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.

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.

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.

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.

Playing Shakespeare

Author: John Barton
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 0713687738
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Book Description
John Barton is Advisory Director at the Royal Shakespeare Company and has directed some of the greatest Shakespeare productions of our time. His book, Playing Shakespeare, is a transcript of his televised workshops with some of our finest Shakespearean actors: Peggy Ashcroft, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Ben Kingsley, Patrick Stewart and David Suchet. This new edition contains a DVD with 80 minutes of video featuring John Barton in conversation with Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart and Jane Lapotaire discussing changes in approaches to Shakespeare's text since the book first published. This edition also features a foreword by Michael Boyd. This is a highly readable approach to understanding Shakespeare's text and unlocking the hidden stage directions and actors clues that reside in his verse. As Barton explains, "when an actor becomes aware of them they will find Shakespeare himself starts to direct them."

Playing Bit Parts in Shakespeare

Author: M.M. Mahood
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134673655
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 293

Book Description
PUBLICITY TITLE Will appear in 1998 Theatre Craft leaflet and in a New Theatre Quarterly advert Re-issue of hardback published by CUP - this received exceptional review coverage M. Mahood is an all-time old-school Great: well known for Shakespeare's Wordplay and her Penguin editions of Twelfth Night and Merchant of Venice The Pb will include a new appendix aimed at helping directors and actors Will appeal to actors and directors, critics and students The six studies of individual plays offers models for students to follow in studying and writing about the other thirty plays. Includes an index of characters as well as a detailed general index - very user friendly

Thinking Shakespeare (Revised Edition)

Author: Barry Edelstein
Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
ISBN: 155936890X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 231

Book Description
Thinking Shakespeare gives theater artists practical advice about how to make Shakespeare’s words feel spontaneous, passionate, and real. Based on Barry Edelstein’s thirty-year career directing Shakespeare’s plays, this book provides the tools that artists need to fully understand and express the power of Shakespeare’s language.

Brutus and Other Heroines

Author: Harriet Walter
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781848422933
Category : LITERARY CRITICISM
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
A rich journey of discovery through the greatest roles in Shakespeare, both female and male.

Re-playing Shakespeare in Asia

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

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.