Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Shakespeare’s Narremes
- Stepping Out of Narrative Line: A Bit of Word, and Horse, Play in Venus and Adonis
- A ‘consummation devoutly to be wished’: The Erotics of Narration in Venus and Adonis
- Echoes Inhabit a Garden: The Narratives of Romeo and Juliet
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Comedy as Apotrope of Myth
- Plutarch, Insurrection, and Dearth in Coriolanus
- Shakespeare, Crossing the Rubicon
- Vernacular Criticism and the Scenes Shakespeare Never Wrote
- The Shadow of Lear’s ‘Houseless’ in Dickens
- Shakespearian Margins in George Eliot’s ‘working-day world’
- In Her Father’s Library: Margaret Fuller and the Making of the American Miranda
- The Magician in Love
- Narrative Approaches to Shakespeare: Active Storytelling in Schools
- Monsters, Magicians, Movies: The Tempest and the Final Frontier
- Shakespeare’s Self-Repetitions and King John
- Inside Othello
- The View of London from the North and the Playhouses in Holywell
- Measured Endings: How Productions from 1720 to 1929 Close Shakespeare’s Open Silences in Measure for Measure
- Shakespearian Utopias
- Shakespeare Performances in England, 1999
- Professional Shakespeare Productions in the British Isles January–December 1998
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage
- 3 Editions and Textual Studies
- Books Received
- Index
Shakespearian Utopias
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2007
- Frontmatter
- Shakespeare’s Narremes
- Stepping Out of Narrative Line: A Bit of Word, and Horse, Play in Venus and Adonis
- A ‘consummation devoutly to be wished’: The Erotics of Narration in Venus and Adonis
- Echoes Inhabit a Garden: The Narratives of Romeo and Juliet
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Comedy as Apotrope of Myth
- Plutarch, Insurrection, and Dearth in Coriolanus
- Shakespeare, Crossing the Rubicon
- Vernacular Criticism and the Scenes Shakespeare Never Wrote
- The Shadow of Lear’s ‘Houseless’ in Dickens
- Shakespearian Margins in George Eliot’s ‘working-day world’
- In Her Father’s Library: Margaret Fuller and the Making of the American Miranda
- The Magician in Love
- Narrative Approaches to Shakespeare: Active Storytelling in Schools
- Monsters, Magicians, Movies: The Tempest and the Final Frontier
- Shakespeare’s Self-Repetitions and King John
- Inside Othello
- The View of London from the North and the Playhouses in Holywell
- Measured Endings: How Productions from 1720 to 1929 Close Shakespeare’s Open Silences in Measure for Measure
- Shakespearian Utopias
- Shakespeare Performances in England, 1999
- Professional Shakespeare Productions in the British Isles January–December 1998
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage
- 3 Editions and Textual Studies
- Books Received
- Index
Summary
For a long time, the story goes, we supported a Victorian regime, and we continue to be dominated by it even today . . . But for decades now, we have found it difficult to speak on the subject without striking a different pose: we are conscious of defying established power, our tone of voice shows that we know we are being subversive, and we ardently conjure away the present and appeal to the future, whose day will be hastened by the contribution we believe we are making.
While nothing might have been further from his thoughts when tracing the genealogy of sex in the modern period than the history of twentieth-century Shakespearian performance, the model of repression and liberation that is outlined in Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality provides a striking analogy for what is said to have happened to the early modern drama on stage since the Victorian period. This story is well known: it begins around 1888 with the publication of the rediscovered DeWitt sketch of the Swan, at the time that William Poel started his long and lonely struggle against the forces of illusion and spectacle in his tireless, eccentric and even fanatical proselytizing for the platform stage.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Shakespeare SurveyAn Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production, pp. 233 - 243Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000
- 1
- Cited by