In this issue of The Shakespearean International Yearbook, the special section surveys various means of 'Updating Shakespeare'. The section treats a variety of attempts and strategies, including by artists in Japan, China and Brazil, to adapt Shakespeare's works into local and present circumstances. The guest editor for the section is Tetsuo Kishi, Professor Emeritus in English at the University of Kyoto, co-author of Shakespeare in Japan (2006).

The Shakespearean International Yearbook continues to provide an annual survey of important issues and developments in contemporary Shakespeare studies. Contributors to this issue come from the US and the UK, Poland, Japan and Brazil. In addition to the section on 'Updating', essays in this volume treat Shakespeare's poems, his narrative strategies, his relation to ideas such as tolerance and representation, and the afterlives of his work in writers such as Gay, Slowacki and Becket, and in theatrical relics.

Contents: Special Section: Updating Shakespeare: Introduction, Tetsuo Kishi; Dramaturgy: beyond the presentism/historicism dichotomy, Ros King; Site-specific Hamlets and reconfigured localities: Jiang'an, Singapore, Elsinor, Alexander C.Y. Huang; Family ties over romantic love: appropriations of Romeo and Juliet in Northeastern Brazil, José Roberto O'Shea; Tadashi Suzuki directs King Lear – again, Tetsuo Kishi. Poems: Thats amores! Latin love and lovesickness in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, Lisa S. Starks; Semper eadem: the paradox of constancie in Shakespeare's Phoenix and the Turtle, Kristen Olson. Narrative Designs: Tragedy in retrospect: Hamlet's narrative infrastructure, Raphael Falco; The rape of Marina, Simon Palfrey. Social Works: Prenuptial rituals and bonding in Shakespeare and elsewhere, Richard Levin; Tolerance in Shakespeare; an introduction, B.J. Sokol. After Shakespeare: Idols in Hobbes, Shakespeare and Gay, Jonathan Lamb; Politics of theatre vs. politics on (non)state: Shakespeare in the repertoire of Polish 19th-century theatres, Marta Gibinska; Useful and fancy articles: relics of the 19th-century stage, Elizabeth Williamson; 'What wretches feel': Lear, Edgar, and Samuel Beckett's Worstward Ho, Andrew Fitzsimons; Bibliography; Index.

About the Editor: Graham Bradshaw is Professor in the Faculty of Literature at Chuo University, Japan. Tom Bishop is Professor of English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Tetsuo Kishi is Professor Emeritus at Kyoto University, Japan.

Extracts from this title are available to view:

Full contents list

Introduction

Index