1,720,985 research outputs found
Quoting Shakespeare in the British Novel from Dickens to Wodehouse
Full text linkNovelists heralded as Victorian Shakespeares frequently navigated the varied nineteenth-century practices of Shakespeare quotation (in the classroom in compilation books, in stage spoofs) to construct the relationship between narrator and character, and to negotiate the dialogue between Shakespeare\u27s voice and the voice of the novel. This chapter looks at three novelists whose practices intersect and contrast: George Eliot, who resists the Bardolatrous imputation of a Shakespearean character\u27s wisdom to its author by distinguishing her own characters\u27 inept Shakespeare quotations from her narrative voice; Thomas Hardy, who claims the authority of Shakespearean pastoral, regional language against the glib quotations of his more cosmopolitan characters; and a latter-day Victorian, P.G. Wodehouse, who plays the irreverent, defamiliarising gambits of Victorian Shakespeare burlesques against the educational and commonplace authority that Shakespeare quotations accrue
Sabbatical Leave Report
No full textI appreciated the chance during my sabbatical to write more articles for a broader readership. I had three pieces run in The New Yorker online about ways that we reconsider Shakespeare today. One, “American Playwrights Try to Reinvent the History Play,” looked at a series of commissions from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival that adapt the model of Shakespeare’s history plays to represent change in American history; a second, “Two Ways to Bring Shakespeare into the Twenty-First Century,” reviewed contrasting experimental Shakespeare productions that I saw in the U.K.; and a third, “The Radical Argument of the New Oxford Shakespeare,” evaluated the claim of a controversial new edition of the complete works that credits many other Renaissance playwrights as Shakespeare’s collaborators. I brought my scholarly interests to bear on popular culture, too, in a piece for Slate about Shakespeare’s legacy in the American West as reflected in a new HBO show (“Westworld Is Full of Shakespeare Quotations, but It’s Using Them All Wrong”), and two articles editorially solicited for the online academic review Public Books: one about reading the scripts of two popular shows (“\u27Harry Potter\u27 and \u27Hamilton\u27 from the Page to the Stage”) and another about the gender politics of Disney musicals (“Lin-Manuel Meets Moana”). Most unexpectedly, I made an appearance on The New York Times opinion page when I learned that President Trump’s chief strategist had written an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus that offered surprising insight into his vision of social change (“Behold, Steve Bannon’s Hip-Hop Shakespeare Rewrite: Coriolanus”). I found it invigorating to write about current events and contemporary culture, and I hope these pieces can help to bring Linfield a higher national profile as a college where scholars engage in the public humanities
\u3cem\u3eHarry Potter\u3c/em\u3e and \u3cem\u3eHamilton\u3c/em\u3e from the Stage to the Page
Full text linkIn this article originally published in Public Books, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner offers commentary on the two best-selling plays on record, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and Hamilton. Specifically, Pollack-Pelzner examines how the Anglo-American world’s favorite orphans play at home, adopted, as it were, from the stage to the page
The Book That Made Me: A Girl
Full text linkIn this installment of The Book That Made Me, a series from Public Books reflecting on the books that have changed our lives, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner reflects on the freedom he received—to become a whole other person, in a whole other place—from an unexpected source
\u27Mary Poppins\u27 and a Nanny\u27s Shameful Flirting with Blackface
Full text linkIn this piece originally published in the New York Times, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner discusses problematic racist imagery in both the 1964 and 2018 Mary Poppins films and argues that minstrelsy has long been Disney\u27s mode of expressing topsy-turvy fun
Lin-Manuel Meets \u3cem\u3eMoana\u3c/em\u3e
Full text linkIn this article originally published in Public Books, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner wonders whether a Disney musical and a Lin-Manuel Miranda musical want the same thing
Jane Austen, the Prose Shakespeare
Full text linkThis essay explores the connection between Shakespearean drama and the novel’s representation of interiority. Jane Austen’s celebrated use of free indirect discourse, I argue, is linked to Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, which turned dramatic soliloquies into prose narration, rendering a character’s thought and idiom in a third-person voice. Heralded as a “prose Shakespeare” by nineteenth-century critics, Austen also developed an inverse free indirect discourse, the infusion of the narrative voice into characters’ dialogue. Scenes from Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion offer mini-Shakespearean plays of attention, for Shakespearean technique and quotation script Austen’s dramas of reading
The Mixed Reception of the \u3cem\u3eHamilton\u3c/em\u3e Premiere in Puerto Rico
Full text linkIn this article originally published in The Atlantic, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner wonders about the challenges of premiering the famed Broadway musical, Hamilton, during a time of political discord in the aftermath of 2017\u27s Hurricane Maria, in Puerto Rico
Summer of Shrew, Part 3: A Sly Conceit
Full text linkIn the third of a four-part series on Shakespeare\u27s The Taming of the Shrew, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner asks, what if Kate’s story isn’t the play’s only reality? Pollack-Pelzner explores how a drunken beggar and an earlier version of the script shift the brawling balances of the play and call into question who the real shrew is
Who Has Sex in \u3cem\u3eTwelfth Night?\u3c/em\u3e
No full textFor the third straight summer, we were grateful to receive funding to explore gender roles in Shakespearean comedy in collaboration with the Portland Shakespeare Project (PSP). Our project combined literary research with theater practice as dramaturgs for the 2015 production of Twelfth Night at PSP, where I am the scholar-in-residence. This production set the play in the Elizabethan period, raising questions about class and gender cross-dressing, as well as the relation between same-sex bonds and heterosexual unions. We consulted on directorial and acting choices; we examined primary and secondary sources to research class and gender roles in the Elizabethan period; we advised the artistic team on textual and historical questions; and we shared our research with audiences in pre- and post-show lectures and discussions
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