Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama

Challenges of Visualization and Adaptation in Old and New Media

edited by Rowland Wymer

Book cover: Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama

Extent: 220 pages

Publisher: Brepols Publishers

Subjects: Early Modern & Renaissance Studies, Music & Performing Arts

Series: IKON Studies

Series volume number: 2

Language: English

Paperback (Published)

(February 2026)

ISBN: 9782503618432

Price: $100.00

Out of stock

This volume of essays examines creative and visually interesting responses to the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in a range of media (both old and new), including film, television, digital theatre, animation, online games, graphic art, and gallery installations.


The plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries have been a powerful stimulus to artists and practitioners in a variety of media. Film and television adaptations of individual Shakespeare plays have a long and continuing history but they now exist alongside films with a much looser and more creative relation to their Shakespearean source, growing numbers of adaptations of plays by his contemporaries, new forms of digital theatre, and experimental art works and installations. The visual impact of the original performances was considerable but has been generally thought of as subordinate to the verbal. This relationship is reversed in most modern mediations of the plays, forcing a reconsideration of what it is in them that matters most to us and whether actual physical co-presence is important or not in recreating the full emotional experience which the plays offered their original audiences. The essays collected here have a broad range of reference from Aeschylus to Zoom Theatre and are lavishly illustrated with stills from film and theatre productions as well as original art works, generating new thoughts on the different possible relationships between image and text.

  • Edited by Rowland Wymer