Reenacting Shakespeare in the Shakespeare Aftermath ― The Intermedial Turn and Turn to Embodiment

In the Shakespeare aftermath—where all things Shakespearean are available for reassembly and reenactment—experimental transactions with Shakespeare become consequential events in their own right, informed by technologies of performance and display that defy conventional staging and filmic practices. Reenactment signifies here both an undoing and a redoing, above all a doing differently of what otherwise continues to be enacted as the same. Rooted in the modernist avant-garde, this revisionary approach to models of the past is advanced by theater artists and filmmakers whose number includes Romeo Castellucci, Annie Dorsen, Peter Greenaway, Thomas Ostermeier, Ivo van Hove, and New York’s Wooster Group, among others. Although the intermedial turn taken by such artists heralds a virtual future, this book demonstrates that embodiment—in more diverse forms than ever before—continues to exert expressive force in Shakespearean reproduction’s turning world.

Thomas Cartelli is Professor of English & Film Studies at Muhlenberg College, USA. He is author of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Economy of Theatrical Experience (1991), Repositioning Shakespeare (1999), and co-author (with Katherine Rowe) of New Wave Shakespeare on Screen (2007). He has also edited The Norton Critical Richard III (2009).