Introduction: Theatre, war, memory, and culture / Irena R. Makaryk -- German Shakespeare, the Third Reich, and the war / Werner Habicht -- Shakespearean negotiations in the perpetrator society: German productions of The merchant of Venice during the second world war / Zeno Ackermann -- Shylock, Palestine, and the second world war / Mark Bayer -- 'Caesar's word against the world': Caesarism and the discourses of empire / Nancy Isenberg -- Shakespeare and censorship during the second World War: Othello in occupied Greece / Tina Krontiris -- 'In this hour of history: amidst these tragic events' - Polish Shakespeare during the second world war / Krystyna Kujawi¿ska Courtney -- Pasternak's Shakespeare in wartime Russia / Aleksei Semenenko -- Shakespeare as an icon of the enemy culture in wartime Japan, 1937-1945 / Ryuta Minami -- 'Warlike noises': jingoistic Hamlet during the Sino-Japanese wars / Alexander C.Y. Huang -- Shakespeare, Stratford, and the second world war / Simon Barker -- Rosalinds, violas, and other sentimental friendships: the Osiris players and Shakespeare, 1939-1945 / Peter Billingham -- Maurice Evans's G.I. Hamlet: analogy, authority, and adaptation / Anne Russell -- The war at 'home': representations of Canada and of the second world war in Star crossed / Marissa McHugh -- Shakespeare's merchant of Venice in Auschwitz / Tibor Egervari -- Appropriating Shakespeare in defeat: Hamlet and the contemporary Polish vision of war / Katarzyna Kwapisz Williams -- Appendix: List of productions.
Summary:
"Shakespeare's works occupy a prismatic and complex position in world culture: they straddle both the high and the low, the national and the foreign, literature and theatre. The Second World War presents a fascinating case study of this phenomenon: most, if not all, of its combatants have laid claim to Shakespeare and have called upon his work to convey their society's self-image. In wartime, such claims frequently brought to the fore a crisis of cultural identity and of competing ownership of this 'universal' author. Despite this, the role of Shakespeare during the Second World War has not yet been examined or documented in any depth. Shakespeare and the Second World War provides the first sustained international, collaborative incursion into this terrain. The essays demonstrate how the wide variety of ways in which Shakespeare has been recycled, reviewed, and reinterpreted from 1939-1945 are both illuminated by and continue to illuminate the War today."--pub. desc.
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