Avant-Garde Hamlet

Reviews / Votes

There is certainly much to welcome in this new study of Hamlet's afterlives.... White writes with real felicity, and he has done us all a service in providing so much useful information so intriguingly packaged.... This is a hugely worthwhile and abundantly provocative book. * Renaissance Quarterly * Revolution, rebellion, absurdism, the right to mourn: these are all expressions of Shakespeare's Hamlet. But in R.S. White's Avant -Garde Hamlet, the author doesn't posit these as expository universal qualities: rather they are driving energies, powering productions in a diversity of ways that makes each production real, vital, experimental, worth staging for more than the power of the beautiful meditations therein. A recent review of The Bell Shakespeare's Hamlet suggested: 'When companies approach Shakespeare without a clearly defined vision or a genuinely contemporary take on the text, it makes the very notion of the Bard's 'universal truths' look increasingly tenuous.' R.S. White knows this, and he infuses his understanding of it into the very architecture, the living blood-flow, of Avant Garde Hamlet. In his hands, Hamlet is ever-now, ever-new. -- Philippa Kelly, Author of "The King and I," "Shakespeare Now!" Series White not only makes a convincing case that in many countries and many times productions of Hamlet have served as an expression of artistic and political dissent, he offers a rich and rewarding exploration of why that might be the case. * Shakespeare Bulletin * This book galvanizes the field with the strength of the artistic disruptions spawned by Hamlet. White offers an absorbing insight into why the play 'never seems to lose its radical edge' (p. 186) and presents us with a
comprehensive overview of an ever-adaptable play with global appeal. * Parergon * White's book is a fascinating addition to scholarship on Shakespeare and Shakespearean adapta-tions that invites and challenges its readers to (re-)examine this familiar work, or set of works, from new and different perspectives. * Canadian Review of Comparative Literature *