Comrade Shakespeare – Binge the Bard!

It is a widespread cliché of contemporary theater: the classics are released on stage without the poor viewer being informed in any case where the individual parts actually belong. Staging for staging is further screwed on it. This has been going so long that hardly anyone may remember the original state. And the common thing about clichés like this is the following: they are rare completely freely.

The literary scholar Elisabeth Bronfen is performing a completely different kind of deconstruction than we are used to by theaters in her recently published book “Shakespeare and his serial motifs”. This is because Bronfen knows the construction plan – that means: the works of the comrade Shakespeare – know the best. And after she has skilfully taken everything apart, she even put it together with a lot of verve. What remains is an astonished, enlightened readership.

Bronfen encounters a “repetition as a dramaturgical principle”. According to her unconventional thesis, Shakespeare repeatedly write his pieces, devoting itself to one motif a motif, but vary it and look at it from different perspectives.

As “the definitive book about Shakespeare”, the publisher advertises the publication somewhat market. The author is not concerned with anything definitive. With her reading, she shows an example of connections in the Shakespeares plant and makes its topicality understandable. The motifs viewed by it are suggestions that their reading process serves as a model that their work is not complete with the book, as she says.

Genosse Shakespeare

As you like it: Every two weeks, Erik Zielke writes about great tragedies, political lubricating theater and the fools from the past and present. He finds inspiration from his comrade from Stratford-Upon-Avon.

You can find all columns here.

So at the beginning she looks at the Shakespeare dream and ghost worlds- and beats arches from the dream-decorated carnival sesks (and in the English original title-giving) “twelfth night” in “What you want” for the “summer night dream”, from there to the love dream in “Romeo and Julia” and further to the darkly prophetic dream in “Othello”, with side views on “Julius Caesar” and “The storm”, finally to the hallucinating Macbeth and ghostly appearances in “Richard III.” And “Hamlet”. You prefer to immediately take the Shakespeare at hand.

Bronfen had already referred to the afterlife of the comrade Shakespeare in Hollywood and agreed in parallels between “Macbeth” and the political television series “House of Cards”, between the Shakespeare historical dramas and “The Wire”. Your latest book is not just an instructive, albeit prerequisite, but an invitation to devote yourself to Shakespeare as you would do with a series, perhaps the folk theater of our day: by banging it!

Elisabeth Bronfen: Shakespeare and his serial motifs. S. Fischer, 400 pages, born, € 29.