Shakespeare’s Body Language
Shakespeare’s Body Language

Author: Miranda Fay Thomas

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-11-14

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1350035491

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Why do the Capulets bite their thumbs at the Montagues? Why do the Venetians spit upon Shylock's Jewish gaberdine? What is it about Volumnia's act of kneeling that convinces Coriolanus not to assault the city of Rome? Shakespeare's Body Language is a ground-breaking new study of Shakespearean drama, revealing the previously unseen history of social tensions found within the performance of gestures – and how such gestures are used to shame those within the body politic of early modern England. The first full study of shaming gestures in Shakespearean drama, this book establishes how shame is often rooted in the gendered expectations of the Renaissance era. Exploring how the performance of gestures such as figging, the cuckold's horns, and even the in-action of stillness created shaming spectacles on the early modern stage and its wider society, Shakespeare's Body Language argues that gestures are embodied social metaphors which epitomise the personal as political. It reveals the tensions of everyday life as key motivators behind the actions of Shakespeare's characters, and considers how honour and its opposite, shame, are constructed in terms of gender norms. Featuring in-depth analyses of plays across Shakespeare's career, this book explores how the playwright's understanding of shame and humiliation is rooted in performance anxiety and gender politics, explaining how theatrical gestures can create dramatic tension in a way that words alone cannot. It offers both rich insights into the early modern context of Shakespeare's drama and confirms the startling relevance of his work to modern audiences.

Shakespeare’s Body Language
Shakespeare’s Body Language

Author: Miranda Fay Thomas

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-11-14

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1350035483

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Why do the Capulets bite their thumbs at the Montagues? Why do the Venetians spit upon Shylock's Jewish gaberdine? What is it about Volumnia's act of kneeling that convinces Coriolanus not to assault the city of Rome? Shakespeare's Body Language is a ground-breaking new study of Shakespearean drama, revealing the previously unseen history of social tensions found within the performance of gestures – and how such gestures are used to shame those within the body politic of early modern England. The first full study of shaming gestures in Shakespearean drama, this book establishes how shame is often rooted in the gendered expectations of the Renaissance era. Exploring how the performance of gestures such as figging, the cuckold's horns, and even the in-action of stillness created shaming spectacles on the early modern stage and its wider society, Shakespeare's Body Language argues that gestures are embodied social metaphors which epitomise the personal as political. It reveals the tensions of everyday life as key motivators behind the actions of Shakespeare's characters, and considers how honour and its opposite, shame, are constructed in terms of gender norms. Featuring in-depth analyses of plays across Shakespeare's career, this book explores how the playwright's understanding of shame and humiliation is rooted in performance anxiety and gender politics, explaining how theatrical gestures can create dramatic tension in a way that words alone cannot. It offers both rich insights into the early modern context of Shakespeare's drama and confirms the startling relevance of his work to modern audiences.

Shakespeare's Knowledgeable Body
Shakespeare's Knowledgeable Body

Author: Martha Kalnin Diede

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 9781433101335

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Taking a new approach to the metaphor of the political body, this book examines Shakespeare's representation of that body as possessing epistemological faculties. The theater is one of these faculties, and is, therefore, essential to the health and survival of the Early Modern state. By depicting the theater as an essential faculty of the body politic, Shakespeare offers a defense of the theater against anti-theatrical critics. Students and teachers interested in the body and its representations in literature will find this text illuminating as will those scholars whose work focuses on knowledge, its relationship to the body, ways of knowing, and anti-theatrical prejudice.

Shakespeare and the Body Politic
Shakespeare and the Body Politic

Author: Bernard J. Dobski

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2013-04-25

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0739170961

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mate Shakespeare’s corpus, and one of the most prominent is the image of the body. Sketched out in the eternal lines of his plays and poetry, and often drawn in exquisite detail, variations on the body metaphor abound in the works of Shakespeare. Attention to the political dimensions of this metaphor in Shakespeare and the Body Politic permits readers to examine the sentiments of romantic love and family life, the enjoyment of peace, prosperity and justice, and the spirited pursuit of honor and glory as they inevitably emerge within the social, moral, and religious limits of particular political communities. The lessons to be learned from such an examination are both timely and timeless. For the tensions between the desires and pursuits of individuals and the health of the community forge the sinews of every body politic, regardless of the form it may take or even where and when one might encounter it. In his plays and poetry Shakespeare illuminates these tensions within the body politic, which itself constitutes the framework for a flourishing community of human beings and citizens—from the ancient city-states of Greece and Rome to the Christian cities and kingdoms of early modern Europe. The contributors to this volume attend to the political context and role of political actors within the diverse works of Shakespeare that they explore. Their arguments thus exhibit together Shakespeare’s political thought. By examining his plays and poetry with the seriousness they deserve, Shakespeare’s audiences and readers not only discover an education in human and political virtue, but also find themselves written into his lines. Shakespeare’s body of work is indeed politic, and the whole that it forms incorporates us all.

