The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance

Shakespearean performance criticism has undergone a sea change in recent years, and strong tides of discovery are continuing to shift the contours of the discipline. The essays in this volume, written by scholars from around the world, reveal how these critical cross-currents are influencing the ways we now view Shakespeare in performance.
The volume is organised in four Parts. Part I interrogates how Shakespeare continues to achieve contemporaneity for Western audiences by exploring modes of performance, acting styles, and aesthetic choices regarded as experimental. Part II tackles the burgeoning field of reception: how and why audiences respond to performances as they do, or actors to the conditions in which they perform; how immersive productions turn spectators into actors; how memory and cognition shape and reshape the performances we think we saw. Part III addresses the ways in which revolutions in technology have altered our views of Shakespeare, both through the mediums of film and sound recording, and through digitalizing processes that have generated a profound reconsideration of what performance is and how it is accessed. The final Part grapples with intercultural Shakespeare, considering not only matters of cultural hegemony and appropriation in a 'global' importation of non-Western productions to Europe and North America, but also how Shakespeare has been made 'local' in performances staged or filmed in African, Asian, and Latin American countries. Together, these ground-breaking essays attest to the richness and diversity of Shakespearean performance criticism as it is practiced today, and they point the way to critical continents not yet explored.

James C. Bulman holds the Henry B. and Patricia Bush Tippie Chair in English at Allegheny College. General editor, with Carol Rutter, of the Shakespeare in Performance Series for Manchester University Press, he has written a performance history of The Merchant of Venice (1991) and edited anthologies on Shakespeare on Television (with H. R. Coursen, 1988), Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance (1996), and Shakespeare Re-Dressed: Cross-Gender Casting in Contemporary Performance (2008). His other books include The Heroic Idiom of Shakespearean Tragedy (1985), Comedy from Shakespeare to Sheridan (with A. R. Braunmuller, 1986), and, most recently, an edition of King Henry IV, Part Two for The Arden Shakespeare , Third Series (2016). He is a former president of the Shakespeare Association of America.

- Introduction: Cross-Currents in Performance Criticism - PART I: EXPERIMENTAL SHAKESPEARE - 1: Susan Bennett: Experimental Shakespeare - 2: Bridget Escolme: Shakespeare and the Contemporary: Psychology, Culture, and Audience in Othello Production - 3: Roberta Barker: 'Deared by Being Lacked': The Realist Legacy and the Art of Failure in Shakespearean Performance - 4: Carol Chillington Rutter: Shakespeare for Dummies, or 'See the Puppets Dallying' - 5: Peter Kirwan: Not-Shakespeare and the Shakespearean Ghost - 6: Kim Solga: Shakespeare's Property Ladder: Women Directors and the Politics of 'Ownership' - 7: Andrew James Hartley: Dialectical Shakespeare: Pedagogy in Performance - 8: Ton Hoensalaars: Captive Shakespeare - PART II: RECEPTION - 9: Ayanna Thompson: (How) Should We Listen to Audiences? Race, Reception, and the Audience Survey - 10: Peter Holland: Forgetting Performance - 11: Cary M. Mazer: Documenting the Demotic: Actor Blogs and the Guts of the Opera Singer - 12: Robert Shaughnessy: The Time is Out of Joint: Shakespeare, Jet Lag, and the Rhythms of Performance - 13: Paul Menzer: Archives and Anecdotes - 14: Robert Conkie: Reveries of a Shakespearean Walker - 15: Katherine Prince: Intimate and Epic Macbeths in Contemporary Performance - PART III: MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY - 16: Thomas Cartelli: High Tech Shakespeare in a Mediatized Globe: Ivo van Hove's Roman Tragedies and the Problem of Spectatorship - 17: Stephen Purcell: 'It's All a Bit of a Risk': Reformulating 'Liveness' in Twenty-First Century Performances of Shakespeare - 18: Pascale Aebischer: Technology and the Ethics of Spectatorship - 19: W. B. Worthen: Shakespearean Technicity - 20: Sarah Werner: Performance in Digital Editions of Shakespeare - 21: Anthony R. Guneratne: Shakespeare's Rebirth: Performance in Music, Dance, Theatre, and Cinema in the Age of Electro-Digital Reproduction - 22: Scott Newstok: Making 'Music at the Editing Table': Echoing Verdi in Welles' Othello - 23: Samuel Crowl: 'Nobody's Perfect': Cross-Dressing and Gender-Bending in Sven Gade's Hamlet and Julie Taymor's Tempest - 24: Courtney Lehmann: Can the Subaltern Sing? Liz White's Othello - PART IV: GLOBAL SHAKESPEARE - 25: Alexa Alice Joubin: Global Shakespeare Criticism beyond the Nation-State - 26: Dennis Kennedy: Global Shakespeare and Globalized Performance - 27: Christie Carson: Performance, Presence, and Personal Responsibility: Witnessing Global Theatre in and around the Globe - 28: Sonia Massai: Shakespeare with and without its Language - 29: Rose Elfman: Slapstick against Stereotypes in South Sudan's Cymbeline - 30: Colette Gordon: Open and Closed: Workshopping Shakespeare in South Africa - 31: Adele Seeff: Indigenizing Shakespeare in South Africa - 32: Alfredo Michel Modenessi: 'Victim of Improvisation' in Latin America: Shakespeare Out-sourced and In-taken - 33: Robert Ormsby: Global Cultural Tourism at Canada's Stratford Festival: The Adventures of Pericles - 34: Michiko Suematsu: Verbal and Visual Representations in Modern Japanese Shakespeare Productions - 35: Li Ruru: There Is a World Elsewhere: Shakespeare on the Chinese Stage - 36: Yong Li Lan: Translating Performance: the Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive