Constructing Shakespeares
Research > Publications
Why are Shakespeare’s plays still performed so frequently? Why are they read at school? Why taught at university? There is a correct and generally acceptable answer: they are great plays. But what do we mean by this adjective? And what are the conditions for greatness? This study brings together essays focussing on how Shakespeare's works have achieved their status as classics and by what means they have managed to keep it. The essays cover a wide range of uses and areas, from Germany to the Lesser Antilles.
Engler, Balz, Constructing Shakespeares: Essays on the Making of a Great Author. Dozwil: EDITION SIGNAThUR, 2019. 260pp. ISBN 978-3-906273-25-9
Contents
Acknowledgements
Premises
1 Else My Project Fails: Applause and the Authority of Shakespeare's Texts
2 Hamlet in the Closet: Reading as Performance
3 The Media of King Lear
Construction
4 Constructing Shakespeares in Europe
5 Shakespeare's Passports
6 Shakespeare: The Unmaking of a National Poet
Monumental Shakespeare
8 Stratford and the Canonization of Shakespeare
9 Shakespeare, Washington, Lincoln: The Folger Library and the American Appropriation of the Bard
10 Weimar: Shakespeare among the German Classics
11 Local Habitations: Hamlet at Helsingør, Juliet at Verona
Occasions: Status and Process
12 Shakespeare in the Trenches
13 The Noise that Banished Martius—Coriolanus in Post-War Germany
14 Shakespearean Passages
Hamlet: Passages We Live By
15 HyperHamlet: Shakespeare's Presence in Culture
16 Quoting Shakespeare: "Words, words, words"?
17 HyperHamlet—an extended personal footnote
Re-Productions
18 On Gottfried Keller's A Village Romeo and Juliet and Shakespeare Adaptation in General
19 Language and Conflict: A Trilingual Romeo and Juliet
Coda
20 The Relevance of the Inconspicuous