Tales from Shakespeare: Creative Collisions (Hardcover)

In this engaging new book writer and critic Graham Holderness shows how a classic Shakespeare play can be the source for a modern story providing a creative collision between the Shakespeare text and contemporary concerns. Using an analogy from particle physics Holderness tests his methodology through specific examples structured in four parts: a recreation of performances of Hamlet and Richard II aboard the East India Company ship the Red Dragon in 1607; an imagined encounter between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson writing the King James Bible; the creation of a contemporary folk hero based on Coriolanus and drawing on films such as Skyfall and The Hurt Locker; and an account of the terrorist bombing at a performance of Twelfth Night in Qatar in 2005. These pieces of narrative and drama are interspersed with literary criticism each using a feature of the original Shakespeare play or its performance to illuminate the extraordinary elasticity of Shakespeare. The tales provoke questions about what we understand to be Shakespeare and not-Shakespeare making the book of vital interest to students scholars and enthusiasts of Shakespeare literary criticism and creative writing.