Shakespeare's Dead

Resumen del libro

Four hundred years after Shakespeares death, his plays live on in theater and popular culture, given new life through countless innovative approaches to their performance and interpretation. Just as our enthusiasm for seeing the plays performed'and transformed'affirms their continued life, death scenes in Shakespeares plays tend to mark not an ending but a transformation of life.
Published to accompany a major exhibition at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Shakespeares Dead documents the many ways Shakespeares characters meet their demise, from suicide to murder, from death by workaday dagger to the more creative method of being baked and fed to ones family in a meat pie. Through these examples, Simon Palfrey and Emma Smith show Shakespeares mastery at choreographing death as a means of rediscovery. Some characters refuse to go quietly, dying in stages, as in Nick Bottoms performance as Pyramus killing himself with much flourish in A Midsummer Nights Dream. Others are remembered in elegies, and still others are resurrected or reappear as ghosts. Shakespeares death scenes also often speak to the boundaries between theater and everyday life, with funerals and scenes of mourning that are undercut by their staged inauthenticity.
Extensively illustrated with contemporary drawings and images from stage history, Shakespeares Dead takes readers through the playwrights great death scenes and tragic figures, exploring in them the theme of life in death and delineating the cultural, religious, and social contexts.