Re-Visions of Shakespeare: Essays in Honor of Robert Ornstein is a tribute to one of the most prominent Shakespeareans in the last half of the twentieth century, past president of the Shakespeare Association of America, and author of Shakespeare's Comedies: From Roman Farce to Romantic Mystery, and Other texts. Twelve original contributions by an international group of scholars, including some of the most prominent working in Shakespeare studies today, use a variety of theoretical perspectives to address issues of contemporary import in the dramatic texts. Janus-like, the collection suggests the directions of Shakespeare studies at the outset of the new millennium while considering their roots in the last.

Gothic fiction usually has been perceived as the special province of women, an attraction often attributed to a thematics of woman-identified issues such as female sexuality, marriage, and childbirth. But why these issues? What is specifically "female" about "Gothic?" This book argues that Gothic modes provide women who write with special means to negotiate their way through their double status as women and as writers, and to subvert the power relationships that hinder women writers. Current theories of "gendered" observation complicate the idea that Gothic-marked fiction relies on composed, individual scenes and visual metaphors for its effect. The texts studied here--by Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, and Edith Wharton--explode the authority of a unitary, centralized narrative gaze and establish instead a diffuse, multi-angled textual position for "woman." Gothic moments in these novels create a textualized space for the voice of a "woman writer," as well as inviting the response of a "woman reader."

Through close studies of Titus Andronicus, Othello, and Antony and Cleopatra, this book deepens our understanding of race (then and now) as well as the role granted Shakespeare in cultural discourses past and present."--BOOK JACKET.

Questioning whether the impulse to adapt Shakespeare has changed over time, Lynne Bradley argues for restoring a sense of historicity to the study of adaptation. Bradley compares Nahum Tate's History of King Lear (1681), adaptations by David Garrick in the mid-eighteenth century, and nineteenth-century Shakespeare burlesques to twentieth-century theatrical rewritings of King Lear, and suggests latter-day adaptations should be viewed as a unique genre that allows playwrights to express modern subject positions with regard to their literary heritage while also participating in broader debates about art and society. In identifying and relocating different adaptive gestures within this historical framework, Bradley explores the link between the critical and the creative in the history of Shakespearean adaptation. Focusing on works such as Gordon Bottomley's King Lear's Wife (1913), Edward Bond's Lear (1971), Howard Barker's Seven Lears (1989), and the Women's Theatre Group's Lear's Daughters (1987), Bradley theorizes that modern rewritings of Shakespeare constitute a new type of textual interaction based on a simultaneous double-gesture of collaboration and rejection. She suggests that this new interaction provides constituent groups, such as the feminist collective who wrote Lear's Daughters, a strategy to acknowledge their debt to Shakespeare while writing against the traditional and negative representations of femininity they see reflected in his plays.

This book offers a look at the lives of Elizabethan era women in the context of the great female characters in the works of William Shakespeare. Like the other entries in this fascinating series, Women in the Age of Shakespeare shows the influence of the world William Shakespeare lived in on the worlds he created for the stage, this time by focusing on women in the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras in general and in Shakespeare's works in particular. Women in the Age of Shakespeare explores the ancient and medieval ideas that Shakespeare drew upon in creating his great comedic and tragic heroines. It then looks at how these ideas intersected with the lived experiences of women of Shakespeare's time, followed by a close look at the major female characters in Shakespeare's plays and poems. Later chapters consider how these characters have been enacted on stage and in film, interpreted by critics and scholars, and re-imagined by writers in our own time.

Re-visioning the classics, often in a subversive mode, has evolved into its own theatrical genre in recent years, and many of these productions have been informed by feminist theory and practice. This book examines recent adaptations of classic texts (produced since 1980) influenced by a range of feminisms, and illustrates the significance of historical moment, cultural ideology, dramaturgical practice, and theatrical venue for shaping an adaptation. Essays are arranged according to the period and genre of the source text re-visioned: classical theater and myth (e.g. Antigone, Metamorphoses), Shakespeare and seventeenth-century theater (e.g. King Lear, The Rover), nineteenth and twentieth century narratives and reflections (e.g. The Scarlet Letter, Jane Eyre, A Room of One's Own), and modern drama (e.g. A Doll House, A Streetcar Named Desire).