Shakespeare revisited: rewritings of Shakespeare in modern British drama

The aim of the thesis is to analyze three recent British rewritings of William Shakespeare's tragedies - Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Edward Bond's Lear, and Sarah Kane's Blasted. The thesis attempts to trace parallels between the classical text and its modern transformation. Nevertheless, central to the study is the discussion of the reasons for dismantling Shakespeare's texts in order to compose own works of art out of their elements. The paper explores in what ways and to what purposes the three playwrights modernize Shakespeare and rewrite his tragedies. The analysis of the three modern plays based on Shakespeare is framed in a study of the shifting attitudes towards Shakespeare's plays and the changing patterns of their adaptations from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. As far as the development of approaches to Shakespeare's texts is concerned, the focus lies particularly on the late twentiethcentury phenomenon of rewriting classical texts in order to present a more updated and thus more accurate picture of contemporary reality and the current vision of human condition. Such a practice and such an approach to classical texts seem to be representative of Stoppard's, Bond's and Kane's plays