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

Contemporary performance is a particularly stimulating area for the study of how Shakespeare and particular cultural contexts interact with and transform each other. 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, recasting the contemporary instead as the site of tragedy and crisis in a Europe fragmented by years of economic austerity, political divisions around Brexit and ecological vacillation, and an anxious, refashioning of global relations between North and South.