Transforming Shakespeare: Contemorary Women's Re-visions in Literature and Performance - Tapa dura

A large number of women writers, directors, and performers have created works that talk back to Shakespeare, or to more earlier and more traditional interpretations of his plays, in the late 20th-century. For example, Jane Smiley's "A Thousand Acres", which rewrites "King Lear", and Marina Warner's "Indigo", which rewrites "The Tempest", protest biases against women and colonialist attitudes that Shakespeare's plays have come to symbolize. In this collection, feminist critics, and Jane Smiley herself, explore a range of such re-writings, as well as recent Shakespearean performances directed by women. The essays examine how these works use rewritings of Shakespeare to deal with gender, race, sexuality, colonialism, environmentalism, class, and nationalism, as well as with the general question of what is our relation to cultural tradition at the start of the new millennium.

MARIANNE NOVY is Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of Love's Argument: Gender Relations in Shakespeare.