Shakespeare and Celebrity Cultures PDF Download

Author: Jennifer Holl
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000422216
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
This book argues that Shakespeare and various cultures of celebrity have enjoyed a ceaselessly adaptive, symbiotic relationship since the final decade of the sixteenth century, through which each entity has contributed to the vitality and adaptability of the other. In five chapters, Jennifer Holl explores the early modern culture of theatrical celebrity and its resonances in print and performance, especially in Shakespeare’s interrogations of this emerging phenomenon in sonnets and histories, before moving on to examine the ways that shifting cultures of stage, film, and digital celebrity have perpetually recreated the Shakespeare, or even the #shakespeare, with whom audiences continue to interact. Situated at an intersection of multiple critical conversations, this book will be of great interest to scholars and graduate students of Shakespeare and Shakespearean appropriations, early modern theater, and celebrity studies.

Author: Jennifer R. Holl
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781303087981
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Book Description
Despite a recent boom of scholarly interest in the cultural, economic, and affective force of celebrity, critical inquiry remains peculiarly limited to the past century, with only a handful of accounts veering into questions of pre-film era celebrity and almost no discussion of the phenomenon's existence prior to the eighteenth century. Stars Indeed expands the putative historical parameters of celebrity to argue that a confluence of theatrical, economic, and social innovations in early modern London gave rise to a nascent celebrity culture that resonated profoundly through performance, print, market exchange, and social relations. As the theater became a stable, public forum for performance and the circulation of current information, the early modern player took on an increasingly visible and important cultural role, embodying and reflecting social innovations and tensions. Facilitated through the reciprocal dynamics between audience and actor in the playhouse, and perpetuated through the player's accessibility and commoditization in performance and print, the emergence of a celebrity culture empowered early modern Londoners with a democratic alternative to traditional discourses and icons of authority circumscribed by birthright. In four chapters, this dissertation explores the collaborative construction of the early modern celebrity in the theater, the circulation and appropriation of celebrity name and image in print media, the tensions between traditional modes of fame enjoyed through birthright and the emergent celebrity of popular performers, and finally, how Shakespeare's enduring and ever-evolving celebrity has colored popular and critical receptionthroughout the centuries. As celebrity remains a particularly immediate and ephemeral kind of fame, this dissertation illuminates the celebrity presence of notable players, including Tarlton, Alleyn, and Kempe, through careful analyses of these stars' appearances in contemporary ballads, commendatory verse, prose accounts, and staged performances, while also exploring the ways Shakespeare, Jonson, Marston, and other playwrights interrogated the mechanisms, implications, and impact of this developing theatrical phenomenon.

Author: Anna Blackwell
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319965441
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
This book offers a timely examination of the relationship between Shakespeare and contemporary digital media. By focusing upon a variety of ‘Shakespearean’ individuals, groups and communities and their ‘online’ presence, the book explores the role of popular internet culture in the ongoing adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays and his general cultural standing. The description of certain performers as ‘Shakespearean’ is a ubiquitous but often throwaway assessment. However, a study of ‘Shakespearean’ actors within a broader cultural context reveals much, not only about the mutable face of British culture (popular and ‘highbrow’) but also about national identity and commerce. These performers share an online space with the other major focus of the book: the fans and digital content creators whose engagement with the Shakespearean marks them out as more than just audiences and consumers; they become producers and critics. Ultimately, Digital Shakespeareans moves beyond the theatrical history focus of related works to consider the role of digital culture and technology in shaping Shakespeare’s contemporary adaptive legacy and the means by which we engage with it.

Author: Margreta De Grazia
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521886325
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
Twenty-one essays provide lively and authoritative approaches to the literary, historical, cultural and performative aspects of Shakespeare works.

Author: Michael D. Bristol
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134928599
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
Bristol debates Shakespeare's cultural success and widespread notoriety, his achievement of contemporary celebrity and argues that Shakespeare's plays represent the pathos of our civilization with extraordinary force and clarity.

