The 2012 Globe to Globe Festival proved a great success. Actors, directors, musicians, dancers, designers and technicians travelled from all over the world to perform on the Globe stage. Visitors to London’s Cultural Olympiad enjoyed six jam-packed weeks of Shakespeare, presented in an array of international languages. The Globe’s Artistic Director, Dominic Dromgoole, and his Festival Director, Tom Bird, had achieved what seemed, to many, the impossible. Nonetheless, filmed interviews with Dromgoole and Bird, conducted during the festival by the American documentary-maker Steve Rowland, offer tantalizing insights into the genesis of the festival venture. These candid interviews confirm the sometimes farcical, often exhausting, but invariably serendipitous truth behind the Globe to Globe Festival’s short, intense history. Although the Globe was “flying completely blind,” it still succeeded in hosting a glorious feast of Shakespearean delights, seasoned with the strong spice of multiculturality.
William Shakespeare arguably represents the height of English intellectual creativity. His drama and poetry transcend his mortality, speaking to generation upon generation with an authoritative appeal that seems morally superior because of its durability over the centuries. In his play As You Like It, Shakespeare even appears to glorify the social bandit and proto food activist. Characters that survive in the Forest of Arden by poaching their usurping duke’s deer are likened to the mythical figure, Robin Hood. The allusion achieves greater significance when considered alongside near-contemporary pseudo-biographies that record Shakespeare’s early life as a poacher and youthful renegade. At face value, Shakespeare’s Robin Hood reference might suggest his subtle advocacy of food sovereignty and social justice. This romanticized image is supported by later historiographies that interpret medieval and early modern enclosure from a specifically partisan viewpoint. Early nineteenth century historians who referenced More’s Utopia, and whose influence is evident in enclosure analyses ranging from Marx to Polanyi and Bookchin, unwittingly assist in perpetuating the iconography of the social bandit Shakespeare, united with his rebellious rural contemporaries. Surprisingly, however, Shakespeare’s true personality – that of a shrewd and ruthless businessman, at ease with hoarding in time of famine as purchasing common-land rights and privileges at the expense of his impoverished neighbors – is less familiar. The opportunistic, land-grabbing, pro-enclosure Bard, while not erased from critical view, is certainly shielded by the bardolatrous hero-worship of later ages. This “Bardwashing” of Shakespeare’s agrarian capitalist identity, in favor of the morally irreproachable icon, owes much to gossip gleaned from the very people most impacted by his aggressive exurbanite dealings. This paper interrogates the populist iconography of Shakespeare, and questions his reinvention as a local celebrity and Robin Hood eco-champion, rather than aggressive capitalist willing to exploit for immediate profit the food justice rights of his hometown community.
Linguistic features used to highlight findings, concepts, ideas, and their significance are ubiquitous in academic writing. In the present exploratory study, we investigate how novice writers (L1 and L2 English) and expert writers use formulaic discontinuous sequences for highlighting purposes; we also look at the extent to which there are differences in use of these across five academic registers. Through a bottom-up approach, we identified five discontinuous sequences that were particularly productive for highlighting purposes: it is * to (e.g., it is interesting to), it is * that (e.g., it is clear that), the * of the (e.g., the importance of the), the * that (e.g., the fact that), and one of the * (e.g., one of the major). While the novice writers largely depend on the same discontinuous sequences as the experts, they tend to rely more heavily on a limited set of fillers (i.e., lexical items that go in the open slots). Only minor differences across registers were noted, which suggests that highlighting strategies play an important part in all registers investigated. It is hoped that results from this study can help novice writers extend their linguistic repertoire and inform future research on highlighting strategies.
