Shakespeare and Directing in Practice
Shakespeare and Directing in Practice

Author: Kevin Ewert

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-05-11

Total Pages: 158

ISBN-13: 1137369302

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When directors approach Shakespeare, is the play always the thing – or might something else sometimes be the thing? How can directing produce fresh contexts for Shakespeare's work? Part of the innovative series Shakespeare in Practice this book introduces students to current practices of directing Shakespeare. Ewert explores how the conventions and creative tropes of today's theatre make meaning in Shakespeare production now. The 'In Theory' section starts with an analysis of theatre production and directing more generally before looking at the specific Shakespeare context. The 'In Practice' section offers a wonderful range of production examples that showcase the wide breadth of approaches to directing Shakespeare today, from the 'conventional' to the most experimental. Providing a useful general overview of directing Shakespeare on stage today, this is an ideal text for undergraduate and postgraduate students studying 'Shakespeare in Performance' in Literature, Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies departments. This book will also inspire students studying directing as part of a theatre programme, and scholars, performers and lovers of Shakespeare everywhere.

How to Think Like Shakespeare
How to Think Like Shakespeare

Author: Scott Newstok

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-08-31

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 0691227691

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"This book offers a short, spirited defense of rhetoric and the liberal arts as catalysts for precision, invention, and empathy in today's world. The author, a professor of Shakespeare studies at a liberal arts college and a parent of school-age children, argues that high-stakes testing and a culture of assessment have altered how and what students are taught, as courses across the arts, humanities, and sciences increasingly are set aside to make room for joyless, mechanical reading and math instruction. Students have been robbed of a complete education, their imaginations stunted by this myopic focus on bare literacy and numeracy. Education is about thinking, Newstok argues, rather than the mastery of a set of rigidly defined skills, and the seemingly rigid pedagogy of the English Renaissance produced some of the most compelling and influential examples of liberated thinking. Each of the fourteen chapters explores an essential element of Shakespeare's world and work, aligns it with the ideas of other thinkers and writers in modern times, and suggests opportunities for further reading. Chapters on craft, technology, attention, freedom, and related topics combine past and present ideas about education to build a case for the value of the past, the pleasure of thinking, and the limitations of modern educational practices and prejudices"--

Shakespeare and Costume in Practice
Shakespeare and Costume in Practice

Author: Bridget Escolme

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-12-23

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 3030571491

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What is the role of costume in Shakespeare production? Shakespeare and Costume in Practice argues that costume design choices are central not only to the creation of period setting and the actor’s work on character, but to the cultural, political, and psychological meanings that the theatre makes of Shakespeare. The book explores questions about what the first Hamlet looked like in his mourning cloak; how costumes for a Shakespeare comedy can reflect or critique the collective nostalgias a culture has for its past; how costume and casting work together to ask new questions about Shakespeare and race. Using production case studies of Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Tempest, the book demonstrates that costume design can be a site of experimentation, playfulness, and transgression in the theatre – and that it can provoke audiences to think again about what power, race, and gender look like on the Shakespearean stage.

Directing Shakespeare in America
Directing Shakespeare in America

Author: Charles Ney

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2016-02-25

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 1474239854

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In this first substantive study of directing Shakespeare in the USA, Charles Ney compares and contrasts directors working at major companies across the country. Because of the complexities of directing Shakespeare for audiences today, a director's methods, values and biases are more readily perceptible in their work on Shakespeare than in more contemporary work. Directors disclose their interpretation of the text, their management of the various stages of production, how they go about supervising rehearsals and share tactics. This book will be useful to students wanting to develop skills, practitioners who want to learn from what other directors are doing, and scholars and students studying production practice and performance.

The Routledge Companion to Directors' Shakespeare
The Routledge Companion to Directors' Shakespeare

Author: John Russell Brown

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2009-06-02

Total Pages: 603

ISBN-13: 1134146485

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The Routledge Companion to Directors' Shakespeare is a major collaborative book about plays in performance. Thirty authoritative accounts describe in illuminating detail how some of theatre’s most talented directors have brought Shakespeare’s texts to the stage. Each chapter has a revealing story to tell as it explores a new and revitalising approach to the most familiar works in the English language. A must-have work of reference for students of both Shakespeare and theatre, this book presents some of the most acclaimed productions of the last hundred years in a variety of cultural and political contexts. Each entry describes a director’s own theatrical vision, and methods of rehearsal and production. These studies chart the extraordinary feats of interpretation and innovation that have given Shakespeare’s plays enduring life in the theatre. Notable entries include: Ingmar Bergman * Peter Brook * Declan Donnellan * Tyrone Guthrie * Peter Hall * Fritz Kortner * Robert Lepage * Joan Littlewood * Ninagawa Yukio * Joseph Papp * Roger Planchon * Max Reinhardt * Giorgio Strehler * Deborah Warner * Orson Welles * Franco Zeffirelli

Secrets of Acting Shakespeare
Secrets of Acting Shakespeare

Author: Patrick Tucker

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-11-05

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 1135862265

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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.

Teaching Shakespeare
Teaching Shakespeare

Author: Rex Gibson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-04-21

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 1316609871

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An improved, larger-format edition of the Cambridge School Shakespeare plays, extensively rewritten, expanded and produced in an attractive new design.

Playing Shakespeare
Playing Shakespeare

Author: John Barton

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2010-11-10

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 0307773914

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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.

Imaginary Performances in Shakespeare
Imaginary Performances in Shakespeare

Author: Aureliu Manea

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-04-21

Total Pages: 151

ISBN-13: 1000074145

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In Imaginary Performances in Shakespeare, visionary modernist theatre director Aureliu Manea analyses the theatrical possibilities of Shakespeare. Through nineteen Shakespeare plays, Manea sketches the intellectual parameters, the visual languages, and the emotional worlds of imagined stage interpretations of each; these nineteen short essays are appended by his essay ‘Confessions,’ an autobiographical meditation on the nature of theatre and the role of the director. This captivating book which will be attractive to anyone interested in Shakespeare and modern theatre.

Shakespeare and the Challenge of the Contemporary
Shakespeare and the Challenge of the Contemporary

Author: Francesca Clare Rayner

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-09-23

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1350182168

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Contemporary performance is a particularly stimulating area for the study of how Shakespeare is produced and received in different cultural contexts. Francesca Clare Rayner's original and thought-provoking book highlights the diversity and experimentalism of contemporary performance practices through a focus on unexplored performances in Portugal. This book references key debates within contemporary performance studies on intermediality, globalization and political participation and analyses their particular configurations within the Portuguese context. These case studies represent clear alternatives to the market-driven view of the contemporary as the continual reproduction of the new and the topical for global consumers. Instead, they recast the contemporary as a site of disempowerment, crisis and erasure in a Europe fragmented by economic austerity, political divisions around Brexit, ecological vacillation and an anxious refashioning of global relations between North and South.