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Still Shakespeare and the Photography of Performance
Sally Barnden 
Swansea University Author:
Sally Barnden
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DOI (Published version): 10.1017/9781108768337
Abstract
Still Shakespeare is the first book-length study of the relationship between Shakespeare’s works and photography. It examines the place of photography in the reception of the Shakespeare canon since the invention of the camera, looking at how photographic images have shaped perceptions of historicit...
| ISBN: | 9781108487931 9781108768337 |
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| Published: |
Cambridge
Cambridge University Press
2019
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| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa64322 |
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| Abstract: |
Still Shakespeare is the first book-length study of the relationship between Shakespeare’s works and photography. It examines the place of photography in the reception of the Shakespeare canon since the invention of the camera, looking at how photographic images have shaped perceptions of historicity, of performance, and of Shakespearean character, and at how their dissemination has participated in the diffusion of notions of Shakespearean authority. It suggests that photography has conditioned the reception of Shakespeare’s works in two key ways. Firstly, as a form of performance documentation, photographs shape the way individual performances are remembered and their positioning in relation to traditional and iconoclastic interpretations of the text. Secondly, photographs are vehicles of Shakespearean iconography (as well as interventions in that iconography as inherited from painting and illustration): they encourage particular compositions and interpretations. In its attention to both theatrical and staged (art) photographs, Still Shakespeare demonstrates the role of photography in fixing and unfixing Shakespearean authority – that is, as a contributor to the calcification of Shakespearean quotation, advertising and iconography, and as a cause of the attrition of the relationship between image and text whereby images are taken out of context and attached to other narratives. |
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| Keywords: |
Shakespeare, performance, photography, liveness, archives |
| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |