Shakespeare In Performance

These studies take stage history as a means of knowing the play. Half of the studies deal with casting - doubling, chorus and the crowd, the star of Hamlet and Measure for Measure. Then the transformations of dramatis personae are analyzed and The Tempest is viewed through the changing relationships of Prospero, Ariel and Caliban. Some of Shakespeare’s most original strategies for audience control are studied, such as Cordelia's asides in King Lear, Richard II’s subversive laughter and the scenic alternation of pleasure and duty in Henry IV. Performance is the realization of identity. The book draws on major productions up to 1992, just before the book was originally published.

Theatrical performance, suggest the contributors to this volume, can be an unpredictable, individual experience as well as a communal, institutional or cultural event. The essays collected here use the tools of theatre history in their investigation into the phenomenology of the performance experience, yet they are also careful to consider the social, ideological and institutional contingencies that determine the production and reception of the living spectacle. Thus contributors combine a formalist interest in the affective and aesthetic dimensions of language and spectacle with an investment in the material cultures that both produced and received Shakespeare's plays. Six of the chapters focus on early modern cultures of performance, looking specifically at such topics as the performance of rusticity; the culture of credit; contract and performance; the cultivation of Englishness; religious ritual; and mourning and memory. Building upon and interrelating with the preceding essays, the last three chapters deal with Shakespeare and performance culture in modernity. They focus on themes including literary and theatrical performance anxiety; cultural iconicity; and the performance of Shakespearean lateness. This collection strives to bring better understanding to Shakespeare's imaginative investment in the relationship between theatrical production and the emotional, intellectual and cultural effects of performance broadly defined in social terms.

This study examines how Shakespeare's plays have been transformed for the stage by the demands of theatrical spaces and staging conventions.

A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance provides astate-of-the-art engagement with the rapidly developing field ofShakespeare performance studies. Redraws the boundaries of Shakespeare performance studies. Considers performance in a range of media, including in print,in the classroom, in the theatre, in film, on television and video,in multimedia and digital forms. Introduces important terms and contemporary areas of enquiry inShakespeare and performance. Raises questions about the dynamic interplay betweenShakespearean writing and the practices of contemporary performanceand performance studies. Written by an international group of major scholars, teachers,and professional theatre makers.

How do performances of Shakespeare change the meanings of the plays? In this controversial new book, Sarah Werner argues that the text of a Shakespeare play is only one of the many factors that give a performance its meaning. By focusing on The Royal Shakespeare Company, Werner demonstrates how actor training, company management and gender politics fundamentally affect both how a production is created and the interpretations it can suggest. Werner concentrates particularly on: The influential training methods of Cicely Berry and Patsy Rodenburg The history of the RSC Women's Group Gale Edwards' production of The Taming of the Shrew She reveals that no performance of Shakespeare is able to bring the plays to life or to realise the playwright's intentions without shaping them to mirror our own assumptions. By examining the ideological implications of performance practices, this book will help all interested in Shakespeare's plays to explore what it means to study them in performance.

This short history of Shakespeare in global performance-from the re-opening of London theatres upon the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 to our present multicultural day-provides a comprehensive overview of Shakespeare's theatrical afterlife and introduces categories of analysis and understanding to make that afterlife intellectually meaningful. Written for both the advanced student and the practicing scholar, this work enables readers to situate themselves historically in the broad field of Shakespeare performance studies and equips them with analytical tools and conceptual frameworks for making their own contributions to the field.

What does it mean to study Shakespeare within a multicultural society? And who has the power to transform Shakespeare? The Diverse Bard explores how Shakespeare has been adapted by artists born on the margins of the Empire, and how actors of Asian and African-Caribbean origin are being cast by white mainstream directors. It examines how notions of 'race' define the contemporary British experience, including the demands of traditional theatre, and it looks at both the playtexts themselves and contemporary productions. Editor Delia Jarrett-Macauley assembles a stunning collection of classic texts and new scholarship by leading critics and practitioners, to provide the first comprehensive critical and practical analysis of this field.

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.