Shakespeare And Audience In Practice

What do audiences do as they watch a Shakespearean play? What makes them respond in the ways that they do? This book examines a wide range of theatrical productions to explore the practice of being a modern Shakespearean audience. It surveys some of the most influential ideas about spectatorship in contemporary performance studies, and analyses the strategies employed both in the texts themselves and by modern theatre practitioners to position audiences in particular ways.

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.

Shakespeare: Actors and Audiences brings together the voices of those who make productions of Shakespeare come to life. It shines a spotlight on the relationship between actors and audiences and explores the interplay that makes each performance unique. We know much about theatre in Shakespeare's time but very little about the audiences who attended his plays. Even today the audience's voice remains largely ignored. This volume places the role of the audience at the centre of how we understand Shakespeare in performance. Part One offers an overview of the best current audience research and provides a critical framework for the interviews and testimony of leading actors, theatre makers and audience members that follow in Part Two, including Juliet Stevenson and Emma Rice. Shakespeare: Actors and Audiences offers a fascinating insight into the world of theatre production and of the relationship between actor and audience that lies at the heart of theatre-making.

A comprehensive treatment of Shakespeare's plays in clear prose, The Practical Shakespeare: The Plays in Practice and on the Page illuminates for a general audience how and why the plays work so well.Noting in detail the practical and physical limitations the Bard faced as he worked out the logistics of his plays, Colin Butler demonstrates how Shakespeare incorporated and exploited those limitations to his advantage: his management of entrances and exits; his characterization technique; his handling of scenes off stage; his control of audience responses; his organization of major scenes; and his use of prologues and choruses. A different aspect of the plays is covered in each chapter?and all chapters are free-standing, for separate consultation. For easy access, chapters also are subdivided, and each part has its own heading. Butler draws most of his examples from mainstream plays, such as Macbeth, Othello, and Much Ado About Nothing. He brings special focus to A Midsummer Night's Dream, which is treated as one of Shakespeare's most important plays. Butler supports his major points with quotations, so readers can understand an issue even if they are unfamiliar with the particular play being discussed. The author also cross-references dramatic devices among plays, increasing enjoyment and understanding of Shakespeare's achievements. Clear, jargon-free, easy-to-use, and comprehensive, The Practical Shakespeare looks to the elements of stagecraft and playwriting as a conduit for students, teachers, and general audiences to engage with, understand, and appreciate the genius of Shakespeare. Colin Butler, previously the head of an English department at a British grammar school, lives in Canterbury, England, where he writes on literary subjects.

This unique study investigates the ways in which the staging convention of direct address - talking to the audience - can construct selfhood, for Shakespeare's characters. By focusing specifically on the relationship between performer and audience, Talking to the Audience examines what happens when the audience are in the presence of a dramatic figure who knows they are there. It is a book concerned with theatrical illusion; with the pleasures and disturbances of seeing 'characters' produced in the moment of performance. Through analysis of contemporary productions Talking to the Audience serves to demonstrate how the study of recent performance helps us to understand both Shakespeare's cultural moment and our own. Its exploration of how theory and practice can inform each other make this essential reading for all those studying Shakespeare in either a literary or theatrical context.

Shakespeare wrote for a theater in which the audience was understood to be, and at times invited to be, active and participatory. How have Shakespeare’s audiences, from the sixteenth century to the present, responded to that invitation? In what ways have consumers across different cultural contexts, periods, and platforms engaged with the performance of Shakespeare’s plays? What are some of the different approaches taken by scholars today in thinking about the role of Shakespeare's audiences and their relationship to performance? The chapters in this collection use a variety of methods and approaches to explore the global history of audience experience of Shakespearean performance in theater, film, radio, and digital media. The approaches that these contributors take look at Shakespeare’s audiences through a variety of lenses, including theater history, dramaturgy, film studies, fan studies, popular culture, and performance. Together, they provide both close studies of particular moments in the history of Shakespeare’s audiences and a broader understanding of the various, often complex, connections between and among those audiences across the long history of Shakespearean performance.

When actors perform Shakespeare, what do they do with their bodies? How do they display to the spectator what is hidden in the imagination? This is a history of Shakespearean performance as seen through the actor's body. Tunstall draws upon social, cognitive and moral psychology to reveal how performers from Sarah Siddons to Ian McKellen have used the language of gesture to reflect the minds of their characters and shape the reactions of their audiences. This book is rich in examples, including detailed analysis of recent performances and interviews with key figures from the worlds of both acting and gesture studies. Truly interdisciplinary, this provocative and original contribution will appeal to anyone interested in Shakespeare, theatre history, psychology or body language.

Shakespearean performance criticism has undergone a sea change in recent years, and strong tides of discovery are continuing to shift the contours of the discipline. The essays in this volume, written by scholars from around the world, reveal how these critical cross-currents are influencing the ways we now view Shakespeare in performance. The volume is organised in four Parts. Part I interrogates how Shakespeare continues to achieve contemporaneity for Western audiences by exploring modes of performance, acting styles, and aesthetic choices regarded as experimental. Part II tackles the burgeoning field of reception: how and why audiences respond to performances as they do, or actors to the conditions in which they perform; how immersive productions turn spectators into actors; how memory and cognition shape and reshape the performances we think we saw. Part III addresses the ways in which revolutions in technology have altered our views of Shakespeare, both through the mediums of film and sound recording, and through digitalizing processes that have generated a profound reconsideration of what performance is and how it is accessed. The final Part grapples with intercultural Shakespeare, considering not only matters of cultural hegemony and appropriation in a 'global' importation of non-Western productions to Europe and North America, but also how Shakespeare has been made 'local' in performances staged or filmed in African, Asian, and Latin American countries. Together, these ground-breaking essays attest to the richness and diversity of Shakespearean performance criticism as it is practiced today, and they point the way to critical continents not yet explored.