Shakespeare’s Histories on Screen Adaptation, Race and Intersectionality
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Jennie M. Votava is Associate Professor of English at Allegheny College, USA. She has published essays in Renaissance Drama, Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Bulletin, and Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage, eds. Darryl Chalk and Mary Floyd-Wilson (2019).This volume reframes the critical conversation about Shakespeare’s histories and national identity by bringing together two growing bodies of work: early modern race scholarship and adaptation theory. Theorizing a link between adaptation and intersectionality, it demonstrates how over the past thirty years race has become a central and constitutive part of British and American screen adaptations of the English histories. Available to expanding audiences via digital media platforms, these adaptations interrogate the dialectic between Shakespeare’s cultural capital and racial reckonings on both sides of the Atlantic and across time. By engaging contemporary representations of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability and class, adaptation not only creates artefacts that differ from their source texts, but also facilitates the conditions in which race and its intersections in the plays become visible.
At the centre of this analysis stand two landmark 21st-century history adaptations that use non-traditional casting: the British TV miniseries The Hollow Crown (2012, 2016) and the American independent film H4 (2012), an all-Black Henry IV conflation. In addition to demonstrating how the 21st-century screen history illuminates both past and present constructions of embodied difference, these works provide a lens for reassessing two history adaptations from Shakespeare’s 1990s box office renaissance, when actors of colour were first cast in cinematic versions of the plays. As exemplified by these formal adaptations’ reappropriations of race in history, non-traditional Shakespearean casting practices are also currently shaping digital culture’s conversations about race in non-Shakespearean period dramas such as Bridgerton.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction – From Rodney King to Netflix’s The King: Adaptation and/as Intersectionality in Shakespeare’s Histories, 1991-2019
Chapter One – Through a Glass Darkly: Race, Gender, Disability and Sophie Okonedo’s Margaret of Anjou in The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses
Chapter Two –Two Yorks, the Boy and the King of Pop: Colour-Conscious Casting and Queer Seriality in The Hollow Crown, Season One
Chapter Three – The Fat Knight in Black and White: Race, Disability, Gender, Nation, Falstaff
Chapter Four – Straight Outta Shakespeare: H4, My Own Private Idaho and the Universality Conundrum
Chapter Five – Film Noir, White Heat, ‘Top of the World’: Loncraine’s Richard III in Nazi-Face
Conclusion – Swinging the Lens: Bridgerton as Shakespearean History in Digital Cultures
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
Shakespeare and Adaptation provides in-depth discussions of a dynamic field and showcases the ways in which, with each act of adaptation, a new Shakespeare is generated. The series addresses the phenomenon of Shakespeare and adaptation in all of its guises and explores how Shakespeare continues as a reference-point in a generically diverse body of representations and forms, including fiction, film, drama, theatre, performance and mass media. Including both sole authored books as well as edited collections, the series embraces a mix of methodologies and espouses a global perspective that brings into conversation adaptations from different nations, languages and cultures.
Advisory Board:
Professor Ariane M. Balizet (Texas Christian University, USA)
Professor Sarah Hatchuel (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier, 3, France)
Professor Peter Kirwan (Mary Baldwin University, USA)
Professor Douglas Lanier (University of New Hampshire, USA)
Professor Adele Lee (Emerson College, USA)
Professor Joyce Green MacDonald (University of Kentucky, USA)
Dr Stephen O’Neill (Maynooth University, Ireland)
Professor Shormishtha Panja (University of Delhi, India)
Professor Lisa Starks (University of South Florida)
Professor Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France)
Professor Sandra Young (University of Cape Town, South Africa)