Shakespeare's Culture in Modern Performance

Shakespeare's Culture in Modern Performance confronts the challenge of recent work on adaptation that views a performance as a cultural object, authentic in itself, no longer deriving authority from an original source text. Maria Jones argues provocatively that performance of Shakespeare pulls back to an original history. This is possible because 'original' early modern cultural history is a product of a modern understanding of past time. In this sense, performance produces and continues our dialogues with the past. Jones shows how modern productions on stage and screen produce Kate's consent in The Taming of the Shrew, define 'alien' status in The Merchant of Venice and evidence a dialogic history through props in performance in Hamlet and Richard II. Critical developments are charted with clarity and enthusiasm, offering fresh insights on a wide range of productions from 1928 to 2003.