Shakespeare, Our Contemporary is a provocative, original study of the major plays of Shakespeare. More than that, it is one of the few critical works to have strongly influenced theatrical productions. Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz are among the many directors who have acknowledged their debt to Jan Kott, finding in his analogies between Shakespearean situations and those in modern life and drama the seeds of vital new stage conceptions. Shakespeare, Our Contemporary has been translated into nineteen languages since it appeared in 1961, and readers all over the world have similarly found their responses to Shakespeare broadened and enriched.

The best, the most alive, radical book about Shakespeare in at least a generation.

First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

From one of the world's premier Shakespeare scholars comes a magisterial new study whose premise is "that Shakespeare makes modern culture and that modern culture makes Shakespeare." Shakespeare has determined many of the ideas that we think of as "naturally" true: ideas about human character, individuality and selfhood, government, leadership, love and jealousy, men and women, youth and age. Marjorie Garber delves into ten plays to explore the interrelationships between Shakespeare and contemporary culture, from James Joyce's Ulysses to George W. Bush's reading list. From the persistence of difference in Othello to the matter of character in Hamlet to the untimeliness of youth in Romeo and Juliet, Garber discusses how these ideas have been re-imagined in modern fiction, theater, film, and the news, and in the literature of psychology, sociology, political theory, business, medicine, and law. Shakespeare and Modern Culture is a brilliant recasting of our own mental and emotional landscape as refracted through the prism of the protean Shakespeare.

A complete critical introduction to New Historicist and Cultural Materialist approaches that have dominated contemporary Shakespeare theory, as well as alternative new directions.

Passing Strange offers a trenchant look at the diverse ways Shakespeare relates to race in a variety of cultural producitons in the United States.

"This collection covers a wide range of Shakespeare productions, from Granville Barker and Poel's experiments with cross-gender casting to recent performances by Cheek by Jowl, the National Theatre, and the new Globe; from early twentieth-century performances by women's companies in England and Japan to contemporary stagings by the Los Angeles Women's Shakespeare Company; from Mabou Mines' controversial Lear in New York to a more subtly transgressive Tempest by the Georgia Shakespeare Festival." "These essays are comprehensive in their consideration of cross-gender-cast Shakespeare as it evolved over the past century. Theoretically informed yet grounded in the particularity of individual performances, they forge new connections between performance studies and gender theory and broach issues vital to anyone interested in Shakespeare."--BOOK JACKET.