Shakespeare and Modern Culture

From one of the world's premier Shakespeare scholars comes a magisterial new study whose premise is "that Shakespeare makes modern culture and that modern culture makes Shakespeare."

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Where, when, and why did European Romantics take to Shakespeare? How about Shakespeare's reception in enduring Neoclassical or in popular traditions? And above all: which Shakespeare did these various groups promote? This collection of essays leaves behind the time-honoured commonplaces about Shakespearean translation (the 'translatability' of Shakespeare's forms and meanings, the issue of 'loss' and 'gain' in translation, the distinction between 'translation' and 'adaptation', translation as an 'art'. etc.) and joins modern Shakespearean scholarship in its attempt to lay bare the cultural mechanisms endowing Shakespeare's texts with their supposedly inherent meanings.

Developing the arguments of Terence Hawkes' "That Shakespeherian Rag" (1986), this book uses the work of influential critics to question whether we could have any genuine access to final, authoritative or essential meanings in respect of Shakespeare's plays. Implicitly and explicitly, it argues that all we can ever do is use Shakespeare as a powerful element in specific ideological strategies. Traditionally, critics, producers, actors and audiences of Shakespeare have assumed that the "meaning" of each play is bequeathed to it by the Bard and lies within its text.

Inspired by new approaches in performance studies, theatre history, research in material culture and dress history, a rich discussion of the many aspects of costume in Shakespearean performance has begun. Shakespeare and Costume furthers this research, bringing together varied and stimulating essays by leading scholars that consider costume from literary, dramatic, design, performative and theatrical perspectives, as well as interviews with renowned theatre practitioners Jane Greenwood and Robert Morgan. The volume amply demonstrates how an analysis of the meaning of costume enriches our understanding of Shakespeare's plays.

MACBETH, Shakespeare's last great tragedy, has remained one of the most popular plays since its first performance in 1606 - probably in front of King James. This exciting audiobook production is directed with fresh imagination by Fiona Shaw who breaks the conventional strait jacket that has hampered the development of Shakespeare on audio. We are as much in the 21st century as in medieval Scotland - the tensions, the politics, the struggle for power and dark ambition is part of our lives.