Katherine Steele Brokaw’s research while affiliated with University of California, Merced and other places

This chapter details the methods and practices used to create productions for Shakespeare in Yosemite, an annual weekend of free, outdoor Shakespeare plays in Yosemite National Park. It first describes how Shakespeare in Yosemite’s performance and research are grounded in eco-dramaturgy and Practice as Research (PaR), and then explains the collaborative creative processes, performed adaptations, and evaluative methods for As You Like It (2019) and Love’s Labor’s Lost (2022). It ends by describing collaborative efforts to create community among eco-focused Shakespeareans around the world, including the EarthShakes Alliance, a global collective of Shakespeare organizations who pledge to center ecological concerns in their operations and programming.KeywordsShakespeare in performanceeco-theatrePractice as Researchenvironmental justicetheatre for social change As You Like It Love’s Labor’s Lost

This chapter focuses on twinned applied theatre projects: Public Works, a program of the Public Theatre in New York City, and Public Acts, at the National Theatre (NT) of Great Britain. It begins by demonstrating the centrality of Shakespeare and community-based theatre to the Public and the NT and other influential theatres in the UK and US. It then describes and analyzes the Public Works and Public Acts programs and the first two Public Acts shows, 2018’s Pericles and 2019’s As You Like It. The chapter proposes that these programs invite academics, critics, theatre-makers, and audiences to rethink what gets valued when it comes to twenty-first-century Shakespearean performance.KeywordsShakespeareApplied theatreCommunity-based theatreThe National Theatre of Great BritainThe Public Theatre (NYC)Joseph PappEmily Lim As You Like It Pericles

This chapter provides company histories of the Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company (LAWSC), founded by Lisa Wolpe in 1993, and of Take Wing and Soar (TWAS) and its Harlem Shakespeare Festival, founded by Debra Ann Byrd in 2001. It is a verbatim chapter, consisting almost entirely of quotations taken from interviews, news stories, and the occasional scholar. The histories of the L.A. Women’s Shakespeare Company and Take Wing and Soar are told in the words of those who built the companies. The chapter ends with these artists’ reflections on the legacies of these companies and of the women who founded them.KeywordsAll-female ShakespeareBlack ShakespeareFeminist theatreShakespeareHarlemGender and performanceLisa WolpeDebra Ann Byrd

This introductory chapter defines relevant terms and lays out several theories and methods central to the practice and study of community Shakespeare. Its first section defines ‘community’ before discussing categories of ‘community performance’; imbedded in this section are four small cases studies of community-based theatres in California, the UK and Eastern Europe, Maine, and the Bahamas. The chapter then turns to describing methods for studying community-based theatre: ethnography, Practice as Research, and applied theatre. It next elucidates the particular challenges and opportunities that Shakespeare, specifically, poses to community-based theatre companies and artists, focusing on issues of access, adaptation, and activism. The chapter concludes with summaries of the book’s four chapter-length case studies.KeywordsShakespearean performanceCommunity theatreCommunity-based theatreApplied theatrePractice as researchGrassroots ShakespearePerformative ethnography

This chapter describes the first-ever production of Hamlet in the Faroe Islands, a self-governing archipelago of the Kingdom of Denmark, located between Iceland, Scotland, and Norway and having a population of just over 50,000 inhabitants. It begins with a brief history of the Faroe Islands and a depiction of their literary and arts scenes. In the description of the Hamlet production that ensues, the chapter focuses on four ways in which the show functioned as a kind of community-based theatre: through a Faroese translation that was rife with cultural references, the production’s site specificity, the use of Faroese funeral ritual as a framing device, and the way this Hamlet self-consciously provoked contemplation of local attitudes toward emotion, love, violence, death, and art.KeywordsShakespeareFaroe IslandsNordic culture Hamlet Shakespearean performanceGlobal ShakespeareShakespeare in Translation

The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Adaptation is the first comprehensive reference resource to explore the dynamics of adapted Shakespeare across a range of media forms. The volume maps the field of Shakespeare adaptation studies, identifying theories of adaptation, their application in practice, and the methodologies that underpin them. It considers how adaptation is a key driver of Shakespeare’s ongoing vitality in the contemporary world as Shakespeare is encountered through novels, films, television, and internet culture. It investigates current research and points towards future lines of inquiry for students, researchers and practitioners of Shakespeare adaptation. The opening section on research methods and problems considers definitions of adaptation. A central section develops these theoretical concerns through a series of case studies that move across a range of genres, media forms, and locations to ask not only how Shakespeare is variously transfigured, hybridised and valorised through adaptational play, but also how adaptations produce interpretive communities, and within these potentially new literacies, modes of engagement, and sensory pleasures. The Handbook devotes separate chapters to artists and practitioners of Shakespeare adaptation, including novelists, dramatists and YouTube vloggers, and thus provides a uniquely detailed insight for the reader into the creative impulses and energies at work in adapted Shakespeare. The Handbook establishes the conceptual parameters of the field through detailed, practical resources that will aid the specialist and non-specialist reader alike, including an A-Z of key terms in Shakespeare adaptation studies, a chronology of the field, a guide to research resources, and an annotated bibliography.

Shakespeare in Yosemite, founded in 2017, consists of an annual outdoor production of Shakespeare in Yosemite National Park on the weekend closest to World Earth Day and Shakespeare’s birthday. The productions are site-specific and heavily adapted for a general audience; admission is free. In this article, the co-founders describe the origins and aims of the festival within the contexts of applied theatre, eco-criticism and the American tradition of free outdoor Shakespeare. In describing the festival’s inaugural show – a collage piece that counterpointed Shakespeare’s words with those of early environmentalist John Muir – we make the case for leveraging Shakespeare’s cultural currency to play a part (however small or unknowable) in encouraging environmental awareness and activism.