Shakespeare’s Histories on Screen: Adaptation, Race and Intersectionality

— —

Jennie M. Votava (Allegheny College, USA) Mark Thornton Burnett (Queen's University Belfast UK)

Shakespeare’s Histories on Screen

Adaptation, Race and Intersectionality

Jennie M. Votava (Allegheny College, USA), Mark Thornton Burnett (Queen's University Belfast UK)

$59.99

Paperback

Not in-store but you can order this
How long will it take?

Availability Information

We source books from suppliers in Australia and overseas. For books we don't currently have in stock, the time it takes to get them from our suppliers can vary widely - from a few days to a few months - so we check each book with each supplier to determine the expected time it will take to be supplied to us.

We then advise you accordingly. If the time taken to get any book is too long for you, you can let us know and we will cancel or adjust your order, and refund as required.

To find out the anticipated arrival time for specific items prior to ordering, please contact us by phone or email:

Phone +61 2 9264 3111, or 1800 4 BOOKS (1800 4 26657) if outside Sydney:
option 1 Abbey's Bookshop (Crime, History, Science, Kids & more) • info@abbeys.com.au
option 2 Language Book Centre (ESL & Foreign Languages) • language@abbeys.com.au
option 3 Galaxy Bookshop (Sci-fi, Fantasy, Romance, Graphic Novels) • sf@galaxybooks.com.au

QTY:

English

The Arden Shakespeare
20 February 2025

Film theory & criticism; Literary studies: plays & playwrights; Social discrimination; Gender studies: women; Gay & Lesbian studies

Series: Shakespeare and Adaptation

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.

By: Jennie M. Votava (Allegheny College USA)
Edited by: Mark Thornton Burnett (Queen's University Belfast UK)
Imprint: The Arden Shakespeare
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 138mm, Spine: 25mm
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9781350326682
ISBN 10: 1350326682
Series: Shakespeare and Adaptation
Pages: 272
Publication Date: 20 February 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

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).