A Year of Shakespeare: Re-living the World Shakespeare Festival

Description

A Year of Shakespeare gives a uniquely expert and exciting overview of the largest Shakespeare celebration the world has ever known: the World Shakespeare Festival 2012. This is the only book to describe and analyse each of the Festival's 73 productions in well-informed,lively reviews by eminent and up-and-coming scholars and critics from the UK and around the world. A rich resource of critical interest to all students, scholars and lovers of Shakespeare, the book also captures the excitement of this extraordinary event. A Year of Shakespeare provides: * a ground-breaking collection of Shakespearean reviews, covering all of the Festival's productions; * a dynamic visual record through a wide range of production photographs; * incisive analysis of the Festival's significance in the wider context of the Cultural Olympiad 2012. All the world really is a stage, and it's time for curtain-up...

Paul Edmondson is Head of Research and Knowledge for The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and a priest in The Church of England. Paul Prescott is an Associate Professor at the University of Warwick, a specialist in Shakespeare theatre reviewing, and a teaching associate for The Royal Shakespeare Company. Erin Sullivan is a Lecturer, Fellow, and the Distance Learning Co-ordinator at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham

This is an extraordinary collection of essays recording the events of the World Shakespeare Festival, summoning up its kaleidoscopic diversity, its global reach, its oddities, triumphs and provocations- it's Shakespeare criticism as you have never encountered it before, scholarly, experimental, instant, and at times bizarre. It takes Shakespeare from the stage and academe into the age of Twitter and Facebook, and makes you feel you were there, present at all those strange and wonderful productions you missed. It's an exhilarating record of a great and successful Shakespearean adventure. -- Dame Margaret Drabble The book is a physical archive of the 73 plays [of the World Shakespeare Festival], reviewed in rich and entertaining detail by enthusiastic scholars... The book was born out of a desire to capture what may have been a fleeting moment - few of the World Shakespeare Festival plays were granted reviews in the national newspapers, so this book archives and immortalises productions that may have otherwise been forgotten... The editors did a fantastic job sourcing lots of production photos, so the book is heavily illustrated with these interesting and evocative images of actors and sets. The reviewers are a team of professional scholars and graduate students, and while they each have their own unique voice and approach to theatre reviewing, these separate voices come together harmoniously. -- Yolana Wassersug * The Shakespeare Bookshop Newsletter * Provides a comprehensive expert view of the proceedings, with reviews of all 74 productions that capture the vibrancy of this once-in-a-lifetime event. -- Karen Lyon * Folger Magazine * This is a comprehensive record, a welcome one, of the diversity and vibrance of the Festival. -- Heather Neill * Around the Globe *