Book Series IKON Studies, vol. 2

Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama

Challenges of Visualization and Adaptation in Old and New Media

Rowland Wymer (ed)

  • Pages: approx. 220 p.
  • Size:170 x 240 mm
  • Illustrations:34 b/w, 51 col.
  • Language(s):English
  • Publication Year:2026


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This volume of essays examines creative and visually interesting responses to the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in a range of media (both old and new), including film, television, digital theatre, animation, online games, graphic art, and gallery installations.

Subject(s)
BIO

Rowland Wymer is Emeritus Professor of English at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK. His publications include Suicide and Despair in the Jacobean Drama (1986), Webster and Ford (1995), and Derek Jarman (2005), as well as a number of coedited collections of essays, including Neo-Historicism (2000), The Accession of James I: Historical and Cultural Consequences (2006), and J. G. Ballard: Visions and Revisions (2012). He edited The Witch of Edmonton for volume 3 (2017) of the Oxford edition of The Collected Works of John Ford. He is currently working on a book on science fiction and religion.

Summary

The plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries have been a powerful stimulus to artists and practitioners in a variety of media. Film and television adaptations of individual Shakespeare plays have a long and continuing history but they now exist alongside films with a much looser and more creative relation to their Shakespearean source, growing numbers of adaptations of plays by his contemporaries, new forms of digital theatre, and experimental art works and installations. The visual impact of the original performances was considerable but has been generally thought of as subordinate to the verbal. This relationship is reversed in most modern mediations of the plays, forcing a reconsideration of what it is in them that matters most to us and whether actual physical co-presence is important or not in recreating the full emotional experience which the plays offered their original audiences. The essays collected here have a broad range of reference from Aeschylus to Zoom Theatre and are lavishly illustrated with stills from film and theatre productions as well as original art works, generating new thoughts on the different possible relationships between image and text.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Rowland Wymer, Introduction

Film

Rowland Wymer, Syskonbädd 1782: The Swedish Adaptation of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore
Sam Hopkins and Lisa Hopkins, “Doomed to Be Damned?”: Shakespeare and the Reformation in Visconti’s The Damned
Magdalena Cieślak, “About a Boy”: Revisions of Masculinity in David Michôd’s The King
John J. Joughin, On Macbeth, Dark Media, and the Black Universe

Digital Theatre

Gemma Kate Allred, “A quick venue of wit”: The Domestic Aesthetic of Lockdown Productions of Love’s Labour’s Lost
Benjamin Broadribb, Speaking with Others’ Tongues: Creation Theatre’s Zoom-based Adaptations of The Duchess of Malfi and The Witch of Edmonton

Mixed Media (Ancient to Postmodern)

Yuki Nakamura, Eriniyes’ Justice in Ancient, Early Modern, and Modern Revenge Dramas
Attila Kiss, The Emblematic Logic of Representation in Titus Andronicus: The Peacham Drawing, Theatre, Film, and Television
Zita Turi, “Thinking to get a fame by fooleries”: Representations of the Foolish Scholar in the Early Modern Period and Jan Švankmajer’s Faust
Ivona Mišterová, Shakespeare Unbound: A Journey through Text Message Language in OMG Shakespeare! and Will Play

Art

Agnieszka Żukowska, “Counting Atomies”: Ben Rubin’s Artistic Experiments in Shakespeare’s Language”
Tibor Fabiny, Anamorphosis in the Graphic World of the Hungarian Artist István Orosz: How it Works in Shakespeare’s Romances?

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