Playing Shakespeare's Seemers and Deceivers

In an era of fake news and media manipulation, where images and content can be manipulated anywhere and at any time, Playing Shakespeare’s Seemers and Deceivers focuses on Shakespeare’s master manipulators: the seemers, deceivers, and dissemblers, who, across the spectrum of Shakespeare’s plays, have a fluid and malleable (if not post-modern) approach to truth, identity, facts, and morality. There are notable seemers in the Histories (such as Richard III); deceivers in the Tragedies (Iago and Edmund); and dissemblers in the Comedies (Don John and Falstaff). Meanwhile Portia, Rosalind, Viola, and Julia, played by men dressed as women playing men, seem to be "seeming" for a nearly infinite variety of reasons. Distinguished theater practitioners, scholars, and educators tackle truth, appearance, and self-presentation in the world in this wide-ranging anthology.