Local Shakespeares: Proximations and Power

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Taylor & Francis, 2005 - 220 pages
"This remarkable volume challenges scholars and students to look beyond a dominant European and North American "metropolitan bank" of Shakespeare knowledge. As well as revealing the potential for a new understanding of Shakespeare's plays, Martin Orkin adopts a fresh approach to issues of power, where "proximations" emerge from a process of dialogue and challenge traditional notions of authority. Since their first performances, Shakespeare's plays and their audiences or readers have journeyed to one another across time and space, to and from countless and always different historical, geographical and ideological locations. Engagement with a Shakespeare text always entails in part, then, cultural encounter or clash, and readings are shaped by a reader's particular locations and knowledge. Part I of this book challenges us to recognise the way in which "local" or "non-metropolitan" knowledges and experiences might extend understanding of Shakespeare's texts and their locations. Part II demonstrates the use of local as well as metropolitan knowledges in exploring the presentation of masculinity in Shakespeare's late plays. These plays themselves dramatise encounters with different cultures and crucially, challenges to established authority." -- Back cover.
 

Contents

PARTI
15
whose muti in the web of it?
29
William TshikinyaChaka I presume? Cultural encounter
43
the infirmities of men in Pericles
63
that most venerable man which IDid call
82
Let no man mock me
112
Any strange beast there makes a man
142
the unruliness of patriarchy
165
Notes
171
Select bibliography
203
Index
213
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About the author (2005)

Martin Orkin, who teaches in the Departments of English and Theatre at the University of Haifa, is author of Shakespeare Against Apartheid and Drama and the South African State. He is also co-editor, with Ania Loomba, of Postcolonial Shakespeares, and editor of At the Junction: Four Plays by the Junction Avenue Theatre Company.

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