Living with Shakespeare Essays by Writers, Actors, and Directors

Why Shakespeare? What explains our continued fascination with his poems and plays? In Living with Shakespeare, Susannah Carson invites forty actors, directors, scholars, and writers to reflect on why his work is still such a vital part of our culture.

We hear from James Earl Jones on reclaiming Othello as a tragic hero, Julie Taymor on turning Prospero into Prospera, Camille Paglia on teaching the plays to actors, F. Murray Abraham on gaining an audience’s sympathy for Shylock, Sir Ben Kingsley on communicating Shakespeare’s ideas through performance, Germaine Greer on the playwright’s home life, Dame Harriet Walter on the complexity of his heroines, Brian Cox on social conflict in his time and ours, Jane Smiley on transposing King Lear to Iowa in A Thousand Acres, and Sir Antony Sher on feeling at home in Shakespeare’s language. Together these essays provide a fresh appreciation of Shakespeare’s works as a living legacy to be read, seen, performed, adapted, revised, wrestled with, and embraced by creative professionals and lay enthusiasts alike.

F. Murray Abraham ● Isabel Allende ● Cicely Berry ● Eve Best ● Eleanor Brown ● Stanley Cavell ● Karin Coonrod ● Brian Cox ● Peter David ● Margaret Drabble ● Dominic Dromgoole ● David Farr ● Fiasco Theater ● Ralph Fiennes ● Angus Fletcher ● James Franco ● Alan Gordon ● Germaine Greer ● Barry John ● James Earl Jones ● Sir Ben Kingsley ● Maxine Hong Kingston ● Rory Kinnear ● J. D. McClatchy ● Conor McCreery ● Tobias Menzies ● Joyce Carol Oates ● Camille Paglia ● James Prosek ● Richard Scholar ● Sir Antony Sher ● Jane Smiley ● Matt Sturges ● Julie Taymor ● Eamonn Walker ● Dame Harriet Walter ● Bill Willingham ● Jess Winfield

Susannah Carson is an American author, editor, and academic. She received her Ph.D. from Yale, after earning graduate degrees at Paris III, La Sorbonne-Nouvelle and Lyon II, L’Université des Lumières. Her first edited volume of literary essays was A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Authors on Why We Read Jane Austen. Her work has appeared in scholarly publications, newspapers, and magazines.

Contents
 
Foreword: Who Else Is There? by Harold Bloom
Introduction: The Tygers Hart by Susannah Carson
 
Bill Willingham, A Little Monkey Business
Antony Sher, Speaking Shakespeare
Camille Paglia, Teaching Shakespeare to Actors
Ben Kingsley, The Architecture of Shakespeare’s Ideas
Cicely Berry, King Lear in Retrospect
Tobias Menzies, Method and Madness
Rory Kinnear, Character and Conundrum
Matt Sturges, I Know a Hawk from a Handsaw . . .
James Earl Jones, The Sun God
Eamonn Walker, Othello in Love
Barry John, Othello: A Play in Black and White
Jess Winfield, Re-revising Shakespeare
Brian Cox, “I Say it is the Moon”
Richard Scholar, Trial By Theatre, or, Free-Thinking in Julius Caesar
Stanley Cavell, Saying in The Merchant of Venice
F. Murray Abraham, Searching for Shylock
Fiasco Theatre Company, Boldness Be My Friend
Karin Coonrod, Killing Shakespeare and Making My Play
Dominic Dromgoole, Playing Shakespeare at the Globe
Angus Fletcher, Tolstoy and the Shakespearean Gesture
J. D. McClatchy, The Red Scarf
Germaine Greer, Spring Imagery in Warwickshire
James Prosek, What’s in a Name? Or, Unnamed in the Forest
David Farr, The Sea Change
Alan Gordon, Looking for Illyria
Eleanor Brown, Shakespeare’s Siblings
Eve Best, “A Star Danced”
Harriet Walter, Two Loves, or the Eternal Triangle
Jane Smiley, Odd Man Out
Margaret Drabble, The Living Drama
Joyce Carol Oates, The Tragedy of the Imagination in Anthony and Cleopatra
Maxine Hong Kingston, War and Love
Peter David, On the Terrible and Unexpected Fate of the Star-Crossed Lovers
Conor McCreery, Shakespeare and Four-Colour Magic
Julie Taymor, Rough Magic
James Franco, My Own Private River
Isabel Allende, Enamoured with Shakespeare
 
Index of Plays and Characters
Permission Acknowledgments