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‘If Power Change Purpose’: Appropriation and the Shakespearian Despot

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Elizabethan and Jacobean Reappropriation in Contemporary British Drama

Part of the book series: Adaptation in Theatre and Performance ((ATP))

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Abstract

This chapter probes Howard Brenton’s version of Measure for Measure (1972) and Thirteenth Night (1981), a play that borrows from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, along with David Edgar’s Dick Deterred (1974), that uses Richard III and David Greig’s Dunsinane (2010), that could be described as a prequel to Macbeth. What all these plays have in common is how they use Shakespearean material to make comparisons between the politics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and events in the twentieth and twenty first centuries.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

    Graham Saunders

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  1. Graham Saunders
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Correspondence to Graham Saunders .

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Saunders, G. (2017). ‘If Power Change Purpose’: Appropriation and the Shakespearian Despot. 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_5

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