“Staging The Magic Flute” examines the production history of Mozart’s opera over more than two centuries, from its 1791 premiere to 2019. It focuses especially on productions of The Magic Flute since 1970 and the critical reactions they have provoked, and asks if there can ever be a definitive staging of this iconic work. Productions discussed in detail range from Barrie Kosky’s radical “silent movie” version for the Komische Oper Berlin to August Everding and David McVicar’s long-running fairytale-Enlightenment stagings for (respectively) the Bavarian State Opera and The Royal Opera. Among the many other directors and designers discussed are Marc Chagall, Ingmar Bergman, David Hockney, Peter Sellars, Pierre Audi, Julie Taymor, Peter Stein, and Simon McBurney.

This chapter explores the pervasive ways in which Gothic forces and affiliations appear in Dickens’s writings. The word ‘Gothic’ is rare in his work but an awareness of Gothic tropes, plottings and conventions is vital to understanding it. Gothic is used in highly innovative ways: to explore asymmetrical power relations of many sorts; to limit-test the idea of the ‘human’; and as radical social critique. The diabolical and uncanny are particularly powerful modes, and Dickens is pioneering both in his use of ‘virtual’ Gothic in A Christmas Carol and in the creation of ‘paranoid Gothic’ in the violent same-sex eroticism of Our Mutual Friend and the Mystery of Edwin Drood. Gothic is also an essential component of such scenes as Miss Havisham’s resemblance to ‘waxwork and skeleton’ in Great Expectations and Fagin’s and Monks’s appearance at the sleeping Oliver Twist’s window. The chapter discusses a wide range of Gothic presences in these and other works, concluding with a discussion of Dicken’s remarkable late essay ‘Nurse’s Stories’ (1863), a complex ‘meta-Gothic’ reflection on uncanny repetition and its simultaneously comic and diabolical power in subjective experience and narration.

This chapter focuses primarily on two films that use King Lear to comic and romantic ends: Hobson’s Choice (directed by David Lean, 1954) and Life Goes On (directed by Sangeeta Datta, 2011). In remediating Harold Brighouse’s play about a tyrannical, incontinent Lancastrian boot maker and his three daughters, Lean not only captures its Shakespearean echoes but adds new filmic ones, primarily through his visualization of situations only narrated in the 1915 playtext.Datta’s transference of Lear’s familial discord to a first-generation Bengali family in contemporary London goes even further in quoting Shakespeare’s play at crucial moments in the narrative. In each film, the juxtaposition serves to isolate the unreasonable father to the benefit of the daughters’ narrative fates, while also allowing a dimension of sympathy (comic and sentimental, respectively) for men mentally unmoored from a lost political order. Moreover, the chapter enlarges on these patterns by citing family resemblances with other comic Lear intertexts on both small and large screen. These latter draw further attention to media specificity, format and distribution. The analysis not only illuminates the productions but can also enrich current scholarly conversations about genre, gender and Shakespeare’s movement towards tragicomic romance.