Celebrating Shakespeare: Commemoration and Cultural Memory

On the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, this collection opens up the social practices of commemoration to new research and analysis. An international team of leading scholars explores a broad spectrum of celebrations, showing how key events - such as the Easter Rising in Ireland, the Second Vatican Council of 1964 and the Great Exhibition of 1851 - drew on Shakespeare to express political agendas. In the USA, commemoration in 1864 counted on him to symbolise unity transcending the Civil War, while the First World War pulled the 1916 anniversary celebration into the war effort, enlisting Shakespeare as patriotic poet. The essays also consider how the dream of Shakespeare as a rural poet took shape in gardens, how cartoons challenged the poet's lite status and how statues of him mutated into advertisements for gin and Disney cartoons. Richly varied illustrations supplement these case studies of the diverse, complex and contradictory aims of memorialising Shakespeare.

Author: Clara Calvo
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 11/19/2015
Pages: 404
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.70lbs
Size: 9.34h x 5.91w x 0.94d
ISBN: 9781107042773

About the Author
Calvo, Clara: - Clara Calvo is Professor of English Studies at Universidad de Murcia, Spain. She is the author of Power Relations and Fool-Master Discourse in Shakespeare (1991) and co-authored The Literature Workbook (with Jean-Jacques Weber, 1998). She has edited, with Ton Hoenselaars, European Shakespeares (The Shakespearean International Yearbook, 8, 2008), a special issue of Critical Survey on Shakespeare and the Cultures of Commemoration (2010), and Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy for Arden Early Modern Drama (with Jesús Tronch, 2013). Her articles have appeared in Shakespeare Survey, The Year's Work in English Studies, and several other journals and collections of essays.Kahn, Coppélia: - Coppélia Kahn is Professor of English, Emerita, at Brown University, Rhode Island. She has published widely on feminist theory, Shakespeare, Renaissance drama, and Shakespeare's place in American culture. She is author of Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (1981) and Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (1997). She also co-edited Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism (with Gayle Green, 1985).