Shakespeare's Language in Digital Media
Shakespeare's Language in Digital Media

Author: Janelle Jenstad

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-12-22

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 1317056108

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The authors of this book ask how digital research tools are changing the ways in which practicing editors historicize Shakespeare's language. Scholars now encounter, interpret, and disseminate Shakespeare's language through an increasing variety of digital resources, including online editions such as the Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE), searchable lexical corpora such as the Early English Books Online-Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP) or the Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME) collections, high-quality digital facsimiles such as the Folger Shakespeare Library's Digital Image Collection, text visualization tools such as Voyant, apps for reading and editing on mobile devices, and more. What new insights do these tools offer about the ways Shakespeare's words made meaning in their own time? What kinds of historical or historicizing arguments can digital editions make about Shakespeare's language? A growing body of work in the digital humanities allows textual critics to explore new approaches to editing in digital environments, and enables language historians to ask and answer new questions about Shakespeare's words. The authors in this unique book explicitly bring together the two fields of textual criticism and language history in an exploration of the ways in which new tools are expanding our understanding of Early Modern English.

Shakespeare on Toast
Shakespeare on Toast

Author: Ben Crystal

Publisher: Icon Books Ltd

Published: 2015-12-24

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 178578031X

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Actor, producer and director Ben Crystal revisits his acclaimed book on Shakespeare for the 400th anniversary of his death, updating and adding three new chapters. Shakespeare on Toast knocks the stuffing from the staid old myth of the Bard, revealing the man and his plays for what they really are: modern, thrilling, uplifting drama. The bright words and colourful characters of the greatest hack writer are brought brilliantly to life, sweeping cobwebs from the Bard – his language, his life, his world, his sounds, his craft. Crystal reveals man and work as relevant, accessible and alive – and, astonishingly, finds Shakespeare's own voice amid the poetry. Whether you're studying Shakespeare for the first time or you've never set foot near one of his plays but have always wanted to, this book smashes down the walls that have been built up around this untouchable literary figure. Told in five fascinating Acts, this is quick, easy and good for you. Just like beans on toast.

Thinking Shakespeare (Revised Edition)
Thinking Shakespeare (Revised Edition)

Author: Barry Edelstein

Publisher: Theatre Communications Group

Published: 2018-07-03

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 155936890X

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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.

The Anatomy of Insults in Shakespeare’s World
The Anatomy of Insults in Shakespeare’s World

Author: Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-05-19

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1350055506

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The Anatomy of Insults in Shakespeare's World explores Shakespeare's complex art of insults and shows how the playwright set abusive words at the heart of many of his plays. It provides valuable insights on a key aspect of Shakespeare's work that has been little explored to date. Focusing on the most memorable scenes of insult, abusive characters and insulting effects in the plays, the volume shifts how readers understand and read Shakespeare's insults. Chapters analyze the spectacular rhetoric of insult in Henry IV, Troilus and Cressida and Timon of Athens; the 'skirmishes of wit' in Much Ado about Nothing and A Midsummer Night's Dream; insult and duelling codes in Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It and Twelfth Night, the complex relationships between slander and insult in Much Ado about Nothing and Measure for Measure; the taming of the tongue in Richard III and The Taming of the Shrew, the trauma of insults in Othello, The Merchant of Venice and Cymbeline and insult beyond words in Henry V and King lear. Grasping insult as a specific speech act, the volume explores the issues of verbal violence and verbal shields and the importance of reception and interpretation in matters of insult. It offers a panorama of the Elizabethan politics of insult and redefines Shakespeare's drama as a theatre of insults.

Shakespeare and Disability Studies
Shakespeare and Disability Studies

Author: Sonya Freeman Loftis

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-04-08

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 0192650076

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Shakespeare and Disability Studies argues that an understanding of disability theory is essential for scholars, teachers, and directors who wish to create more inclusive and accessible theatrical and pedagogical encounters with Shakespeare's plays. Previous work in the field of early modern disability studies has focused largely on Renaissance characters that a modern audience might view as disabled. This volume argues that the conception of disability as residing within individual literary characters limits understandings of disability in Shakespeare: by theorizing disability vis-a-vis characters, previous studies have largely overlooked readers, performers, and audience members who self-identify as disabled. Focusing on issues such as accessible performances, inclusive casting, and Shakespeare-based therapy, Shakespeare and Disability Studies reinvigorates textual approaches to disability in Shakespeare by reading accessibility as an art form and exploring both the powers and potential limits of universal design in theatrical performance. The book examines the complex interdependence among the concepts of theory, access, and inclusion—demonstrating the crucial role of disability theory in building access and examining the ways that access may both open and foreclose inclusive dramatic practice. Shakespeare and Disability Studies challenges Shakespearians, from students to audience members, from classroom teachers to theatre practitioners, to consider how Shakespeare, as industry, as high art, and as cultural symbol, impacts the lived reality of those with disabled bodies and/or minds.

William Shakespeare's Star Wars
William Shakespeare's Star Wars

Author: Ian Doescher

Publisher: Quirk Books

Published: 2013-07-09

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 1594746559

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The New York Times Best Seller Experience the Star Wars saga reimagined as an Elizabethan drama penned by William Shakespeare himself, complete with authentic meter and verse, and theatrical monologues and dialogue by everyone from Darth Vader to R2D2. Return once more to a galaxy far, far away with this sublime retelling of George Lucas’s epic Star Wars in the style of the immortal Bard of Avon. The saga of a wise (Jedi) knight and an evil (Sith) lord, of a beautiful princess held captive and a young hero coming of age, Star Wars abounds with all the valor and villainy of Shakespeare’s greatest plays. Authentic meter, stage directions, reimagined movie scenes and dialogue, and hidden Easter eggs throughout will entertain and impress fans of Star Wars and Shakespeare alike. Every scene and character from the film appears in the play, along with twenty woodcut-style illustrations that depict an Elizabethan version of the Star Wars galaxy. Zounds! This is the book you’re looking for.