The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance

Shakespearean performance criticism has undergone a sea change in recent years, and strong tides of discovery are continuing to shift the contours of the discipline. The essays in this volume, written by scholars from around the world, reveal how these critical cross-currents are influencing the ways we now view Shakespeare in performance.

The volume is organised in four Parts. Part I interrogates how Shakespeare continues to achieve contemporaneity for Western audiences by exploring modes of performance, acting styles, and aesthetic choices regarded as experimental. Part II tackles the burgeoning field of reception: how and why audiences respond to performances as they do, or actors to the conditions in which they perform; how immersive productions turn spectators into actors; how memory and cognition shape and reshape the performances we think we saw. Part III addresses the ways in which revolutions in technology have altered our views of Shakespeare, both through the mediums of film and sound recording, and through digitalizing processes that have generated a profound reconsideration of what performance is and how it is accessed. The final Part grapples with intercultural Shakespeare, considering not only matters of cultural hegemony and appropriation in a 'global' importation of non-Western productions to Europe and North America, but also how Shakespeare has been made 'local' in performances staged or filmed in African, Asian, and Latin American countries. Together, these ground-breaking essays attest to the richness and diversity of Shakespearean performance criticism as it is practiced today, and they point the way to critical continents not yet explored.

James C. Bulman, Henry B. and Patricia Bush Tippie Professor of English, Allegheny College

James C. Bulman holds the Henry B. and Patricia Bush Tippie Chair in English at Allegheny College. General editor, with Carol Rutter, of the Shakespeare in Performance Series for Manchester University Press, he has written a performance history of The Merchant of Venice (1991) and edited anthologies on Shakespeare on Television (with H. R. Coursen, 1988), Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance (1996), and Shakespeare Re-Dressed: Cross-Gender Casting in Contemporary Performance (2008). His other books include The Heroic Idiom of Shakespearean Tragedy (1985), Comedy from Shakespeare to Sheridan (with A. R. Braunmuller, 1986), and, most recently, an edition of King Henry IV, Part Two for The Arden Shakespeare , Third Series (2016). He is a former president of the Shakespeare Association of America.