Shakespeare’s Histories on Screen

Adaptation, Race and Intersectionality

Jennie M. Votava (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

272 Seiten

2025
The Arden Shakespeare (Verlag)
978-1-350-32668-2 (ISBN)

Noch nicht erschienen (ca. Februar 2025)
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This volume reframes the critical conversation about Shakespeare’s histories and national identity by bringing together two growing bodies of work: early modern race scholarship and adaptation theory. Theorizing a link between adaptation and intersectionality, it demonstrates how over the past thirty years race has become a central and constitutive part of British and American screen adaptations of the English histories. Available to expanding audiences via digital media platforms, these adaptations interrogate the dialectic between Shakespeare’s cultural capital and racial reckonings on both sides of the Atlantic and across time. By engaging contemporary representations of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability and class, adaptation not only creates artefacts that differ from their source texts, but also facilitates the conditions in which race and its intersections in the plays become visible.

At the centre of this analysis stand two landmark 21st-century history adaptations that use non-traditional casting: the British TV miniseries The Hollow Crown (2012, 2016) and the American independent film H4 (2012), an all-Black Henry IV conflation. In addition to demonstrating how the 21st-century screen history illuminates both past and present constructions of embodied difference, these works provide a lens for reassessing two history adaptations from Shakespeare’s 1990s box office renaissance, when actors of colour were first cast in cinematic versions of the plays. As exemplified by these formal adaptations’ reappropriations of race in history, non-traditional Shakespearean casting practices are also currently shaping digital culture’s conversations about race in non-Shakespearean period dramas such as Bridgerton.

Jennie M. Votava is Associate Professor of English at Allegheny College, USA. She has published essays in Renaissance Drama, Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Bulletin, and Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage, eds. Darryl Chalk and Mary Floyd-Wilson (2019).

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements

Introduction – From Rodney King to Netflix’s The King: Adaptation and/as Intersectionality in Shakespeare’s Histories, 1991-2019

Chapter One – Through a Glass Darkly: Race, Gender, Disability and Sophie Okonedo’s Margaret of Anjou in The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses

Chapter Two –Two Yorks, the Boy and the King of Pop: Colour-Conscious Casting and Queer Seriality in The Hollow Crown, Season One

Chapter Three – The Fat Knight in Black and White: Race, Disability, Gender, Nation, Falstaff

Chapter Four – Straight Outta Shakespeare: H4, My Own Private Idaho and the Universality Conundrum

Chapter Five – Film Noir, White Heat, ‘Top of the World’: Loncraine’s Richard III in Nazi-Face

Conclusion – Swinging the Lens: Bridgerton as Shakespearean History in Digital Cultures

Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

Erscheint lt. Verlag	20.2.2025
Reihe/Serie	Shakespeare and Adaptation
Zusatzinfo	10 bw illus
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	138 x 216 mm
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Lyrik / Dramatik ► Dramatik / Theater
	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Film / TV
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Medienwissenschaft
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Gender Studies
ISBN-10	1-350-32668-2 / 1350326682
ISBN-13	978-1-350-32668-2 / 9781350326682
Zustand	Neuware