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Full-Text Articles in Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory

Fun With Palamon And Arcite: Rationale And Strategies For Teaching The Two Noble Kinsmen As The Culmination Of The Shakespearean Canon, Joanne E. Gates Jan 2022

Fun With Palamon And Arcite: Rationale And Strategies For Teaching The Two Noble Kinsmen As The Culmination Of The Shakespearean Canon, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

Hardly noticed in the reception of Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human several years ago was his hint that not The Tempest but The Two Noble Kinsmen makes an appropriate final accomplishment. On one level, the play is merely a stage adaptation of Chaucer's The Knight's Tale, with a rather crude couple of subplots thrown in, perhaps to please the commoners. In an undergraduate forum, I am less inclined to evaluate Fletcher's contribution as distinct from Shakespeare, but I do think the play important for how it is representative of many of the co-authored English Renaissance plays …


Shakespeare As Opera In English: Britten's Dream And Adès' The Tempest, Joanne E. Gates Jan 2022

Shakespeare As Opera In English: Britten's Dream And Adès' The Tempest, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

I assert that we learn Shakespeare better when we study him against the adaptation. Some of the adaptation choices made by opera composers and librettists-- and especially by stage designers in recent productions-- provoke us to critique a production concept for its innovative staging, forcing us to learn more about Shakespeare's original. The recent Metropolitan's The Tempest conveys the 2004 Thomas Adès Tempest as if an 18th century impresario Prospero had conjured or appropriated the contents of the Milan opera house to his island. Meredith Oakes's libretto simplifies much of Shakespearean language to efficient rhyming couplets, yet this opera eloquently …