Michael Shapiro

Personal Information

Education:  

BA (1959), University of Rochester; MA (1960), PhD (1967) Columbia University

Teaching and Research Interests: 

Shakespeare Renaissance Drama and Poetry, Modern Jewish Literature

Recent Publications:

“Shylock as crypto-Jew: A New Mexican adaptation of The Merchant of Venice,” inWorld-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance, ed. Sonia Massai (Routledge: London, 2005), pp. 31-39  [co-written with Elizabeth Klein]

“The Westminster Scholars’ Sapienta Solomonis as Royal Gift Offering,” in Inside Shakespeare: Essays on the Blackfriars Stage, ed. Paul Menzer (Susquehanna University Press, 2006), pp. 118-22.

“The Merchant of Venice after the Holocaust, or Shakespearean Comedy Meets Auschwitz,” Cithara 46 (2006), 3-23.

“Shylock the Old Clothes Man: Victorian Burlesques of The Merchant of Venice,” in Shakespeare’s World / World Shakespeares: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Brisbane 2006, ed. Richard Fotheringham et al. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), pp. 119-29.

“How Shylock Became Fagin’s Cousin: The Jewish Old Clothes Man in Shakespeare, Dickens, and Victorian Burlesque Theatre,” University of California at Santa Cruz, [2009].

“Early (pre-1591) boy companies and their acting venues,” in  Handbook on Early Modern Theatre,  ed. Richard Dutton (Oxford University Press, 2009),  120-35.

Books:

Children of the Revels: The Boy Companies of Shakespeare’s Time and Their Plays, Columbia University Press, l977.

Ed., Divisions Between Traditionalism and Liberalism in the American Jewish Community:  Cleft or Chasm, introduction, Edwin Mellen Press, 1991.

Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage:  Boy Heroines and Female Pages , University of Michigan Press, 1994; paperback ed., 1996.

Co-ed., Transvestism and the Onnagata Traditions in Shakespeare and Kabuki, Global Oriental, 2006.

Work in Progress:

            A series of studies of adaptations of The Merchant of Venice

A collection of essays (co-edited) on Jewish Artistic  Responses to The Merchant of Venice