Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer (1773) was staged only two weeks after the publication of his Essay on the Theatre, in which he famously compared sentimental comedies with what he described as laughing comedies. The play thus illustrates Goldsmith’s principles for his ideal laughing comedy. One of the aspects of this type of comedy, which has rarely been addressed, is its representation of the matrix of temporal and spatial elements, or what Mikhail Bakhtin calls a chronotope. The present study is thus aimed at investigating She Stoops to Conquer in terms of Bakhtinian chronotope. The study argues how different chronotopes have influenced the behaviours as well as the decisions of characters in the play. Moreover, it shows that the chronotopic framework can shed new light on the play’s portrayal of the class divisions in the eighteenth century, when the middle class was emerging in England’s social system.

No abstract

No abstract

The conventional approach to literary adaptation, which insisted on rigid adherence to the source and denounced any deviation from the established text as unprofessional and negligent, has been substituted with attitudes that define the adaptation-source relation in new ways. Bakhtinian dialogism, as one of these approaches, redefines this relation in terms of a persistent contact between the two sides as the participants of a never-ending, all-inclusive network of relations. The idea of carnivalesque, a key part of Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism, can be used in adaptation studies to reflect both on the nature of adaptation-source relation and the internal mechanisms and techniques used by a particular adapter to reverse and suspend the orders and hierarchies established in its source work. Within this framework, the present study investigates Bakhtinian carnivalesque in Justin Kurzel and Billy Morrissette’s cinematic adaptations of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606). Kurzel’s Macbeth (2015), set in Scottish Highlands during the 11th century, seeks to retain the Shakespearean air while addressing its contemporary issues mostly by highlighting or adding to the elements of carnival within the play. Morrissette’s Scotland PA (2001) takes a radically different stance toward the play, though. He transforms Shakespeare’s bloody tragedy into a dark comedy about the revolt of the lower class against the social structure. The study suggests that while these two adaptations take different, and at times opposing, approaches toward the play Macbeth, they both point to the carnivalesque potential of the play which can be released in and adapted to various sociocultural contexts

Adaptations of Shakespeare’s Roman plays have frequently addressed political topics at the time of their production. As a result, Shakespeare’s Rome, already a site of political conflict and power struggle, has found different and at times opposing significations in its new contexts. The present study is set to explore how two recent adaptations of the Roman plays in Iran, There Will Be Blood (2019, based on Titus Andronicus) and Coriolanus (2019 and 2020), have situated Shakespeare’s texts in Iran’s contemporary political context. The study argues that Shakespeare’s Roman plays have created a platform for Iranian theatre directors to address the political issues and debates in Iran, a country in which it is extremely difficult to produce a political play. Jürgen Habermas’s idea of legitimation crisis and Ernesto Laclau’s concept of the empty signifier underpin the analysis of the adaptations.