Shakespeare's History Plays: Performance, Translation and Adaptation in Britain and Abroad

Concentrating on the play texts as well as their productions, translations and adaptations, this study addresses a range of attitudes to Shakespeare's English history plays in Britain and abroad from the early seventeenth century to the present day. It explores the multiple points of intersection between the English history they recount, and the experience of British and other national cultures. By presenting the British and foreign Shakespeare traditions together, the volume promotes a more finely integrated world Shakespeare.

Ton Hoenselaars is Associate Professor in the English Department at Utrecht University. He is the author of Images of Englishmen and Foreigners in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (1992). He is also editor and co-editor of a number of collections including Shakespeare's Italy (1993, revised edition 1997), Reclamations of Shakespeare (1994), and 400 Years of Shakespeare in Europe (2003).

Dennis Kennedy's books include The Spectator and the Spectacle: Audiences in Modernity and Postmodernity, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance, Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of Twentieth-Century Performance, Foreign Shakespeare, and Granville Barker and the Dream of Theatre. Shakespeare in Asia: Contemporary Performance is due late 2009 (edited with Yong Li Lan). He has twice been a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities in the USA, twice won the Freedley Award for theatre history, received the Chancellor's Distinguished Research Award at the University of Pittsburgh, the Berkeley Fellowship at Trinity College Dublin, and was elected to the Royal Irish Academy and Academia Europaea. His own plays have been performed in New York, London, and many other places, and he has frequently worked as a dramaturg and director in professional theatres.