scholarly journals Shakespearean Drama in Miloš Pietor›S Work: Between Prologue and Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-40
Author(s):  
Ján Sládeček
Keyword(s):  
Professional Life ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Love's Labour's Lost

Abstract William Shakespeare’s work has a very specific place in Miloš Pietor’s professional biography: it starts at the beginning of the artist’s creative period and then again at the end of his professional life. The study is devoted to this part of the director’s work. It analyzes the plays Merry Wives of Windsor (P. Jilemnický Theatre, 1963), Hamlet (Nová scéna Theatre 1974), comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost) (Nová scéna Theatre 1976) and presents the directorial and dramaturgical concept of Pietor’s first production after November 1989, The Merchant of Venice (1991). His planned premiere at the Slovak National Theatre (Slovenské národné divadlo) did not take place; the work was cancelled due to the director’s tragic death.

Shylock in Buchenwald

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-174
Author(s):  
Gad Kaynar-Kissinger
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
World War ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Second World

Can The Merchant of Venice be performed in Germany after the Holocaust, and if so, how? Is the claim that the play is a touchstone for German-Jewish relations, with a philosemitic tradition – and therefore eligible to be performed today – verifiable? The article begins by briefly surveying this tradition from the Jewish emancipation in the mid-eighteenth century, which, with a few relapses, continued – especially in productions directed by Jews and/or with Jewish actors in the role of Shylock – until the rise of the Nazi regime, to be resumed after the Second World War. The main part analyses a test case, staged by the Israeli director Hanan Snir at the Weimar National Theatre (1995), and intended rhetorically to avenge the Holocaust on the German audience: Merchant as a viciously antisemitic play-within-a-play, directed by SS personnel in the nearby Buchenwald concentration camp with eventually murdered Jewish inmates compelled to play the Jewish parts.

Stage Props and Shakespeare’s Comedies

2018 ◽  
pp. 376-394
Author(s):  
Lina Perkins Wilder
Keyword(s):  
Human Subject ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Human Object ◽  
Love's Labour's Lost ◽  
Stage Properties ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Broad Continuum ◽  
Stage Props

While they might seem like ‘toys’ or ‘trifles’, stage properties in Shakespeare’s comedies subtly unsettle the relationship between human subject and non-human object. Even such seemingly innocuous comedic props as letters (in Two Gentlemen of Verona and Love’s Labour’s Lost) and rings (in The Merchant of Venice) can be given incommensurate weight by the comic plot. Drawing on both semiotic and phenomenological accounts of stage props as well as the synthesis of these approaches in the work of Erika Lin and Andrew Sofer, this essay explores the broad continuum between the comically disruptive misdirected letter and absent, irreplaceable objects like Shylock’s turquoise ring and demonstrates just how rigorously Shakespeare’s comic props test our investment in comedic narrative and the comic resolution.

The Merchants and the Jew of Venice: Wealth’s Communion and an Intruder

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. L. Barber
Keyword(s):  
Direct Influence ◽  
Large Structure ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Symbolic Action ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Social ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Love's Labour's Lost ◽  
Organic Combination

This chapter examines Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. This play as a whole is not shaped by festivity in the relatively direct way as in Love's Labour's Lost and A Midsummer Night's Dream. The play's large structure is developed from traditions which are properly theatrical; it is not a theatrical adaptation of a social ritual. And yet analogies to social occasions and rituals prove to be useful in understanding the symbolic action. The chapter pursues such analogies without suggesting, in most cases, that there is a direct influence from the social to the theatrical form. Shakespeare here is working with autonomous mastery, developing a style of comedy that makes a festive form for feeling and awareness out of all the theatrical elements, scene, speech, story, gesture, role which his astonishing art brought into organic combination.

5. Shakespeare and comic form

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stanley Wells
Keyword(s):  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Much Ado About Nothing ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Love's Labour's Lost

Nearly half of Shakespeare’s plays, extending throughout his career, are written in comic form though they play a wide range of variations on it. ‘Shakespeare and comic form’ describes the five earliest as the lightest in tone, but in the five that follow, Shakespeare introduces an antagonist who must be expelled before the play can end happily. The later comedies were written for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The plays considered are The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night.

Shylock in Buchenwald

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-174
Author(s):  
Gad Kaynar-Kissinger
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
World War ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Second World

Abstract Can The Merchant of Venice be performed in Germany after the Holocaust, and if so, how? Is the claim that the play is a touchstone for German-Jewish relations, with a philosemitic tradition – and therefore eligible to be performed today – verifiable? The article begins by briefly surveying this tradition from the Jewish emancipation in the mideighteenth century, which, with a few relapses, continued – especially in productions directed by Jews and/or with Jewish actors in the role of Shylock – until the rise of the Nazi regime, to be resumed after the Second World War. The main part analyses a test case, staged by the Israeli director Hanan Snir at the Weimar National Theatre (1995), and intended rhetorically to avenge the Holocaust on the German audience: Merchant as a viciously antisemitic play with in a play, directed by SS personnel in the nearby Buchenwald concentration camp with eventually murdered Jewish inmates compelled to play the Jewish parts.

The Merchant of Venice

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Tom Lockwood
Keyword(s):  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice

Maritime Fantasies and Gender Space in Three Shakespearean Comedies

2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-37
Author(s):  
Wai Fong Cheang
Keyword(s):  
Female Characters ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Gender Space ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Gender And Space

Abstract Laden with sea images, Shakespeare‘s plays dramatise the maritime fantasies of his time. This paper discusses the representation of maritime elements in Twelfth Night, The Tempest and The Merchant of Venice by relating them to gender and space issues. It focuses on Shakespeare‘s creation of maritime space as space of liberty for his female characters.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document