McMaster University’s The Three Ladies of London conference engages with Wilson’s early modern dramatic text through Performance as Research (PAR). The archival recordings that make up this PAR moment reside in, and are accessed from, their digital home on the Queen’s Men Editions website (QME). Within the wider academic community, however, PAR has yet to achieve its full potential or acceptance. This essay considers the reason for this lessening of PAR’s scholarly status, associated, as it seems, with the hierarchical superiority of more traditional print-based exegesis, which is invariably prioritized and valorized as the sole means to validate PAR’s academic potential. Such valorization denies the collaborative model PAR offers as a laboratory for innovative scholarly inquiry. In addition, this essay questions the prevailing hegemony, and inherent presentism, of recent reconstructional 'original practice' scholarship, while offering an argument for recontextualizing, reviving, and re-enlivening the dramatic text through the embodied skill of the PAR actor.
A radical new approach to humor, where traditional targets become its agents. Humor is often dismissed as cruel ridicule or harmless fun. But what if laughter is a vital force to channel rage against patriarchy, Islamophobia, or mass incarceration? To create moments of empathy and dialogue between Black Lives Matter and the police? These and other such questions are at the heart of this powerful reassessment of humor. Placing theorists in conversation with comedians, Uproarious offers a full-frontal approach to the very foundation of comedy and its profound political impact. Here Cynthia Willett and Julie Willett address the four major theories of humor—superiority, relief, incongruity, and social play—through the lens of feminist and game-changing comics such as Wanda Sykes, Margaret Cho, Hannah Gadsby, Hari Kondabolu, and Tig Notaro. They take a radical and holistic approach to the understanding of humor, particularly of humor deployed by those from groups long relegated to the margins, and propose a powerful new understanding of humor as a force that can engender politically progressive social movements. Drawing on a range of cross-disciplinary sources, from philosophies and histories of humor to the psychology and physiology of laughter to animal studies, Uproarious offers a richer understanding of the political and cathartic potential of humor. A major new contribution to a wider dialogue on comedy, Uproarious grounds for us explorations of outsider humor and our golden age of feminist comics—showing that when women, prisoners, even animals, laugh back, comedy along with belly laughs forge new identities and alter the political climate.
In 2010, Julie Taymor's film The Tempest was given limited art-house release. Starring Helen Mirren as the re-gendered Prospera, this version relied heavily on computer generated imagery to imagine Shakespeare's complex narrative. The resulting hyperrealism juxtaposed seamlessly with the expressionistic reality of the film's Hawaiian island locations. For its audience, Taymor's Tempest was decidedly twenty-first century in technical and visual appeal. In the film's accompanying glossy book, Taymor references her earliest foray into Tempest direction, her New York City production of 1986. No visual record of this production remains. In 1992, however, a children's television program, fronted by the comedy magicians Penn and Teller, records a one-off reworking of this New York production. Evident in a selection of key scenes, Taymor's artistic vision, with her regular use of masks, magic, and international puppetry techniques, is revealed. Significant for our appreciation of Taymor's development as a Tempest director is that this low-quality, low-budget video demonstrates how many 2010 filmic innovations already manifested in her original theatrical staging. The storm-tossed shipwreck, now computer generated, mirrored its New York counterpart. Most noticeable, however, is Taymor's 1980s decision to represent Caliban as an oppressed African slave, emerging from the physical structure of the island. Taymor's overtly postcolonial reading of Caliban, strikingly imagined in her 2010 film, reproduces in surprising detail her earliest creative choices. Prospero becomes Prospera, who transitions into a pseudo-bondage dominatrix, but the film still reproduces Taymor's earlier envisioning of the play's racial tensions, as evidenced by an obscure 1980s televisual experience.
Each chapter of the book revolves around the major events of Catherine’s reign (and some major literary works) that give a broad framework to discuss the evolution of important recurring motifs and images.
"In Creating the Empress, Vera Proskurina examines the interaction between power and poetry in creating the imperial image of Catherine the Great, providing a detailed analysis of a wide range of Russian literary works from this period, particularly the main Classical myths associated with Catherine (Amazon, Astraea, Pallas Athena, Felicitas, Fortune, etc.), as well as how these Classical subjects affirmed imperial ideology and the monarch’s power. Each chapter of the book revolves around the major events of Catherine’s reign (and some major literary works) that give a broad framework to discuss the evolution of important recurring motifs and images."