Tales from Shakespeare
Creative Collisions

Combines the critical and the creative, looking at the collisions that arise when Shakespeare texts are recreated in contemporary contexts.

Graham Holderness (Author)

9781107071292, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 3 July 2014

257 pages
22.4 x 14.5 x 2.1 cm, 0.43 kg

'Successfully 'colliding' in this volume are the creative and critical dimensions. Both coexist and merge, illustrating Holderness's main point: any activity linked to the name of Shakespeare - from the edition of texts to film adaptations, to advertisements and critical essays - exists in a continuum, and therefore must be studied as part of the system in order to understand the Shakespearean phenomenon.' Maria Elisa Montironi, Linguae

In this engaging new book, writer and critic Graham Holderness shows how a classic Shakespeare play can be the source for a modern story, providing a creative 'collision' between the Shakespeare text and contemporary concerns. Using an analogy from particle physics, Holderness tests his methodology through specific examples, structured in four parts: a recreation of performances of Hamlet and Richard II aboard the East India Company ship the Red Dragon in 1607; an imagined encounter between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson writing the King James Bible; the creation of a contemporary folk hero based on Coriolanus and drawing on films such as Skyfall and The Hurt Locker; and an account of the terrorist bombing at a performance of Twelfth Night in Qatar in 2005. These pieces of narrative and drama are interspersed with literary criticism, each using a feature of the original Shakespeare play or its performance to illuminate the extraordinary elasticity of Shakespeare. The 'tales' provoke questions about what we understand to be Shakespeare and not-Shakespeare, making the book of vital interest to students, scholars, and enthusiasts of Shakespeare, literary criticism and creative writing.

Introduction: from appropriation to collision
Part I: 1. The voyage of the Red Dragon
2. 'Shooting an elephant'
Part II: 3. Shakespeare and the King James Bible
4. 'Wholly Writ': a play in two acts
Part III: 5. The Coriolanus myth
6. 'The lonely dragon'
Part IV: 7. Shakespeare and 9/11
8. 'Rudely interrupted'
Afterword: 'Tales from Shakespeare'.

Subject Areas: Shakespeare studies & criticism [DSGS], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Shakespeare plays [DDS], Creative writing & creative writing guides [CBV]