Shakespeare and the Poetics and Politics of Relevance

Dympna Callaghan, Sophie Chiari

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9783031668975
• eBook ISBN:
  9783031668982
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

Four years on from George Floyd's murder, this volume asks if and how Shakespeare might be relevant—whether in performance, in the classroom, or in scholarship—to the pressing issues of social and climate justice. This question, however, is accompanied by the acute and uncomfortable recognition that there have been other consequences to the awakening of the world since Floyd's death, including the call to cancel Shakespeare altogether. This volume, however, is not an apology for Shakespeare but rather an engagement with him. From the perspective of the scholars who contribute here, questions about Shakespeare in our current context are not only deeply enmeshed with issues about his historical, geographical, and performance context and its attendant alterity, but crucially also to the specifically literary forms and structures with which he worked. Even as these essays resist the idea of a "timeless," universalist Shakespeare, they insist upon the "poetics," the creative framework, the specifically literary dimensions of the plays that cannot be reduced to any paraphrasable content.  These are precisely the features that facilitate and enable the "relevance" of Shakespeare's works even across the chasm of the centuries since he composed them.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Shakespeare and the Poetics and Politics of Relevance: An Introduction
• 2. Mistaking Wilderness: Shakespeare Viewed from Turtle Island
• 3. Underground Shakespeare: The Extraction of Natural Resources
• 4. Shakespeare in a Changing Climate
• 5. She Takes a Wife: The Knots of Sex and Gender from Ovid’s Iphis to the Boy Actor on Shakespeare’s Stage
• 6. Shakespeare and the Ethics of Humour
• 7. Caesar, and Caesarism, Now
• 8. The Relief of Shakespeare: Much Ado About (Ir)relevance
• 9. “And what should I do in Islamia?”: Shakespeare and the Virtues of Relevance
• 10. Shakespeare Across the Disciplines
• 11. Healing in the Gap of Time: Resonance and Resilience in José Cruz González’s Invierno
• 12. Shakespeare’s Intercultural Performativity in the After-Life: Ku Na’uka’s Othello in Noh Style
• 13. Afterword: Reckoning with Relevance—Collaboration, Community, Context 
• Back Matter