Tales from Shakespeare: Creative Collisions
Cambridge University Press, 7/3/2014
EAN 9781107071292, ISBN10: 1107071291
Hardcover, 257 pages, 21.6 x 14 x 2.1 cm
Language: English
In this engaging new book, writer and critic Graham Holderness shows how a classic Shakespeare play can be the source for a modern story, providing a creative 'collision' between the Shakespeare text and contemporary concerns. Using an analogy from particle physics, Holderness tests his methodology through specific examples, structured in four parts: a recreation of performances of Hamlet and Richard II aboard the East India Company ship the Red Dragon in 1607; an imagined encounter between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson writing the King James Bible; the creation of a contemporary folk hero based on Coriolanus and drawing on films such as Skyfall and The Hurt Locker; and an account of the terrorist bombing at a performance of Twelfth Night in Qatar in 2005. These pieces of narrative and drama are interspersed with literary criticism, each using a feature of the original Shakespeare play or its performance to illuminate the extraordinary elasticity of Shakespeare. The 'tales' provoke questions about what we understand to be Shakespeare and not-Shakespeare, making the book of vital interest to students, scholars, and enthusiasts of Shakespeare, literary criticism and creative writing.
Introduction
from appropriation to collision
Part I
1. The voyage of the Red Dragon
2. 'Shooting an elephant'
Part II
3. Shakespeare and the King James Bible
4. 'Wholly Writ'
a play in two acts
Part III
5. The Coriolanus myth
6. 'The lonely dragon'
Part IV
7. Shakespeare and 9/11
8. 'Rudely interrupted'
Afterword
'Tales from Shakespeare'.