ENTH 3136: Shakespeare in Performance

Presenting a distinct combination of well-written, up-to-date background information and intriguing selections from primary documents, The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare introduces you to the topics most important to the study of Shakespeare in their full historical and cultural context.

Film adaptations of Shakespeare's plays are increasingly popular and now figure prominently in the study of his work and its reception. This Companion is a lively collection of critical and historical essays on the films adapted from, and inspired by, Shakespeare's plays. Chapters have been revised and updated from the first edition to include the most recent films and scholarship. An international team of leading scholars discuss Shakespearean films from a variety of perspectives: as works of art in their own right; as products of the international movie industry; and as the work of particular directors from Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles to Franco Zeffirelli and Kenneth Branagh. They also consider specific issues such as the portrayal of Shakespeare's women and the supernatural. The emphasis is on feature films for cinema, rather than television, with strong coverage of Hamlet, Richard III, Macbeth, King Lear and Romeo and Juliet.

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies offers a comprehensive introduction to the study of Shakespeare in a series of essays specially written by an international team of eminent scholars. Studies of Shakespeare's life, and of his relationship to the thought of his time, are followed by essays connecting his writings to the literary, dramatic, and theatrical conventions of his age. There are accounts of the transmission of his text, and of the theatrical and critical fortunes of his plays from his own time to ours. Particular attention is given to the twentieth century in studies of criticism, theatre history, the plays on film and television, new critical approaches, and reference books. Each essay is followed by a reading list. A successor to Cambridge's original Companion to Shakespeare Studies (1934) and the New Companion to Shakespeare Studies (1971) this attractively written and helpfully organized volume will be an indispensable companion to anyone with a serious interest in Shakespeare.

Treats, through excerpts from contemporary opinion and official documents, various aspects of the little world of theatre in the full context of Elizabethan-Jacobean life and times.

A fascinating portrait of life in Shakespeare's London, as seen from the theatrical perspective by popular historian Catharine Arnold. The life of William Shakespeare, Britain's greatest dramatist, is inextricably linked with the history of London. Together, the great writer and the great city came of age and confronted triumph and tragedy. Triumph came when Shakespeare's company, the Chamberlain's Men, opened the Globe playhouse on Bankside in 1599, under the patronage of Queen Elizabeth I. Tragedy touched the lives of many of his contemporaries, from fellow playwright Christopher Marlowe to the disgraced Earl of Essex, while London struggled against the ever-present threat of riots, rebellions and outbreaks of plague. Globe takes readers on a sweeping tour of London through Shakespeare's life and work, as Catharine Arnold recounts in fascinating detail how acting came of age. We learn about James Burbage, founder of the original Theatre in Shoreditch, who carried timbers across the Thames to build the Globe among the bear-gardens and brothels of Bankside, and of the terrible night in 1613 when the theatre caught fire during a performance of King Henry VIII. Rebuilt, the Globe continued to stand as a monument to Shakespeare's genius until 1642 when it was destroyed on the orders of Oliver Cromwell. And finally we learn how 300 years later, Shakespeare's Globe opened once more upon the Bankside, to great acclaim, rising like a phoenix from the flames. Arnold has created a vivid portrait of Shakespeare and his London from the bard's own plays and contemporary sources, combining a novelist's eye for detail with a historian's grasp of his unique contribution to the development of the English theatre. This is a definitive and compelling portrait of Shakespeare, London, the man and the myth.

Written by a team of leading international scholars, this Companion is designed to illuminate Shakespeare's works through discussion of the key topics of Shakespeare studies. Twenty-one essays provide lively and authoritative approaches to recent scholarship and criticism for readers keen to expand their knowledge and appreciation of Shakespeare. The book contains stimulating chapters on traditional topics such as Shakespeare's biography and the transmission of his texts. Individual readings of the plays are given in the context of genre as well as through the cultural and historical perspectives of race, sexuality and gender, and politics and religion. Essays on performance survey the latest digital media as well as stage and film. Throughout the volume, contributors discuss Shakespeare in a global as well as a national context, a dramatist with a long and constantly mutating history of reception and performance.

