Shakespeare and Ballet: Gender, Sexuality, Race and Politics on Stage

This new and comprehensive study of Shakespearean ballets and their unique interpretive possibilities is also the first to foreground the importance of music to the aesthetics and meanings of Shakespeare dance-works.

＂A fascinating and highly readable account.＂ - Sir Stanley Wells

＂An outstanding, remarkable book.＂ - Lisa S. Starks, University of South Florida, USA

Organised around adaptations of key plays, each chapter offers close study of the contrasting interpretations and styles of a number of choreographers and illuminates issues of gender, sexuality, race and politics.

While Shakespeare’s work is recreated in diverse forms in theatres all over the world, ballet is potentially one of the most international and inclusive forms of theatrical expression, based in the fundamental expressive potential of the body. Since it moved into the avant-garde more than a century ago, it has been in the forefront of invention and experiment in the theatrical arts and yet the hundreds of ballets which have been based on Shakespeare’s work have received scant attention in Shakespearean scholarship and criticism.

David Fuller explores a wide range of Shakespeare’s oeuvre as it has been recreated in this form, with studies of ballets based on some of his most famous works, including The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Sonnets, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and The Tempest. With analysis of productions from the 1940s to the present by British, American and European choreographers, it reads these as forms of creative criticism which reflect wider developments in society and in so doing show Shakespeare as perpetually contemporary.

David Fuller is Professor Emeritus of English at Durham University, UK. Among his many publications are The Life in the Sonnets, (Bloomsbury, 2011) and Shakespeare and the Romantics (2021), besides writings on Shakespeare ballets, on King Lear and on ballet and music.