Search results for ""Author Graham Holderness""

Almost everything of interest in Anglo-Saxon history is recorded in the poetry of the period: the historical and political, moral and ethical, theological and ecclesiastical, military and constitutional motives and preoccupations of that past culture are there to be read at the level of individual perception and personal experience. In this study Graham Holderness brings these Old English texts and the culture they embody within the reach of the general reader by providing powerful new translations of heroic, elegiac, religious and love verses, translations which span the corpus from Beowulf to The Wife’s Lament and bridge the gap between the unfamiliar language of their original composition and the modern English in which they are subsequently discussed and lucidly explained. As a general introduction to the subject this book opens up the language, literature and life of Anglo-Saxon England to the non-specialist, ending with a line by line, sample translation and detailed annotation as an impetus to further study.

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William Shakespeare stills stands head and shoulders above any other author in the English language, a position that is unlikely ever to change. Yet it is often said that we know very little about him - and that applies as much to what he believed as it does to the rest of his biography. Or does it? In this authoritative new study, Graham Holderness takes us through the context of Shakespeare's life, times of religious and political turmoil, and looks at what we do know of Shakespeare the Anglican. But then he goes beyond that, and mines the plays themselves, not just for the words of the characters, but for the concepts, themes and language which Shakespeare was himself steeped in - the language of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. Considering particularly such plays as Richard ll, Henry V, The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, Hamlet, Othello, The Tempest and The Winter's Tale, Holderness shows how the ideas of Catholicism come up against those of Luther and Calvin; how Christianity was woven deep into Shakespeare's psyche, and how he brought it again and again to his art.

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Shakespeare Recycled is a new, revised edition of Graham Holderness' Shakespeare's History, first published in 1985. That influential and widely admired book has now been thoroughly revised, with new sections on theoretical developments such as new historicism, deconstruction, feminism and postmodernism, which bear on the analysis of history and the interpretation of historical drama. Shakespeare Recycled, the only full-length cultural materialist treatment of Shakespeare's second tetralogy, questions the tendency of deconstruction and postmodernism to eliminate altogether the category of history from the dramatic text, displacing it to an eternal present of provisional re-readings. By means of an intensive theoretical investigation of Tudor historiography, Shakespeare Recycled defines the historiographical contexts of the plays' original production and their status as performance art, and identifies within their formal strategies and uses of genre a distinctive form of historiographical writing. Contrary to new historicist readings of the plays, which see them negatively as endorsing forms of ideological dominence, Shakespeare Recycled argues, in detailed readings of Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V, that the plays can be seen affirmatively, as positive acts of historiographical reconstruction, capable of registering and offering resistance to forms of ideological dominance.

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Who was the real architect of the Gunpowder Plot? Who was the first person to wear a Guy Fawkes mask? Why was Shakespeare's Dark Lady dark? These and many other questions are answered in Graham Holderness's new novel, which combines historical fiction, psychological mystery and supernatural thriller in a highly original and imaginative re-telling of the Gunpowder Plot. It is 1604. The Gunpowder Plotters are tunnelling under the palace of Westminster, and confront an immovable obstacle. Guy Fawkes travels to Europe to fetch help, and brings back more than he bargained for. Who is the mysterious Dark Lady? Who is the man in the mask? Why is London over-run by a plague of vampires, and who is going to defeat them? From a Westminster vault to a Transylvanian mine, from the crypt of Lambeth Palace to the under-stage of the Globe theatre, Black and Deep Desires takes the reader on a tour of historical, psychological and mythical underworlds, delving deep into some of history's unexplored corridors, into the secret thoughts of Catholic terrorists, and into the dark wellsprings of Shakespeare's poetry. In Black and Deep Desires Graham Holderness combines the expertise of an internationally-recognised Shakespeare scholar, the narrative flair of his 2001 novel The Prince of Denmark, and the poetic sensibility that won his verse collection Craeft a Poetry Book Society award.

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This highly original new book by a leading Shakespeare expert and cultural critic argues controversially that the ''samurai Shakespeare'' of the Japanese cinematic and theatrical masterpiece-makers Akira Kurosawa and Yukio Ninagawa represents the greatest achievement of Japanese Shakespeare reproduction. Holderness argues that ''samurai Shakespeare'' is both consistent with our own western engagement with Japan, and true to the spirit of Japanese culture. / Shakespeare was an exact contemporary of Tokugawa Ieyasu. Yet when he was first imported into Japan, in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries, the plays were performed in contemporary dress, not in the conventional British historical styles, and received as the modern counterpart of Ibsen and Shaw, Gorky and Chekhov. / Today in Japan the Edo past is lovingly preserved, reproduced and displayed. Almost 30 million international tourists enter Japan each year to visit the old capitals of Kyoto and Nara, drawn by the magic of E

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Powerful and disturbing, this version of the Hamlet story is set in a modern Middle Eastern state whose leader has just died, to be replaced by his brother, a ruthless, Westernized dictator who juggles petro-dollars, arms dealers, and democratic slogans in an attempt to quell the rising tides of Islamic extremism. Presenting a composite of many Arab concerns that affect peoples from the Arabian Gulf to the Atlantic and beyond, it is a concrete and poetic formulation of an Arab viewpoint, combining aspects of the Arab oral-poetry tradition with the rhetoric of modern-day politics. It is Hamlet as pure, dangerous politics.

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This book is part of a controversial new series that raises fundamental questions about the authenticity of Shakespeare's texts as we know them today. In a radical departure from existing series, it presents the earliest known editions of Shakespeare's playsówhich differ substantially from the present versionsóand argues that these are the most authentic we have. The editors present the text in a form as close as possible to its first publication. It includes an introduction, notes and an appendix containing sample facsimile pages from the original printed texts. Throughout, the emphasis of the critical apparatus is on the theoretical and historical significance of the text and its contextual relationships with theatre, history and cultural politics. Published in 1594 under the title The Taming of a Shrew, this play has always been regarded as an earlier version by another dramatist, or as a corrupt "memorial reconstruction" of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Yet the version accepted as Shakespeare's was not published until the First Folio of 1623. The text of A Shrew differs from that of The Shrew. It contains, for example, a complete theatrical "framing" device in the form of the Lord's practical joke on Christopher Sly, where the "Shakespearean" text drops Sly and the framing device early in the play. From the beginning of this century the "non-Shakespearean" text has been used in theatrical practice to complete the authorized but insufficient "Shakespearean" play. This new edition makes The Taming of a Shrew available in full, not as a source or analogue or memorial reconstruction of a Shakespearean original, but in its own right as a brilliantly inventive popular Elizabethan play.

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