Shakespeare's Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance

This study looks at the violation of bodies in Shakespeare's tragedies, especially as revealed (or concealed) in performance on stage and screen. Pascale Aebischer discusses stage and screen performances of Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, Othello and King Lear with a view to showing how bodies which are virtually absent from both playtexts and critical discourse (due to silence, disability, marginalisation, racial otherness or death) can be prominent in performance, where their representation reflects the cultural and political climate of the production. Aebischer focuses on post-1980 Royal Shakespeare Company and Royal National Theatre productions but also covers film adaptations and landmark productions from the nineteenth century onwards. Her book will interest scholars and students of Shakespeare, gender, performance and cultural studies.

Table of Contents:
Prologue: The Gravedigger's daughter - a story of loss; Introduction: filling the empty space; 1. Titus Andronicus: spectacular obscenities; 2. 'Not dead? not yet quite dead?': Hamlet's unruly corpses; 3. Murderous male moors: gazing at race in Titus Andronicus and Othello; 4. En-gendering violence and suffering in King Lear; Epilogue: Polly goes to Hollywood - a success story; Appendix: Main productions cited; Bibliography; Index.

About the Author :
Pascale Aebischer is Associate Professor of Early Modern Performance Studies at the University of Exeter. After a combined honours degree (English and French) at the University of Bern and a postgraduate diploma at the London Academy of Performing Arts, she moved to Lincoln College, Oxford, where she was the recipient of a Berrow Scholarship and where she completed her DPhil. From 1999 to 2002, Aebischer held a Research Fellowship, funded by the National Science Foundation (CH), at Darwin College, Cambridge. During those years, she taught in Cambridge, Oxford and for the British American Drama Academy in London. She took up a Lectureship in Renaissance Studies at the University of Leicester in 2002 and moved to the University of Exeter in 2004. She is author of Jacobean Drama (2010) and Screening Early Modern Drama: Beyond Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and co-editor of Performing Early Modern Drama Today (Cambridge University Press, 2012). In spring 2013, Pascale Aebischer became General Editor of Shakespeare Bulletin, the leading journal of early modern performance studies.

Review :
Review of the hardback: '… an extremely useful resource to scholars of Shakespeare on both stage and screen.' Theatre Notebook Review of the hardback: 'Methodologically ... highly innovative, boldly fusing two critical schools usually seen as incompatible: textual and performance criticism. Aebischer demonstrates that the study of Shakespeare in performance cannot replace the close attention to the play texts, but may potentially enrich our understanding of them.' Shakespeare Jahrbuch Band