Synopses & Reviews
"He was not of an age but for all time," Ben Jonson said of his friend and rival Shakespeare. The truth of Jonson's axiom is evident in this new book, the first full-length study to assess Shakespearean performances on southern stages. It is a study of the plentiful evidence throughout the history of the American South that Shakespearean plays have been performed with success on southern stages.
The thirteen essays in this collection seek both to document and to evaluate these performances from colonial to contemporary times. The essays, written expressly for this volume, are divided into two parts: histories of Shakespearean performances and accounts of some southern Shakespeare festivals. The historical evidence shows the importance of Shakespeare in the theaters of Richmond, Charleston, Annapolis, Baltimore, Mobile, Vicksburg, Natchez, New Orleans, and Houston. A vigorous Shakespearean tradition has continued into the present time as festivals in North Carolina, Alabama, Florida, and Texas emphasize the importance of Shakespeare.
Synopsis
This collection of essays documents the indebtedness and thematic similarities uniting Shakespeare and eight southern authors--William Gilmore Simms, Henry Timrod, Sidney Lanier, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, and Walker Percy.
Each of these essays, written expressly for this collection, examines the shared cultural heritage in which Shakespeare has been received as well as the significant ways in which each of these writers has responded to Shakespeare.
Since no other single work currently exists that exclusively considers this subject, Shakespeare and Southern Writers will be a valuable resource for scholars of American literature, Shakespearian studies, and southern culture, giving as it does not only a much needed account of the Bard's influence on the life and writings of these particular writers but also an assessment of his influence on southern letters in general.
The eight authors selected are representatives of various periods and achievements in southern literature (the local color movement, the age of the Fugitives-Agrarians, the modern novel); their work represents the widely different genres in which Shakespeare's influence was felt--the lyric (Timrod, Warren), the drama (Simms--in both comedy and tragedy), the novel (Twain, Faulkner, Percy), and criticism (Ransom, in particular).
The editor draws together these disparate and individual writers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in an introductory essay that points out the variety and richness of these authors' responses to Shakespeare.