Shakespeare and the Challenge of the Contemporary: Performance, Politics and Aesthetics

Contemporary performance is a particularly stimulating area for the study of how Shakespeare is produced and received in different cultural contexts. Francesca Clare Rayner’s original and thought-provoking book highlights the diversity and experimentalism of contemporary performance practices through a focus on unexplored performances in Portugal. This book references key debates within contemporary performance studies on intermediality, globalization and political participation and analyses their particular configurations within the Portuguese context. These case studies represent clear alternatives to the market-driven view of the contemporary as the continual reproduction of the new and the topical for global consumers. Instead, they recast the contemporary as a site of disempowerment, crisis and erasure in a Europe fragmented by economic austerity, political divisions around Brexit, ecological vacillation and an anxious refashioning of global relations between North and South.

Francesca Rayner is Assistant Professor at the University of Minho, Portugal. Her research centres on the cultural politics of performance, with a particular interest in the performance of Shakespeare in Portugal. She has published widely on Shakespeare and performance in national and international journals and contributed chapters to several volumes on Shakespeare and performance.