Living with Shakespeare
Essays by Writers, Actors, and Directors
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Why Shakespeare? What explains our continued fascination with his poems and plays? In Living with Shakespeare, Susannah Carson invites forty actors, directors, scholars, and writers to reflect on why his work is still such a vital part of our culture.
We hear from James Earl Jones on reclaiming Othello as a tragic hero, Julie Taymor on turning Prospero into Prospera, Camille Paglia on teaching the plays to actors, F. Murray Abraham on gaining an audience’s sympathy for Shylock, Sir Ben Kingsley on communicating Shakespeare’s ideas through performance, Germaine Greer on the playwright’s home life, Dame Harriet Walter on the complexity of his heroines, Brian Cox on social conflict in his time and ours, Jane Smiley on transposing King Lear to Iowa in A Thousand Acres, and Sir Antony Sher on feeling at home in Shakespeare’s language. Together these essays provide a fresh appreciation of Shakespeare’s works as a living legacy to be read, seen, performed, adapted, revised, wrestled with, and embraced by creative professionals and lay enthusiasts alike.
F. Murray Abraham ● Isabel Allende ● Cicely Berry ● Eve Best ● Eleanor Brown ● Stanley Cavell ● Karin Coonrod ● Brian Cox ● Peter David ● Margaret Drabble ● Dominic Dromgoole ● David Farr ● Fiasco Theater ● Ralph Fiennes ● Angus Fletcher ● James Franco ● Alan Gordon ● Germaine Greer ● Barry John ● James Earl Jones ● Sir Ben Kingsley ● Maxine Hong Kingston ● Rory Kinnear ● J. D. McClatchy ● Conor McCreery ● Tobias Menzies ● Joyce Carol Oates ● Camille Paglia ● James Prosek ● Richard Scholar ● Sir Antony Sher ● Jane Smiley ● Matt Sturges ● Julie Taymor ● Eamonn Walker ● Dame Harriet Walter ● Bill Willingham ● Jess Winfield
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this lively volume, an esteemed (and in many instances, famous) group of actors, directors, authors, academics, and others share insights and experiences about their relationship to Shakespeare's literary and dramatic inheritance. Editor Carson's eclecticism aims to break down the usual disciplinary borders and reduce the intimidating distance that often yawns between Shakespeare experts and general readers. The volume succeeds at this admirably across a compelling range of biographical accounts, actor's insights, and production notes. Minor and major contradictions across essays, rather than dismaying, tend to be thought-provoking. The essays include much justified reverence, but also some healthy questioning, as well as limited forays into cross-cultural dialogues. Contributors overwhelmingly skew to American and British practitioners, with the odd Canadian, Australian, and South African. As the editor's stated goal includes bringing together as many perspectives as possible, the nearly complete lack of non-native English speakers (Isabelle Allende proves the sole exception) is all the more disappointing. It would have been nice, for example, to hear from famed German director Tomas Ostermeier, whose extraordinary 2008 Schaub hne production of Hamlet receives passing mention. That said, the collection is a consistently stimulating read, which goes a great way toward illuminating the degree to which we all live already and can live even further with Shakespeare.
