Shakespeare and Community Performance

This book explores how productions of Shakespearean plays create meaning in specific communities, with special attention to issues of access, adaptation, and activism. Instead of focusing on large professional companies, it analyzes performances put on by community theatres and grassroots companies, and in applied drama projects. It looks at Shakespearean productions created by marginalized populations in Greater London, Harlem, and Los Angeles, a Hamlet staged in the remote Faroe Islands, and eco-theatre made in California’s Yosemite National Park. The book investigates why different communities perform Shakespeare, and what challenges, opportunities, and triumphs accompany the processes of theatrical production for both the artists and the communities in which they are embedded.

Katherine Steele Brokaw is associate professor of English and Theatre at University of California Merced, USA, co-founding artistic director of Shakespeare in Yosemite, and co-founder of the EarthShakes Alliance. She is the author of Staging Harmony: Music and Religious Change in Late Medieval and Early English Drama (2016) and has published articles and reviews inseveral journals and essay collections. With Jay Zysk she co-edited Sacred and Secular Transactions in the Age of Shakespeare (2019), and she edited Macbeth for the Arden Performance Editions series (2019).