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‘Love in the Museum’: Howard Barker, the Erotic and the Elizabethan/Jacobean Text

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Elizabethan and Jacobean Reappropriation in Contemporary British Drama

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Abstract

This chapter focuses in more detail at Howard Barker’s ideas (principally expressed in his essay collection Arguments for a Theatre) as his rationale for the appropriation of classical texts and belief in the radical potential of classical tragedy in terms of the erotic as well as offending modern culture’s sensibilities about the nature of death. This chapter targets Barker’s other major engagements with Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy, including his self-styled ‘collaboration’ with Thomas Middleton on Women Beware Women (1986), Seven Lears (1990), and Gertrude (The Cry) (2002), Barker’s revisitation of Hamlet.

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Correspondence to Graham Saunders .

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Saunders, G. (2017). ‘Love in the Museum’: Howard Barker, the Erotic and the Elizabethan/Jacobean Text. In: Elizabethan and Jacobean Reappropriation in Contemporary British Drama. Adaptation in Theatre and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44453-0_4

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