Shakespeare S Authentic Performance Texts

When we pick up a copy of a Shakespeare play, we assume that we hold in our hands an original record of his writing. We don't. Present-day printings are an editor's often subjective version of the script. Around 25 percent of any Shakespeare play will have been altered, and this creates an enormous amount of confusion. The only authentic edition of Shakespeare's works is the First Folio, published by his friends and colleagues in 1623. This volume makes the case for printing and staging the plays as set in the First Folio, which preserved actor cues that helped players understand and perform their roles. The practices of modern editors are critiqued. Also included are sections on analyzing and acting the text, how a complex character can be created using the First Folio, and a director's approach to rehearsing Shakespeare with various exercises for both professional and student actors. In conclusion, all of the findings are applied to Measure for Measure.

When we pick up a copy of a Shakespeare play, we assume that we hold in our hands an original record of his writing. We don’t. Present-day printings are an editor’s often subjective version of the script. Around 25 percent of any Shakespeare play will have been altered, and this creates an enormous amount of confusion. The only authentic edition of Shakespeare’s works is the First Folio, published by his friends and colleagues in 1623. This volume makes the case for printing and staging the plays as set in the First Folio, which preserved actor cues that helped players understand and perform their roles. The practices of modern editors are critiqued. Also included are sections on analyzing and acting the text, how a complex character can be created using the First Folio, and a director’s approach to rehearsing Shakespeare with various exercises for both professional and student actors. In conclusion, all of the findings are applied to Measure for Measure.

'Shakespeare, Court Dramatist' outlines the symbiotic relationship between Shakespeare and the court and shows how it affected his writing, forging plays like 'Romeo and Juliet' and 'Hamlet' into the versions we know best today.

How the idea of Shakespearean authority is still invested in the activities of directing, acting, and scholarship.

In this lavishly illustrated book, one of the most important and influential scholars of the Renaissance stage brings together essays that have changed the way we think about the age of Shakespeare. His subjects are varied and interconnected: the theater as social phenomenon, the development of the stage as an architectural presence and a cultural institution, the changing use of setting and costume, the changing status of the acting profession, the complex relation of theater to the political life of the age. Most of all, The Authentic Shakespeare is about how the modern constructs the past, how the texts that were performed on the Elizabethan stage became the books and editions that are, for our time, Renaissance drama. Many essays in The Authentic Shakespeare have become classics. Collected here for the first time, they essential reading for students of the Renaissance stage and the history of the book.

"Featuring essays from seventeen international scholars, this exciting new collection is the first sustained study of Shakespeare on the university and college stage. Treating the subject both historically and globally, the essays describe theatrical conditions which fit neither the professional nor the amateur models and show how student performances provide valuable vehicles for artistic construction and intellectual analysis. The book redresses the neglect of this distinctive form of Shakespeare performance, opening up new ways of thinking about the nature and value of university production and its ability to draw unique audiences. Looking at productions across the world - from Asia to Europe and North America - it will interest scholars as well as upper-level students in areas such as Shakespeare studies, performance studies and theatre history"--

Shakespeare, Theory and Performance is a groundbreaking collection of seminal essays which apply the abstract theory of Shakespearean criticism to the practicalities of performance. Bringing together the key names from both realms, the collection reflects a wide range of sources and influences, from traditional literary, performance and historical criticism to modern cultural theory. Together they raise questions about the place of performance criticism in modern and often competing debates of cultural materialism, new historicism, feminism and deconstruction. An exciting and fascinating volume, it will be important reading for students and scholars of literary and theatre studies alike.

Why do we continue to experience many of Shakespeare's dramatic characters as real people with personal histories, individual personalities, and psychological depth? What is it that makes Falstaff seem to jump off the page, and what gives Hamlet his complexity? Shakespearean Character: Language in Performance examines how the extraordinary lifelikeness of some of Shakespeare's most enigmatic and self-conscious characters is produced through language. Using theories drawn from linguistic pragmatics, this book claims that our impression of characters as real people is an effect arising from characters' pragmatic use of language in combination with the historical and textual meanings that Shakespeare conveys to his audience by dramatic and meta-dramatic means. Challenging the notion of interiority attributed to Shakespeare's characters by many contemporary critics, theatre professionals, and audiences, the book demonstrates that dramatic characters possess anteriority which gives us the impression that they exist outside of- and prior to- the play-texts as real people. Jelena Marelj's study examines five linguistically self-conscious characters drawn from the genres of history, tragedy and comedy, which continue to be subjects of extensive critical debate: Falstaff, Cleopatra, Henry V, Katherine from The Taming of the Shrew, and Hamlet. She shows that by inferring Shakespeare's intentions through his characters' verbal exchanges and the discourses of the play, the audience becomes emotionally involved with or repulsed by characters and it is this emotional response that makes these characters strikingly memorable and intimately human. Shakespearean Character will equip readers for further work on the genealogy of Shakespearean character, including minor characters, stock characters, and allegorical characters.