Linda McJannet

“History written by the enemy”: Eastern Sources about the Ottomans on the Continent and in England

t recent conferences, Virginia Mason Vaughan, Jonathan Burton, A and Nabil Matar have expressed concerns about the one-sidedness of the materials available to scholars interested in East-West exchanges in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.’ Most of the available works, they point out, reveal only the western European side of these exchanges. The number of works on the Ottoman Empire alone testifies to the prominence of the East in the Western imagination. C. J. Heywood estimates that nearly I ,000 titles on the Turks were published in Europe between 1501 and 1550 alone, with another 2,500 appearing between 1 5 5 1 and 1600. The seventeenth century saw “as many titles again, and probably more.”* Some scholars speculate that the Muslim East took little interest in Western Europe, and that the Eastern half of the archive may be slight,3 but this hypothesis is now under scrutiny. Matar’s own

Dancing on Her Grave: Shakespeare's Tragic Heroines on Film

ABSTRACT In Grigori Kozintsevs Hamlet, Oliver Parkers Othello, and Rupert Goolds Macbeth, three esteemed directors break with tradition and insert a dance for the tragic heroine. They use the heroines dancing body to contravene genre expectations, to complicate representations of dance as a social practice, and to highlight the theme of the heroines sexual or political vulnerability. Close attention to these dance sequences and their historical associations demonstrates the crucial role dance plays in productions of Shakespeare and illuminates how twentieth- and twenty-first-century directors have (re)discovered the power of dance to communicate, in tragedies as well as comedies and romances, their visions to modern audiences.

The Voice of Elizabethan Stage Directions: The Evolution of a Theatrical Code

This book highlights the form and voice of stage directions as an important aspect of dramatic discourse generally and Elizabethan drama specifically. It traces the development of Elizabethan directions from their medieval forebears and contrasts the directions associated with the professional theaters with the neoclassical conventions of other venues.