Overview

Heiner Muller's re-imaginings of William Shakespeare have puzzled and fascinated readers and spectators alike for the past forty-five years. For the first time, this study addresses all of Muller's re-workings of Shakespeare, including dramatic adaptations, translations, poems, references in interviews and in his autobiography, as well as fragments of unfinished projects, not forgetting the strong Shakespearean echoes in Muller's last play, Germania 3. An analysis of Muller's diverse positions regarding different understandings of history and of its catastrophic violence suggests that Shakespeare is at the literary and theoretical core of Muller's always complex and conflicted relation with philosophy of history and with the notions of heritage, fragmentation and difference.

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This excellently-researched and clearly argued book will be of interest to any Shakespeareans interested in Muller's adaptations of Shakespeare and those who are interested in the pleasures and paradoxes of rewriting Shakespeare more generally. It combines breadth with depth in an engaging and thoughtful way and argues for the centrality of Shakespeare to Muller's development as a dramatist without suggesting that this is an inevitable or necessary trajectory. As a comprehensive account of Muller's transformative engagement with Shakespeare, it will certainly become a key reference for future studies of these plays. - Francesca Rayner, University of Minho, Portugal in Sederi, Vol. 25 pp. 207-11 Gomes manages to give an extensive and well-written reimagining of Muller's turn to Shakespeare as he reworked four of his most widely discussed plays [...] Gomes's claim to read Muller's plays as powerful interventions in a complex political and cultural context is broadly successful. He thereby not only contributes an important new aspect to scholarship on Muller but has also produced an excellent general introduction to Muller's plays. - Stephan Ehrig, University of Bristol in Modern Language Review, Vol. 110.4 2015 pp. 1171-73

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