Author: Milly Williamson
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509511431
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
It is a truism to suggest that celebrity pervades all areas of life today. The growth and expansion of celebrity culture in recent years has been accompanied by an explosion of studies of the social function of celebrity and investigations into the fascination of specific celebrities. And yet fundamental questions about what the system of celebrity means for our society have yet to be resolved: Is celebrity a democratization of fame or a powerful hierarchy built on exclusion? Is celebrity created through public demand or is it manufactured? Is the growth of celebrity a harmful dumbing down of culture or an expansion of the public sphere? Why has celebrity come to have such prominence in today’s expanding media? Milly Williamson unpacks these questions for students and researchers alike, re-examining some of the accepted explanations for celebrity culture. The book questions assumptions about the inevitability of the growth of celebrity culture, instead explaining how environments were created in which celebrity output flourished. It provides a compelling new history of the development of celebrity (both long-term and recent) which highlights the relationship between the economic function of celebrity in various media and entertainment industries and its changing social meanings and patterns of consumption.

Author: R. Burt
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137092777
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
Shakespeare in mass media - particularly film, video, and television - is arguably the hottest, fastest growing research agenda in Shakespeare studies. Shakespeare after Mass Media provides students and scholars with the most comprehensive resource available on the market for studying the pop cultural afterlife of The Bard. From marketing to electronic Shakespeare, comics to romance novels, Star Trek to Branagh, radio and popular music to Bartlett's Quotations , the volume explores the contemporary cultural significance of Shakespeare in an unprecedently broad array of mass media contexts. With theoretical sophistication and accessible writing, it will be the ideal text for courses on Shakespeare and mass media.

Author: Juliet John
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191082104
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 813

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture is a major contribution to the dynamic field of Victorian studies. This collection of 37 original chapters by leading international Victorian scholars offers new approaches to familiar themes including science, religion, and gender, and gives space to newer and emerging topics including old age, fair play, and economics. Structured around three broad sections (Ways of Being: Identity and Ideology, Ways of Understanding: Knowledge and Belief, and Ways of Communicating: Print and Other Cultures), the volume is sub-divided into nine sub-sections each with its own 'lead' essay: on subjectivity, politics, gender and sexuality, place and race, religion, science, material and mass culture, aesthetics and visual culture, and theatrical culture. The collection, like today's Victorian studies, is thoroughly interdisciplinary and yet its substantial Introduction explores a concern which is evident both implicitly and explicitly in the volume's essays: that is, the nature and status of 'literary' culture and the literary from the Victorian period to the present. The diverse and wide-ranging essays present original scholarship framed accessibly for a mixed readership of advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and established scholars.

Author: Emma Smith
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1524748552
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
An electrifying new study that investigates the challenges of the Bard’s inconsistencies and flaws, and focuses on revealing—not resolving—the ambiguities of the plays and their changing topicality A genius and prophet whose timeless works encapsulate the human condition like no other. A writer who surpassed his contemporaries in vision, originality, and literary mastery. A man who wrote like an angel, putting it all so much better than anyone else. Is this Shakespeare? Well, sort of. But it doesn’t tell us the whole truth. So much of what we say about Shakespeare is either not true, or just not relevant. In This Is Shakespeare, Emma Smith—an intellectually, theatrically, and ethically exciting writer—takes us into a world of politicking and copycatting, as we watch Shakespeare emulating the blockbusters of Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd (the Spielberg and Tarantino of their day), flirting with and skirting around the cutthroat issues of succession politics, religious upheaval, and technological change. Smith writes in strikingly modern ways about individual agency, privacy, politics, celebrity, and sex. Instead of offering the answers, the Shakespeare she reveals poses awkward questions, always inviting the reader to ponder ambiguities.

Author: Ellis Cashmore
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134191421
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
In this fascinating and topical beginners guide, Ellis Cashmore explores the intriguing issue of celebrity culture: its origins, its meaning and its global influence. Covering such varied perspectives as fame addiction, the ‘celebrification’ of politics and celebrity fatigue, Cashmore analyzes the relationship celebrity has with commodification and the consumer society, and investigates the new media and the quest for self-perfection. Cashmore takes readers on a quest that visits the Hollywood film industry of the early twentieth century, the film set of Cleopatra in the 1970s, the dressing room of Madonna in the 1980s, the burial of Diana in the 1990s, and the Big Brother house of the early 2000s. Author of Beckham and Tyson, Cashmore collects research, theory, and case studies en route as he explores the intriguing issue of celebrity culture: its origins, its meaning, and its global influence. Including reviews of existing literature, and an outline of key contemporary topics, this absorbing book skilfully explains why we have become so captivated by the lives and loves of the celebrity and, in so doing, presents the clearest, most comprehensive, wide-ranging, and accessible account of celebrity culture to date.