For producers and directors planning a production, several questions inevitably arise: Which play is appropriate for the contemporary audience? Should the text and setting be altered? Twelve leading contemporary directors answer these questions in interviews in this book and shed light on what Shakespeare means to them and to their audiences. Originally published in 1977.

In addition to the authoritative A-Z entries, it includes nearly 100 illustrations, a chronology, a guide to further reading, a thematic contents list, and special feature entries on each of Shakespeare's works. To make information on Shakespeare's major works easier to find, the feature entries have been grouped and placed in a centre section (fully cross-referenced from the A-Z). The thematic listing of entries - described in the press as 'an invaluable panorama of the contents' - has been updated to include allof the new entries. This edition contains a preface written by much-lauded Shakespearian actor Simon Russell Beale.Full of both entertaining trivia and scholarly detail, this authoritative Companion will delight the browser and reward students, academics, as well as anyone wanting to know more about Shakespeare.

Shakespearean performance criticism has undergone a sea change in recent years, and strong tides of discovery are continuing to shift the contours of the discipline. The essays in this volume, written by scholars from around the world, reveal how these critical cross-currents are influencing the ways we now view Shakespeare in performance. The volume is organised in four Parts. Part I interrogates how Shakespeare continues to achieve contemporaneity for Western audiences by exploring modes of performance, acting styles, and aesthetic choices regarded as experimental. Part II tackles the burgeoning field of reception: how and why audiences respond to performances as they do, or actors to the conditions in which they perform; how immersive productions turn spectators into actors; how memory and cognition shape and reshape the performances we think we saw. Part III addresses the ways in which revolutions in technology have altered our views of Shakespeare, both through the mediums of film and sound recording, and through digitalizing processes that have generated a profound reconsideration of what performance is and how it is accessed. The final Part grapples with intercultural Shakespeare, considering not only matters of cultural hegemony and appropriation in a 'global' importation of non-Western productions to Europe and North America, but also how Shakespeare has been made 'local' in performances staged or filmed in African, Asian, and Latin American countries. Together, these ground-breaking essays attest to the richness and diversity of Shakespearean performance criticism as it is practiced today, and they point the way to critical continents not yet explored.

The Routledge Companion to Scenography is the largest and most comprehensive collection of original essays to survey the historical, conceptual, critical and theoretical aspects of this increasingly important aspect of theatre and performance studies. Editor and leading scholar Arnold Aronson brings together a uniquely valuable anthology of texts especially commissioned from across the discipline of theatre and performance studies. Establishing a stable terminology for a deeply contested term for the first time, this volume looks at scenography as the totality of all the visual, spatial and sensory aspects of performance. Tracing a line from Aristotle's Poetics down to Brecht and Artaud and into contemporary immersive theatre and digital media, The Routledge Companion to Scenography is a vital addition to every theatre library.

Shakespeare: Script, Stage, Screenis the only Shakespeare textbook to combine an anthology of Shakespeare's plays with histories of their stage productions and analyses of the films. This textbook approaches Shakespeare's plays through the lens of interpretation, combining film theory, literary theory, and close readings of the texts to provide students with a scholarly yet accessible way to approach 14 of Shakespeare's most-often produced plays. Descriptions of key stage, film, and video interpretations, along with scrupulously edited and annotated play scripts, reinforce the belief that each staging--whether in the theater, on film, or for television--is an interpretation of the play, its point of view conditioned by the times, the medium, and the artist's vision.

Peter Platt here examines Renaissance culture through the lens of paradox. Specifically, he analyzes paradoxes surrounding geography, equity law, and the acting in and witnessing of the Elizabethan-Jacobean theater itself. In showing that Shakespeare's plays create and are created by a culture of paradox, Platt offers an exciting and innovative investigation of Shakespeare's cognitive and affective power over his audience.

Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance asks a central theoretical question in the study of drama: What is the relationship between the dramatic text and the meanings of performance? W.B. Worthen argues that the text cannot govern the force of its performance. Instead, the text becomes significant only as embodied in the changing conventions of its performance. Worthen explores this understanding of dramatic performativity by interrogating several contemporary sites of Shakespeare production. The book includes detailed discussions of recent films and stage productions, and sets Shakespeare performance alongside other works of contemporary drama and theatre.

Describes all the main features of the original staging of Shakespearean drama in one volume: the acting companies and their practices, the playhouses, the staging and the audiences. Thoroughly revised and updated, this fourth edition contains fresh materials about how specific plays by Shakespeare were first staged, and provides new information about the companies that staged them and their playhouses. The book incorporates everything that has been discovered in recent years about the early modern stage, including the archaeology of the Rose and the Globe. Also included is an invaluable appendix, listing all the plays known to have been performed at particular playhouses and by specific companies.

Explores the overlapping, hotly disputed borderlands of literature, theater and film. Concerned with the creative possibilities of rendering Shakespeare on film, the book studies the rich interpretations of Shakespeare by such major directors as Orson Welles, Roman Polanski, Peter Brook, Franco Zeffirelli, the famous Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, and one of Russia's greatest filmmakers, Grigori Kozintsev. It provides a detailed analyses of sixteen major films, illuminating the relations between Renaissance visions and modern re-visions, the parallels of poetic and cinematic imagery, and the quests of directors for significant cinematic style. Dramatically illustrated by over one hundred film photographs. Originally published by Indiana University Press in 1977.

Shakespeare has generated a critical literature that is unsurpassed in its richness and variety. Routledge has been responsible for a disproportionate share of this, especially through Methuen Academic, the original publisher of the Arden Shakespeare. Routledge Library Editions: Shakespearewill make up to sixty out of print titles on Shakespeare available again, and will reflect changing patterns in the reception and interpretation of Shakespeare over the last fifty years. Mini-sets are as follows: A: Comedies: 6 Volumes: 0-415-35328-9 B: Critical Studies: 38 Volumes: 0-415-35329-7 C: History and Politics: 6 Volumes: 0-415-35330-0 D: Performance: 4 Volumes: 0-415-35331-9 E: Tragedies: 8 Volumes: 0-415-35332-7

The "Ethiope," the "tawny Tartar," the "woman blackamoore," and "knotty Africanisms"?allusions to blackness abound in Renaissance texts. Kim F. Hall's eagerly awaited book is the first to view these evocations of blackness in the contexts of sexual politics, imperialism, and slavery in early modern England. Her work reveals the vital link between England's expansion into realms of difference and otherness?through exploration and colonialism-and the highly charged ideas of race and gender which emerged. How, Hall asks, did new connections between race and gender figure in Renaissance ideas about the proper roles of men and women? What effect did real racial and cultural difference have on the literary portrayal of blackness? And how did the interrelationship of tropes of race and gender contribute to a modern conception of individual identity? Hall mines a wealth of sources for answers to these questions: travel literature from Sir John Mandeville's Travels to Leo Africanus's History and Description of Africa; lyric poetry and plays, from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest to Ben Jonson's Masque of Blackness; works by Emilia Lanyer, Philip Sidney, John Webster, and Lady Mary Wroth; and the visual and decorative arts. Concentrating on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Hall shows how race, sexuality, economics, and nationalism contributed to the formation of a modern ( white, male) identity in English culture. The volume includes a useful appendix of not readily accessible Renaissance poems on blackness.

Written for performance, Shakespeare's plays are very different texts from any intended for a reader with book in hand and they require a different kind of attention. John Russell Brown's latest book attempts a description of Shakespeare's distinctive practice as a writer for the stage and, in doing so, suggests ways of responding to the plays which bring them alive in the mind as if in performance. It is a book for use, to quicken both eye and ear while reading the texts and to enliven almost any critical debate.