Shakespeare’s Contested Nations

Shakespeares Contested Nations argues that performances of Shakespearean history at British institutional venues between 2000 and 2016 manifest a post-imperial nostalgia that fails to tell the nations story in ways that account for the agential impact of women and people of color, thus foreclosing promising opportunities to re-examine the nations multicultural past, present, and future in more intentional, self-critical, and truly progressive ways.A cluster of interconnected stage and televisual performances and adaptations of the history play canon illustrate the function that Shakespeares narratives of incipient "British" identities fulfill for the postcolonial United Kingdom. The book analyzes treatments of the plays in a range of stylesstaged performances directed by Michael Boyd with the Royal Shakespeare Company (20002001) and Nicholas Hytner at the National Theatre (2003, 2005), the BBCs Hollow Crown series (2012, 2016), the RSC and BBC adaptations of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies (2013, 2015), and a contemporary reinterpretation of the canon, Mike Bartletts King Charles III (2014, 2017).This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of Shakespeare, theatre, and politics.