Elizabethan and Jacobean Reappropriation in Contemporary British Drama

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

   PDF

2. Introduction: Appropriating the Past

   • Graham Saunders

   Pages 1-24

3. Why Rewrite Shakespeare and His Contemporaries?

   • Graham Saunders

   Pages 25-55

4. A Host of Lears: Howard Barker’s Seven Lears, Elaine Feinstein’s Lear’s Daughters, and Sarah Kane’s Blasted

   • Graham Saunders

   Pages 57-83

5. ‘Love in the Museum’: Howard Barker, the Erotic and the Elizabethan/Jacobean Text

   • Graham Saunders

   Pages 85-103

6. ‘If Power Change Purpose’: Appropriation and the Shakespearian Despot

   • Graham Saunders

   Pages 105-126

7. Anyone for Venice? Wesker, Marowitz, and Pascal Appropriate The Merchant of Venice

   • Graham Saunders

   Pages 127-149

8. Festive Tragedy: Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem (2009)

   • Graham Saunders

   Pages 151-175

9. Back Matter

   Pages 177-194

   PDF

This book examines British playwrights' responses to the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries since 1945, from Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead to Sarah Kane’s Blasted and Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem. Using the work of Julie Sanders and others working in the fields of Adaptation Studies and intertextual criticism, it argues that this relatively neglected area of drama, widely considered to be adaptation, should instead be considered as appropriation - as work that often mounts challenges to the ideologies and orthodoxies within Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, and questions the legitimacy and cultural authority of Shakespeare’s legacy. The book discusses the work of Howard Barker,  Peter Barnes, Edward Bond, Howard Brenton, David Edgar, Elaine Feinstein and the Women’s Theatre Group, David Greig, Sarah Kane, Dennis Kelly, Bernard Kopps, Charles Marowitz, Julia Pascal and Arnold Wesker.

• Shakespeare
• Contemporary Theatre
• Tom Stoppard
• Sarah Kane
• Adaptation

“The most satisfying aspects of the book are the more sustained readings of such complex and highly thought-provoking playtexts as Butterworth’s, Kane’s, or Greig’s that it manages to focus on for more than a few paragraphs. … the study provides rich material and collects many pertinent quotations from relevant sources.” (Tobias Döring, Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, Vol. 8 (2), 2020)

• University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom

  Graham Saunders

Graham Saunders is Allardyce Nicol Professor of Drama Arts at the University of Birmingham, UK. He is author of Love me or Kill me: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes (2002), About Kane: the Playwright and the Work (2009), Patrick Marber’s Closer (2008) and British Theatre Companies 1980-1994 (2015). He is co-editor of Cool Britannia: Political Theatre in the 1990s (Palgrave, 2008) and Sarah Kane in Context (2010).

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