Living with Shakespeare: Essays by Writers, Actors, and Directors

Why Shakespeare? What explains our continued fascination with his poems and plays? In Living with Shakespeare, Susannah Carson invites forty actors, directors, scholars, and writers to reflect on why his work is still such a vital part of our culture.

We hear from James Earl Jones on reclaiming Othello as a tragic hero, Julie Taymor on turning Prospero into Prospera, Camille Paglia on teaching the plays to actors, F. Murray Abraham on gaining an audience’s sympathy for Shylock, Sir Ben Kingsley on communicating Shakespeare’s ideas through performance, Germaine Greer on the playwright’s home life, Dame Harriet Walter on the complexity of his heroines, Brian Cox on social conflict in his time and ours, Jane Smiley on transposing King Lear to Iowa in A Thousand Acres, and Sir Antony Sher on feeling at home in Shakespeare’s language. Together these essays provide a fresh appreciation of Shakespeare’s works as a living legacy to be read, seen, performed, adapted, revised, wrestled with, and embraced by creative professionals and lay enthusiasts alike.

F. Murray Abraham ● Isabel Allende ● Cicely Berry ● Eve Best ● Eleanor Brown ● Stanley Cavell ● Karin Coonrod ● Brian Cox ● Peter David ● Margaret Drabble ● Dominic Dromgoole ● David Farr ● Fiasco Theater ● Ralph Fiennes ● Angus Fletcher ● James Franco ● Alan Gordon ● Germaine Greer ● Barry John ● James Earl Jones ● Sir Ben Kingsley ● Maxine Hong Kingston ● Rory Kinnear ● J. D. McClatchy ● Conor McCreery ● Tobias Menzies ● Joyce Carol Oates ● Camille Paglia ● James Prosek ● Richard Scholar ● Sir Antony Sher ● Jane Smiley ● Matt Sturges ● Julie Taymor ● Eamonn Walker ● Dame Harriet Walter ● Bill Willingham ● Jess Winfield

Susannah Carson is an American author, editor, and academic. She received her Ph.D. from Yale, after earning graduate degrees at Paris III, La Sorbonne-Nouvelle and Lyon II, L’Université des Lumières. Her first edited volume of literary essays was A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Authors on Why We Read Jane Austen. Her work has appeared in scholarly publications, newspapers, and magazines.

Contents

 

Foreword: Who Else Is There? by Harold Bloom

Introduction: The Tygers Hart by Susannah Carson

 

Bill Willingham, A Little Monkey Business

Antony Sher, Speaking Shakespeare

Camille Paglia, Teaching Shakespeare to Actors

Ben Kingsley, The Architecture of Shakespeare’s Ideas

Cicely Berry, King Lear in Retrospect

Tobias Menzies, Method and Madness

Rory Kinnear, Character and Conundrum

Matt Sturges, I Know a Hawk from a Handsaw . . .

James Earl Jones, The Sun God

Eamonn Walker, Othello in Love

Barry John, Othello: A Play in Black and White

Jess Winfield, Re-revising Shakespeare

Brian Cox, “I Say it is the Moon”

Richard Scholar, Trial By Theatre, or, Free-Thinking in Julius Caesar

Stanley Cavell, Saying in The Merchant of Venice

F. Murray Abraham, Searching for Shylock

Fiasco Theatre Company, Boldness Be My Friend

Karin Coonrod, Killing Shakespeare and Making My Play

Dominic Dromgoole, Playing Shakespeare at the Globe

Angus Fletcher, Tolstoy and the Shakespearean Gesture

J. D. McClatchy, The Red Scarf

Germaine Greer, Spring Imagery in Warwickshire

James Prosek, What’s in a Name? Or, Unnamed in the Forest

David Farr, The Sea Change

Alan Gordon, Looking for Illyria

Eleanor Brown, Shakespeare’s Siblings

Eve Best, “A Star Danced”

Harriet Walter, Two Loves, or the Eternal Triangle

Jane Smiley, Odd Man Out

Margaret Drabble, The Living Drama

Joyce Carol Oates, The Tragedy of the Imagination in Anthony and Cleopatra

Maxine Hong Kingston, War and Love

Peter David, On the Terrible and Unexpected Fate of the Star-Crossed Lovers

Conor McCreery, Shakespeare and Four-Colour Magic

Julie Taymor, Rough Magic

James Franco, My Own Private River

Isabel Allende, Enamoured with Shakespeare

 

Index of Plays and Characters

Permission Acknowledgments