From Ben Kingsley, James Earl Jones, Jane Smiley, Margaret Drabble, Camille Paglia, Julie Taymor, and many others of his heirs onstage and on the page—37 essays about why we still love Shakespeare. Performers and creative writers are Shakespeare’s most direct inheritors today—the ones who engage with his work as a living legacy to be performed, adapted, responded to, or interacted with, and not only to be read or dissected by scholars. Editor Susannah Carson has invited a wide range of people in these lines of work (and a few notable scholars as well) to reflect on why Shakespeare is such a vital part of our culture or more specifically on their own engagement with the Bard. Essays include Julie Taymor on turning Prospero into Prospera, Camille Paglia on teaching Shakespeare to actors, F. Murray Abraham on gaining an audience’s sympathy for Shylock, Germaine Greer on the Bard’s home life, and Jane Smiley on transposing King Lear to Iowa in A Thousand Acres.
Read the first chapter here: http://ow.ly/kfbxs