Playing Shakespeare

Author: John Barton
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307773914
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Book Description
Playing Shakespeare is the premier guide to understanding and appreciating the mastery of the world’s greatest playwright. Together with Royal Shakespeare Company actors–among them Patrick Stewart, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Ben Kingsley, and David Suchet–John Barton demonstrates how to adapt Elizabethan theater for the modern stage. The director begins by explicating Shakespeare’s verse and prose, speeches and soliloquies, and naturalistic and heightened language to discover the essence of his characters. In the second section, Barton and the actors explore nuance in Shakespearean theater, from evoking irony and ambiguity and striking the delicate balance of passion and profound intellectual thought, to finding new approaches to playing Shakespeare’s most controversial creation, Shylock, from The Merchant of Venice. A practical and essential guide, Playing Shakespeare will stand for years as the authoritative favorite among actors, scholars, teachers, and students.

Secrets of Acting Shakespeare

Author: Patrick Tucker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135862265
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Book Description
Secrets of Acting Shakespeare isn't a book that gently instructs. It's a passionate, yes-you-can designed to prove that anybody can act Shakespeare. By explaining how Elizabethan actors had only their own lines and not entire playscripts, Patrick Tucker shows how much these plays work by ear. Secrets of Acting Shakespeare is a book for actors trained and amateur, as well as for anyone curious about how the Elizabethan theater worked.

Shakespeare the Player

Author: John Southworth
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 0752472445
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 213

Book Description
Man of the Millennium' he may be but William Shakespeare is a shadowy historical figures. His writings have been analysed exhaustively but much of his life remains a mystery. This controversial biography aims to redress the balance. To his contemporaries, Shakespeare was known not as a playwright but as an actor, yet this has been largely ignored or marginalised by most modern writers. here John Southworth overturns traditional images of the Bard and his work, arguing that Shakespeare cannot be separated from his profession as a player any more than he can be separated from his works. Only by approaching Shakespeare's life from this new angle can we hope to learn or understand anything new about him. Following Shakespeare's life as an actor as he learns his craft and begins work on his own plays, Southworth presents the Bard and his plays in their proper context for the first time. Groundbreaking, contentious and a work of deep scholarship and understanding, 'Shakespeare the Player' should change the way we think about the English language's greatest artist.

The Purpose of Playing

Author: Louis Montrose
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226534831
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Book Description
Examines the role of Elizabethan drama in the shape of cultural belief, values, and understanding of political authority.

Re-playing Shakespeare in Asia

Author: Poonam Trivedi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135272247
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 695

Book Description
In this critical volume, leading scholars in the field examine the performance of Shakespeare in Asia. Emerging out of the view that it is in "play" or performance, and particularly in intercultural / multicultural performance, that the cutting edge of Shakespeare studies is to be found, the essays in this volume pay close attention to the modes of transference of the language of the text into the alternative languages of Asian theatres; to the history and politics of the performance of Shakespeare in key locations in Asia; to the new Asian experimentation with indigenous forms via Shakespeare and the consequent revitalizing and revising of the traditional boundaries of genre and gender; and to Shakespeare as a cultural capital world wide. Focusing specifically on the work of major directors in the central and emerging areas of Asia – Japan, China, India, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines - the chapters in this volume encompass a broader and more representative swath of Asian performances and locations in one book than has been attempted till now.

Mastering Shakespeare

Author: Scott Kaiser
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1581159609
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Book Description
Who says only the British can act Shakespeare? In this unique guide, a veteran acting coach shatters that myth with a boldly American approach to the Bard. Written in the form of a play, this volume's "characters" include a master teacher and 16 students grappling with the challenges of acting Shakespeare. Using actual speeches from 32 of Shakespeare's plays, each of the book's six "scenes" offer proven solutions to such acting problems as delivering spoken subtext, using physical actions to orchestrate a speech, creating images within a speech, dividing a speech into measures, and much more.

Will Power

Author: John Basil
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN: 9781557836663
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Book Description
Provides a guide for actors which outlines a three-week process for performing Shakespeare's plays.

Shakespeare on Stage

Author: Julian Curry
Publisher: Nick Hern Books
ISBN: 9781848420779
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Thirteen leading actors take us behind the scenes, each recreating in detail a memorable performance in one of Shakespeare's major roles. * Brian Cox on Titus Andronicus in Deborah Warner's visceral RSC production * Judi Dench on being directed by Franco Zeffirelli as a twenty-three-year-old Juliet * Ralph Fiennes on Shakespeare's least sympathetic hero Coriolanus * Rebecca Hall on Rosalind in As You Like It, directed by her father, Sir Peter * Derek Jacobi on his hilariously poker-backed Malvolio for Michael Grandage * Jude Law on his Hamlet, a palpable hit in the West End and on Broadway * Adrian Lester on a modern-dress Henry V at the National, during the invasion of Iraq * Ian McKellen on his Macbeth, opposite Judi Dench in Trevor Nunn's RSC production * Helen Mirren on a role she was born for, and has played three times: Cleopatra * Tim Pigott-Smith on Leontes in Peter Hall's Restoration Winter's Tale at the National * Kevin Spacey on his high-tech, modern-dress Richard II * Patrick Stewart on Prospero in Rupert Goold's arctic Tempest for the RSC * Penelope Wilton on Isabella in Jonathan Miller's 'chamber' Measure for Measure The actors discuss their characters, working through the play scene by scene, with refreshing candour and in forensic detail. The result is a masterclass on playing each role, invaluable for other actors and directors, as well as students of Shakespeare - and fascinating for audiences of the plays. Together, the interviews give one of the most comprehensive pictures yet of these characters in performance, and of the choices that these great actors have made in bringing them thrillingly to life. 'These passages of times remembered contribute vividly to the sense of a teemingly creative period when Shakespeare seemed to have been rediscovered.' Trevor Nunn, from his Foreword

Re-playing Shakespeare in Asia

Author: Poonam Trivedi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135272255
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Performing Shakespeare's Women

Author: Paige Martin Reynolds
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350002615
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 207

Book Description
Shakespeare's women rarely reach the end of the play alive. Whether by murder or by suicide, onstage or off, female actors in Shakespeare's works often find themselves 'playing dead.' But what does it mean to 'play dead', particularly for women actors, whose bodies become scrutinized and anatomized by audiences and fellow actors who 'grossly gape on'? In what ways does playing Shakespeare's women when they are dead emblematize the difficulties of playing them while they are still alive? Ultimately, what is at stake for the female actor who embodies Shakespeare's women today, dead or alive? Situated at the intersection of the creative and the critical, Performing Shakespeare's Women: Playing Dead engages performance history, current scholarship and the practical problems facing the female actor of Shakespeare's plays when it comes to 'playing dead' on the contemporary stage and in a post-feminist world. This book explores the consequences of corpsing Shakespeare's women, considering important ethical questions that matter to practitioners, students and critics of Shakespeare today.