French Essays on Shakespeare and His Contemporaries "What Would France With Us?"

The nineteen essays selected for this volume represent typical work concerning Shakespeare and related studies carried out in France over the past fifteen years. Interests run from textual history to drama and theater poetics, myth, and iconography. The work of directors staging Shakespeare in French, questions of time and space (including scenic space), the reception of music, the interpretation of songs in the theater, the monstrous as concept and metaphor, the changing tensions between language and reality, Homer or historiography as sources of Shakespeare, and the theme of war are other issues addressed. Some of the essays show the influence of structuralist poetics or poststructuralism; all rely on a thorough knowledge of Renaissance idiom and thought.