 204Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998
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