Shakespeare and the Political: Elizabethan Politics and Asian Exigencies

The book offers fresh and innovative perspectives on selected plays from diverse genres. It presents a variety of theoretical approaches. It shows how the ideologies of Shakespeare's plays might have been understood in the Jacobean period and also how they may be adapted to answer the needs of contemporary societies.
This edited collection of essays offers various perspectives on the politics of selected Shakespearean plays and their adaptations. The volume shows how selected plays and later adaptations engage with various kinds of politics and political ideology. It contains interpretations of the original plays focusing on the institutions of family and honor, patriarchy and repression of women, kingship and subversion of dynasty, the developing ideas of the nation and cosmopolitanism. The essays examine the concept of power and its interrogation and political ideologies and also undertake comparative studies. Not restricting itself to any one genre, the book discusses tragedies, history plays, and tragicomedies.
The volume looks at adaptations - Taiwanese, Japanese, European, and Indian. The volume adopts Douglas Lanier's concept of "rhizomatic" approach to examine how Asian Shakespearean adaptations, films and stage performances become independent works of art often modifying and appropriating originals 'unfaithfully' in different social and temporal contexts. The volume engages with the contemporary politics in various countries.
The volume makes use of a variety of approaches - historicism, presentism, gender studies and feminism, textual studies, studies of political thoughts - to interpret the texts.