The Book of Sand and Shakespeare’s Memory

Author: Jorge Luis Borges

Translated with an Afterword by Andrew Hurley

The short story “Shakespeare’s Memory” is a must read for anyone fascinated by Shakespeare himself.

“While Borges remained fascinated by books, doubles, strange heresies, magic and the occult, his last two collections broke new ground in their astonishing range of themes. By the 1970s, Borges was frail, blind and bereft, and The Book of Sand is deeply concerned with loss, approaching death, identities rooted in past events and recollected sexual passion. Yet these painful issues are treated with bemused acceptance as well as characteristic inventiveness and wit. Equally haunting is the tale of the scholar who mysteriously acquires Shakespeare’s memory and the other evocative parables which make up his final work. To the last, Borges retained a unique ability to shock and surprise.”

– Book Blurb

The Treasures of William Shakespeare (RSC)

Author: Catherine M.S. Alexander

“Published in association with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and beautifully illustrated with contemporary images from Shakespeare’s time as well as photographs of RSC performances, this book explores the poet’s life and the enduring legacy of his work. It delves into the likely sources that inspired him to write such masterpieces as The Merchant of Venice, Othello and Macbeth and assesses the influences of subsequent generations of performers who have shown the “infinite variety” with which Shakespeare’s work can be adapted to all forms of media. The book is enhanced with 20 items of memorabilia, including Shakespeare’s marriage certificate and Will, an extract of the First Folio of 1623 and an extract from the prompt book for a production of Twelfth Night in 1965 directed by Sir John Gielgud.”

– Book Blurb

Shakespeare: Staging the World

Authors: Jonathan Bate and Dora Thornton

“Published to accompany a major exhibition at the British museum, which was part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad and the World Shakespeare festival.

This exhibition book links historical objects and works of art with Shakespeare’s texts to reveal how the playwright informed his audiences of the major events and political issues of the day: a sixteenth- century dagger fished from the Thames gives new significance to the gang violence of Romeo and Juliet; Henry V’s saddle, helm and shield recall the depiction of war in the history plays; Guy Fawkes’ lantern illustrates the failed gunpowder plot, later to prove the inspiration for Macbeth.”

– Book Blurb

Moving Shakespeare Indoors: Performance and Repertoire in the Jacobean Playhouse

Editors: Andrew Gurr and Farah Karim-Cooper

“Shakespeare’s Company, the King’s Men, played at the Globe, and also in an indoor theatre, the Blackfriars. The year 2014 witnesses the opening of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, based on seventeenth-century designs of an indoor London theatre and built within the precincts of the current Globe on Bankside. This volume, edited by Andrew Gurr and Farah Karim-Cooper, asks what prompted the move to indoor theatres, and considers the effects that more intimate staging, lighting and music had on performance and repertory. It discusses what knowledge is required when attempting to build an archetype of such a theatre, and looks at the effects of the theatre on audience behaviour and reception. Exploring the ways in which indoor theatre shaped the writing of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the late Jacobean and early Caroline periods, this book will find a substantial readership among scholars of Shakespeare and Jacobean theatre history.”

– Book Blurb

Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life

Author: Julia Reinhardt Lupton

Julia Reinhard Lupton’s Thinking With Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life will quite possibly become one of the most important books on Shakespeare to be published in this decade. The book contains two chapters on Shakespeare’s tragedies ‘The Hamlet Elections’ (pp. 69-95) and ‘Job of Athens, Timon of Uz’ (pp. 131-159) (an earlier version of this chapter appeared in Alternative Shakespeares III, 2007): the first of these reads Hamlet’s relationship to Horatio and Fortinbras, not forgetting Ophelia, via Carl Schmitt’s reading of the play and his concern with the state of emergency. Lupton suggests that there are two kinds of friend left on stage at the end of the play, “the enemy-turned-friend of the European state system represented by Fortinbras, and the philosopher-friend of a more civic tradition represented by Horatio” (p. 95). She suggests that “[b]oth have been elected to represent Hamlet” (p. 95). Lupton’s Hamlet is one which invites the audience to “think with Shakespeare about the shapes, origins, costs, and limits of political community” (p. 95). The chapter on Timon of Athens reads the play alongside the Book of Job, focusing on the politics of hospitality and the gift. Reading the play as one of Shakespeare most philosophical works, she argues that “[b]oth the Book of Job and Timon of Athens occupy the deserted margin between politics and life in order to reassemble provisional fellowship out of the remains of friendship and hospitality” (p. 132). As Lupton explains in the book’s introduction, the subtitle of the book is in “partial homage to [Hannah] Arendt” (p. 8) who chairs her critical symposium of thinkers as she seeks to “capture a set of moments in Shakespeare in which certain political questions come up against the problems of life and living” (p. 8).

“What is a person? What company do people keep with animals, plants, and things? What are their rights? To whom are they obligated? Such questions – bearing fundamentally on the shared meaning of politics and life – animate Shakespearean drama, yet their urgency has been obscured by historicist approaches to literature. Julia Reinhard Lupton gently dislodges Shakespeare’s plays from their historical confines in order to pursue their universal implications. From Petruchio’s animals and Kate’s laundry to Hamlet’s friends and Caliban’s childhood, Lupton here restages thinking in Shakespeare as an embodied act of consent, cure, and care. Rather than putting the plays in service of an ideological program, “Thinking with Shakespeare” encourages readers to ponder matters of shared concern with the playwright by their side. In a landscape populated by she-doctors, minor monsters, bankrupted hosts, and faithful cupbearers, Shakespeare tests what it means to consider our humanity fully. Taking her cue from Hannah Arendt, Lupton reads Shakespeare for fresh insights into everything from housekeeping and animal husbandry to biopower and political theology.”

– Book Blurb

Hamlet’s Dreams: The Robben Island Shakespeare

Author: David Schalkwyk

“Hamlet’s Dreams brings together the Robben Island Prison of Nelson Mandela and the prison that is Denmark for Shakespeare’s Hamlet. David Shalkwyk uses the circulation of the so-called ‘Robben Island Shakespeare’, a copy of the Alexander edition of the Complete Works that was secretly circulated, annotated and signed by a group of Robben Island political prisoner in the 1970s (including Nelson Mandela), to examine the representation and experience of imprisonment in South African prison memoirs and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

The book looks at the ways in which oppressive spaces or circumstances restrict the ways in which personal identity can be formed or formulated in relation to others. The ‘bad dreams’ that keep Hamlet from considering himself the ‘king of infinite space’ are, it argues, the need for other people that becomes especially evident in situations of real or psychological imprisonment.”

– Book Blurb