Shakespeare the Actor and the Purposes of PlayingFor the Renaissance, all the world may have been a stage and all its people players, but Shakespeare was also an actor on the literal stage. Meredith Anne Skura asks what it meant to be an actor in Shakespeare's England and shows why a knowledge of actual theatrical practices is essential for understanding both Shakespeare's plays and the theatricality of everyday life in early modern England. Despite the obvious differences between our theater and Shakespeare's, sixteenth-century testimony suggests that the experience of acting has not changed much over the centuries. Beginning with a psychoanalytically informed account of acting today, Skura shows how this intense and ambivalent experience appears not only in literal references to acting in Shakespearean drama but also in recurring narrative concerns, details of language, and dramatic strategies used to engage the audience. Looking at the plays in the context of both public and private worlds outside the theater, Skura rereads the canon to identify new configurations in the plays and new ways of understanding theatrical self-consciousness in Renaissance England. Rich in theatrical, psychoanalytic, biographical, and historical insight, this book will be invaluable to students of Shakespeare and instructive to all readers interested in the dynamics of performance. |
From inside the book
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Page xi
... audience ) , with not only explicit inner plays , but all the action , seen as analogy for the playwright's experience . Burckhardt and Calderwood see the kings and heroes in the history plays , for example , as playwrights trying to ...
... audience ) , with not only explicit inner plays , but all the action , seen as analogy for the playwright's experience . Burckhardt and Calderwood see the kings and heroes in the history plays , for example , as playwrights trying to ...
Page 2
... audience is appropriate to our largest concerns . After all , to analyze a performance from the point of view of the actor , Stephen Booth says , is like describing a meal from the point of view of the entree ( a metaphor about which we ...
... audience is appropriate to our largest concerns . After all , to analyze a performance from the point of view of the actor , Stephen Booth says , is like describing a meal from the point of view of the entree ( a metaphor about which we ...
Page 3
... audience - consciousness . Concerns like these emerge most directly in the portrayal of literal players and plays ... audience which , in the words of one actor , " both appalls and uplifts . " Actors are narcissists who delight in the ...
... audience - consciousness . Concerns like these emerge most directly in the portrayal of literal players and plays ... audience which , in the words of one actor , " both appalls and uplifts . " Actors are narcissists who delight in the ...
Page 4
... audience the power of the maternal gaze to validate or destroy . This emotional intensity is relived in the actor's volatile relation to the director during rehearsal and , again , when he stands alone before a crowd which can make him ...
... audience the power of the maternal gaze to validate or destroy . This emotional intensity is relived in the actor's volatile relation to the director during rehearsal and , again , when he stands alone before a crowd which can make him ...
Page 6
... audience . Chapter 7 suggests that the actor's ambivalent relation to the audience , thematized and theorized within the plays , also underlies Shakespeare's best - known image cluster , the " dog , licking , candy , melting group ...
... audience . Chapter 7 suggests that the actor's ambivalent relation to the audience , thematized and theorized within the plays , also underlies Shakespeare's best - known image cluster , the " dog , licking , candy , melting group ...
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Common terms and phrases
Actaeon acting Anne Antony Arden Armado attack audience audience's baiting Barber and Wheeler bearbaiting beggar Bottom Brutus Caesar called Callow chapter character child cited in Chambers clown Comedy Coriolanus crowd crown death deer describes Drama dream Elizabethan Stage English Epilogue Fairy Falstaff fantasies father fawning fear flattering fool Hal's Hamlet Henriad Henry Henry IV Henry VI Histriomastix histrionic hunt identified inner plays italics added John John Marston Jonson King King Lear kneel Launce Lear literally London Lord Love's Labour's Lost male Midsummer Night's Dream mirror mother murder narcissistic offstage onstage performance play's players poet Queen Renaissance Richard Richard III role says scene Shake Shakespeare shame Shrew Sly's social sonnet speare's stage fright story suggests Tarlton tells theater theatrical thee Thomas thou Timon Timon of Athens Titus Titus Andronicus University Press Wives wounds York