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This unique study investigates the ways in which the staging convention of direct address - talking to the audience - can construct dramatic subjectivity, or selfhood, in Shakespeare plays.
A highly engaging text that approaches Shakespeare as a maker of theatre, as well as a writer of literature. Leading performance critics dismantle Shakespeare's texts, identifying theatrical cues in ways which develop understanding of the underlying theatricality of Shakespeare's plays and stimulate further performances.
Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage demonstrates the links made between excess of emotion and madness in the early modern period. It argues that the ways in which today's popular and theatrical cultures judge how much is too much can distort our understanding of early modern drama and theatre. It argues that permitting the excesses of the early modern drama onto the contemporary stage might free actors and audiences alike from assumptions that in order to engage with the drama of the past, its characters must be just like us. The book deals with characters in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries who are sad for too long, or angry to the point of irrationality; people who l...
This Shakespeare Handbook offers a stimulating and accessible guide to Antony and Cleopatra as theatre. It focuses on the challenges of bringing the notorious lovers and their world to the stage, and explores both recent and Renaissance theatrical approaches. A scene-by-scene account of the play examines the various ways in which the play can be performed, and shows the characters as theatrical beings, in dynamic relationship with both each other and the audience. Lively, critical close readings of key stage and film versions demonstrate the importance of every element of the theatre event in the interpretation of this play's startling shifts from passion to pragmatism, comedy to tragedy, grandeur to irony. The play is contextualised historically, culturally and in terms of its sources, and suggestions for further reading guide the student through the play's critical reception.
What is the role of costume in Shakespeare production? Shakespeare and Costume in Practice argues that costume design choices are central not only to the creation of period setting and the actor’s work on character, but to the cultural, political, and psychological meanings that the theatre makes of Shakespeare. The book explores questions about what the first Hamlet looked like in his mourning cloak; how costumes for a Shakespeare comedy can reflect or critique the collective nostalgias a culture has for its past; how costume and casting work together to ask new questions about Shakespeare and race. Using production case studies of Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Tempest, the book demonstrates that costume design can be a site of experimentation, playfulness, and transgression in the theatre – and that it can provoke audiences to think again about what power, race, and gender look like on the Shakespearean stage.
How did Elizabethan and Jacobean acting companies create their visual and aural effects? What materials were available to them and how did they influence staging and writing? What impact did the sensations of theatre have on early modern audiences? How did the construction of the playhouses contribute to technological innovations in the theatre? What effect might these innovations have had on the writing of plays? Shakespeare's Theatres and The Effects of Performance is a landmark collection of essays by leading international scholars addressing these and other questions to create a unique and comprehensive overview of the practicalities and realities of the theatre in the early modern period.
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The deaths of husbands radically changed women’s lives in the early modern period. While losing male protection, widows acquired rare opportunities for social and economic independence. Placed between death and life, female submissiveness and male audacity, chastity and sexual awareness, or tragedy and comedy, widows were highly problematic in early modern patriarchal society. They were also popular figures in the theatre, arousing both male desire and anxiety. Now how did Shakespeare and his contemporaries represent them on the stage? What kind of costume, props, and gestures were employed? What influence did actors, spectators, and play-space have? This book offers a fresh and incisive examination of the theatrical representation of widows by discussing the material conditions of the early modern stage. It is also the only comprehensive study of this topic covering all three phases of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline drama.
The Routledge Companion to Directors' Shakespeare is a major collaborative book about plays in performance. Thirty authoritative accounts describe in illuminating detail how some of theatre’s most talented directors have brought Shakespeare’s texts to the stage. Each chapter has a revealing story to tell as it explores a new and revitalising approach to the most familiar works in the English language. A must-have work of reference for students of both Shakespeare and theatre, this book presents some of the most acclaimed productions of the last hundred years in a variety of cultural and political contexts. Each entry describes a director’s own theatrical vision, and methods of rehearsal and production. These studies chart the extraordinary feats of interpretation and innovation that have given Shakespeare’s plays enduring life in the theatre. Notable entries include: Ingmar Bergman * Peter Brook * Declan Donnellan * Tyrone Guthrie * Peter Hall * Fritz Kortner * Robert Lepage * Joan Littlewood * Ninagawa Yukio * Joseph Papp * Roger Planchon * Max Reinhardt * Giorgio Strehler * Deborah Warner * Orson Welles * Franco Zeffirelli
Examining how technological developments in performance practices affect spectator experience of Shakespeare and early modern drama.