Imagining Shakespeare [Hardcover]

Stephen Orgel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 6, 2003 | ISBN-10: 1403911770 | ISBN-13: 978-1403911773 | Edition: First Edition

In this beautifully illustrated book, one of the foremost Shakespeareans of our time explores the ways in which Shakespeare has been imagined from his time to ours. In a penetrating series of interpretations, Stephen Orgel explores the ironies and paradoxes that have characterized the reconstruction of Shakespeare's texts, his image, the staging and illustration of his plays over the past four centuries, as he is perennially reinvented for new cultural ends. Drawing on performance history, textual history, and the visual arts (including a fascinating chapter on portraiture), Imagining Shakespeare displays throughout the cultural versatility, elegance, lucidity, and wit which have become the hallmarks of Orgel's style.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This book would repay, with dividends, its careful study...highly recommended..."-Larry Schwartz, Library Journal (starred review)
"Imagining Shakespeare shows Orgel at his best... No one working in the field could fail to take notice of this book. No one who reads it could fail to be, in almost equal measure, instructed and delighted." -- David Kastan, Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University

About the Author

Stephen Orgel is the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Humanities at Stanford University.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; First Edition edition (August 6, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1403911770
• ISBN-13: 978-1403911773
• Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 7 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,233,231 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars superb scholarship, July 8, 2005

By 

Clean Turtle (SF Bay Area) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Imagining Shakespeare (Hardcover)

Another reviewer complains about this book's exquisite illustrations. I'd like to note that including them is not a frivolous choice, but a decision made because our images of Shakespeare often stem from exactly that -- images. Orgel is one of the top Shakespearean scholars around, and he does an incredible job outlining the Shakespeare we think we know, and how this imagined Shakespeare came to be known. Unlike many works on Shakespeare, Orgel bases his scholarship on the historical record, including physical artifacts such as the actual folios, and sculptures, and paintings.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Posing for Shakespeare, September 15, 2008

By 

M. Fetler (Sacramento, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Imagining Shakespeare (Hardcover)

John Singer Sargent's famous painting of Lady Macbeth is a good choice for the cover of "Imagining Shakespeare," even though it shows a scene that never occurs in the play's script. The portrait conveys an intensely sensual image of power. She stands alone, eyes fixed, hair flaming red, upraised hands poised to lower a bejeweled crown on her head. Belts of gold encircle a sinuous gown that sparkles with green and blue scales. The image evokes her words to Macbeth: "look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under't."

Sir Henry Irving's praised 1888 production starring Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth inspired Sargent's painting. Critic Oscar Wilde, writing about the banquet scene where Macbeth sees the ghost of murdered Duncan, poked fun: "Judging from the banquet, Lady Macbeth seems an economical houskeeper ... but she takes care to do all her own shopping in Byzantium." Sargent's medieval queen does look more like Antony's Cleopatra - "serpent of old Nile" - than ancient Scottish royalty. Historical inconsistency, says Orgel, far from being a mistake, is essential to the play. It points out the characters' relationships to one another and to the audience. Wilde's satire is wonderful, but his comment ignores the costume's purpose in showing Lady Macbeth's nature.

The book's many illustrations make clear Orgel's view that since Shakespeare first sharpened a quill, the plays have been "imagined" in diverse ways. (Compare, for example Kenneth Branagh's lavishly detailed "Hamlet," with Richard Burton's stripped bare production. Both are excellent.) Orgel notes that Shakespeare wrote, rewrote and co-wrote for the stage, not for publication. Despite the strenuous efforts of a small army of scholars, the idea of a single, true Shakespeare script remains an illusion.

Drama, most flexible of the fine arts, depends on scenery, dialogue editing, delivery of lines, movement, costumes, props, and background sounds or music - all of which define a certain vision and can vary significantly from one time to the next. Directors, actors, critics, and the audience have always worked together to create each production. Successful playwrights have many helpers.

Orgel notes that Shakespeare shaped history as much, or more, than he drew from it. Take Macbeth, for example: In truth, Duncan was the usurper, Macbeth a popular hero, and Lady Macbeth the legitimate heir to the throne. Historical fact little hindered Shakespeare's creativity, as the sons and daughters of England's wars of the roses might well testify were they now alive.

The pleasures of love and dangers of jealousy permeate the three plays that Orgel analyzes in depth: "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "The Winter's Tale," and "The Merchant of Venice." Sexual language, imagery and situations abound in these plays, in most of Shakespeare's other plays, and were doubtless popular with Elizabethan audiences. Four hundred years have obscured Shakespeare's language enough that the plays now sit unmolested in most school and public libraries.

School productions of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," a play that obsesses on the idea of rampant lust, somehow shine with child-like innocence. Orgel's reviews of the stage-history of these plays show that similarly desexed versions of Shakespeare were common, depending on the tastes and values of the time.

Renewed awareness of sexual language in the plays arose with the 1947 publication of Partridge's, "Shakespeare's Bawdy." Orgel draws on a cryptic reference to the artist Giulio Romano in "The Winter's Tale," in order to provide a visual update to Partridge. Romano was a prominent Italian painter and architect who created a scandalous album of sexual poses known as "I Modi." The original erotic art was suppressed by Papal authority, but survives through copies made by others.

The "I Modi" engravings shown in this book buck the tradition of dry-as-dust studies of Shakespeare. The images are of Shakespeare's time and inspired his writing as much as did Holinshed's "Chronicles." They might now still be "banned in Boston," but are tame by today's standards. If Will Shakespeare was a masterful interpreter of the human heart, the images remind us that for him the human heart is deeply rooted in a human body.

Orgel's elegant book guides readers over well-trodden paths of Shakespeare studies and explores a few less well-traveled byways. More than most such books, it entertains and its illustrations concisely show the reader what many other books only describe in volumes of dusty words.

2 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars "the beautifully illustrated book", June 16, 2005

By 

mom108 (Nevada City, CA. USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Imagining Shakespeare (Hardcover)

I must say that this book does has a lot of pictures in it showing the aspects of Shakespear's world and plays. They are very good and intertaining but I must warn you that the book has a whole chapter with illustrations (in detail)of people having sex. The book is probably very good if you like reading text books, and don't mind these pictures, but I was just too grossed out. If you are teaching Lit in college and/or studying Shakespeare, this is probably the book that you should use, but you should flip through the book first (i.e: library, book store) to see if that is what you want on your book shelves.