The King and I

Author: Philippa Kelly

A 2011 ‘minigraph’ in the second wave of the Shakespeare Now series, The King and I by Philippa Kelly, reads King Lear alongside her own education and teaching experience. At the same time, Kelly’s reading explores the role of the play in Australia with particular focus on its significance in the Australian media. The ‘minigraph’ is much more than a collection of personal thoughts on the play and its place in the writer’s history, however, and it is hard to do it justice here. In a series of separate chapters which move through her personal narrative chronologically, Kelly explores questions of parenting, playing the fool, madness, the tragic, and shame. The final chapter considers three John Bell productions of the play (1984; 1998; 2010). Her approach moves from her own subjective reading and experience to open the play out potentially for others – critics, teachers, students, theatre professionals, and the ‘general reader’. Written by the Resident Dramaturg at the California Shakespeare Theater, the book bridges both literary criticism and theatre studies, as well as providing a scholarly and personal account of the play. Anyone invested in King Lear should read this book, not just those who are interested in its Australian connections.

“Outlaws, irreverent humorists, political underdogs, authoritarians – and the silhouette, throughout, of a contemporary Australian woman: these are some of the figures who emerge from Philippa Kelly’s extraordinary personal tale, The King and I. Kelly uses Shakespeare’s King Lear as it has never been used before – to tell the story of Australia and Australians through the intimate journey she makes with Shakespeare’s old king, whose struggles and torments are touchstones for the variety, poignancy and humour of Australian life. We hear the shrieking of birds and feel the heat of dusty towns, and we also come to know about important moments in Australia’s social and political landscape: about the evolution of women’s rights; about the erosion and reclamation of Aboriginal identity and the hardships experienced by transported settlers; and about attitudes toward age and endurance. At the heart of this book is one woman’s personal story, and through this story we come to understand many profound and often hilarious features of the land Down Under.”

– 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