Dr. Reut Barzilai

My research focuses on Shakespeare’s drama, particularly in its cultural and historic contexts, and on the global afterlives of Shakespeare through adaptation.

My first book, Venus’s Palace: Shakespeare and the Antitheatricalists, examines Shakespeare’s engagement with early modern antitheatrical discourse and the ways debates about theater shaped dramatic form and audience experience. I have also written the scholarly introduction to the first Hebrew translation of Shakespeare’s long narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece, and I am currently working on an article about audience deception in early modern drama.

My work on Shakespeare’s global afterlife has yielded several articles, as well as contributions to the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Global Shakespeare. A central strand of this research explores adaptations of Shakespeare in mainstream Modern Hebrew repertory theaters. My work on Hamlet shows how the play has repeatedly functioned on the Israeli stage as a marker of “Europeanness,” while my more recent research on Richard III examines how Israeli productions reflect changing local attitudes toward tyranny and political power. I am currently writing an essay on adaptations of Romeo and Juliet in the context of the Jewish–Arab conflict.

In addition, together with African literature scholar Ruth S. Wenske, I have written on Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure in the novel Gravel Heart.