Something To Read
Elm Shakespeare Company’s Staff Members and YES! Members have gathered a selection of books about and inspired by Shakespeare and his plays for all age ranges! We have provided descriptions for each book as well as links to buy them. If you know a book that is not on our lists, you can use our “Suggest A Book” portal and let us know your recommendation!
Rebecca’s Favorites!
Women of Will is a fierce and funny exploration of Shakespeare’s understanding of the feminine. Tina Packer, one of our foremost Shakespeare experts, shows that Shakespeare began, in his early comedies, by writing women as shrews to be tamed or as sweet little things with no independence of thought. The women of the history plays are much more interesting, beginning with Joan of Arc. Then, with the extraordinary Juliet, there is a dramatic shift: suddenly Shakespeare’s women have depth, motivation, and understanding of life more than equal to that of the men. As Shakespeare ceases to write women as predictable caricatures and starts writing them from the inside, his women become as dimensional, spirited, spiritual, active, and sexual as any of his male characters. Wondering if Shakespeare had fallen in love (Packer considers with whom, and what she may have been like), the author observes that from Juliet on, Shakespeare’s characters demonstrate that when women and men are equal in status and passion, they can—and do—change the world.
Women Of Will
By Tina Packer
In this unusually wide-ranging study, spanning more than a century and covering such diverse forms of expressive culture as Shakespeare, Central Park, symphonies, jazz, art museums, the Marx Brothers, opera, and vaudeville, a leading cultural historian demonstrates how variable and dynamic cultural boundaries have been and how fragile and recent the cultural categories we have learned to accept as natural and eternal are.
For most of the nineteenth century, a wide variety of expressive forms―Shakespearean drama, opera, orchestral music, painting and sculpture, as well as the writings of such authors as Dickens and Longfellow―enjoyed both high cultural status and mass popularity. In the nineteenth century Americans (in addition to whatever specific ethnic, class, and regional cultures they were part of) shared a public culture less hierarchically organized, less fragmented into relatively rigid adjectival groupings than their descendants were to experience. By the twentieth century this cultural eclecticism and openness became increasingly rare. Cultural space was more sharply defined and less flexible than it had been. The theater, once a microcosm of America―housing both the entire spectrum of the population and the complete range of entertainment from tragedy to farce, juggling to ballet, opera to minstrelsy―now fragmented into discrete spaces catering to distinct audiences and separate genres of expressive culture. The same transition occurred in concert halls, opera houses, and museums. A growing chasm between “serious” and “popular,” between “high” and “low” culture came to dominate America’s expressive arts.
“If there is a tragedy in this development,” Lawrence Levine comments, “it is not only that millions of Americans were now separated from exposure to such creators as Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Verdi, whom they had enjoyed in various formats for much of the nineteenth century, but also that the rigid cultural categories, once they were in place, made it so difficult for so long for so many to understand the value and importance of the popular art forms that were all around them. Too many of those who considered themselves educated and cultured lost for a significant period―and many have still not regained―their ability to discriminate independently, to sort things out for themselves and understand that simply because a form of expressive culture was widely accessible and highly popular it was not therefore necessarily devoid of any redeeming value or artistic merit.”
In this innovative historical exploration, Levine not only traces the emergence of such familiar categories as highbrow and lowbrow at the turn of the century, but helps us to understand more clearly both the process of cultural change and the nature of culture in American society.
Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America
By Lawrence W. Levine
A classic of theatre writing, a unique insight into the creation of a landmark Shakespearian performance.
Antony Sher's stunning performance for the RSC as Richard III on crutches won him both the Laurence Olivier and Evening Standard Awards for Best Actor. This book records - in the actor's own words and drawings - the making of this historic theatrical event.
Year of the King
By Antony Sher
The systematic practice of non-traditional or "colorblind" casting began with Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival in the 1950s. Although colorblind casting has been practiced for half a century now, it still inspires vehement controversy and debate.
This collection of fourteen original essays explores both the production history of colorblind casting in cultural terms and the theoretical implications of this practice for reading Shakespeare in a contemporary context.
Colorblind Shakespeare New Perspectives on Race and Performance
By Ayanna Thompson
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Stories Inspired By Shakespeare & His Plays
Suggest A Book!
Know another great Shakespeare-inspired book? Contact the Youth of Elm Shakespeare Advisory Council, YES!, so we may add it to the Elm Shakespeare Something To Read List! We also welcome you to contact us if you find a mistake on our webpage so we may fix it!