Shakespeare, Dissent and the Cold War

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-x

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Alfred Thomas

   Pages 1-25

3. Culture and Dissent in Shakespeare’s England and Cold War Europe

   • Alfred Thomas

   Pages 26-57

4. ‘The Heart of My Mystery”: The Hidden Language of Dissent in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Grigori Kozintsev’s Film Gamlet

   • Alfred Thomas

   Pages 58-96

5. “A Dog’s Obeyed in Office”: Subverting Authority in Shakespeare’s King Lear and Grigori Kozintsev’s Korol’ Lir

   • Alfred Thomas

   Pages 97-140

6. “Faith, Here’s an Equivocator”: Language, Resistance, and the Limits of Authority in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Tom Stoppard’s Cahoots Macbeth

   • Alfred Thomas

   Pages 141-186

7. “In Fair Bohemia”: The Politics of Utopia in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and Ingeborg Bachmann’s “Bohemia Lies on the Sea”

   • Alfred Thomas

   Pages 187-216

8. Epilogue

   • Alfred Thomas

   Pages 217-224

9. Back Matter

   Pages 225-265

   PDF

Shakespeare, Dissent and the Cold War is the first book to read Shakespeare's drama through the lens of Cold War politics. The book uses the Cold War experience of dissenting artists in theatre and film to highlight the coded religio-political subtexts in Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth and The Winter's Tale.

• England
• Europe
• film
• Hamlet
• King Lear
• Macbeth
• theatre
• William Shakespeare

"Thomas has written a lively, intelligent, and interesting study of the politics of Shakespearean drama and its relationship to the literature and theater of Cold-War (and post-Cold-War) Europe. He examines Shakespeare's deliberate employment of religio-political codes that call attention to the persecution of English Catholics, the repressive practices of the English government and the socially disruptive effects of religious antagonisms. In analyzing Russian film versions of Hamlet and King Lear as indirect criticisms of the Soviet system, the Czech-English playwright Tom Stoppard's Cahoot's Macbeth in the context of post-1968 Czech political resistance, and Ingeborg Bachmann's poem 'Bohemia Lies on the Sea,' Thomas highlights the political potential of Shakespearean drama that can be translated into powerful political protest and analysis in changed (modern) circumstances." - Arthur Marotti, Wayne State University, USA

• University of Illinois, Chicago, USA

  Alfred Thomas

Alfred Thomas is Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, having previously taught at Rutgers, Harvard and Berkeley, USA. He is the author of seven books, including A Blessed Shore: England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare (2007) and Prague Palimpsest: Writing, Memory, and the City (2010).

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