Machine generated contents note: Introduction; 1. 'Improbable fictions: Shakespeare's plays without the plays; 2. Versatility and verisimilitude on sixteenth-century stages; 3. Doubling in The Winter's Tale; 4. Dramaturgical directives and Shakespeare's cast size; 5. Doubling in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet; 6. Where the boys aren't; 7. Doubling in Twelfth Night and Othello; Epilogue: Ragozine and Shakespearean substitution; Appendix; Bibliography; Index.

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.

Double Shakespeares examines contemporary performances of Shakespeare plays that employ the “emotional realist” traditions of acting that were codified by Stanislavski over a century ago. These performances recognize the inescapable doubleness of realism: that the actor may aspire to be the character but can never fully do so. This doubleness troubled the late-nineteenth-century actors and theorists who first formulated realist modes of acting; and it equally troubles theorists and theatre practitioners today. The book first looks at contemporary performances that foreground the doubleness of the actor’s body, particularly through cross-dressing. It then examines narratives of Shakespearean rehearsal—both fictional representations of rehearsal in film and video, and eye-witness narratives of actual rehearsals—and how they show us the process by which the actor does or does not “become” the character. And, finally, it looks at modern performances that “frame” Shakespeare’s play as a play-within-a-play, showing the audience both the character in the Shakespeare play-within and the actor in the frame-play acting that character.

This book analyzes, through easy-to-follow play synopses, the strengths and weaknesses of the female protagonists as they impact not only the plot of Shakespeare's plays but the male protagonist. Selected, condensed one-act versions of the plays are provided in order to enrich the discussion of the play, to stimulate in reading the play in its entirety, and to provide a springboard for group discussion of the play and the impact of the women. Contents: William Shakespeare: His Art, Life and Times; The Women of Shakespeare's Plays: An Overview; The Comedy of Errors; Hamlet, Prince of Denmark; The Merry Wives of Windsor; Julius Caesar; A Midsummer Night's Dream; Macbeth; Much Ado About Nothing; Othello the Moor of Venice; The Taming of the Shrew; Antony and Cleopatra; Twelfth Night or What You Will; Romeo and Juliet; The Two Gentlemen of Verona; Bibliography.

Are some of Shakespeareâ (TM)s romantic storybook heroines actually emoting sexually obscene (but very funny) lines? {â oeSexual quibbles (puns, play-on words), covertly uttered by precious-and-pure heroines, call for an immediate revision of viewpoint.â } When Fernando (The Tempest) is described as bravely swimming for shore â oein lusty strokeâ , would he be disqualified for doing this in Olympic competition? Before the walls of Harfleur, when Henry V threatens to â oemow like grass your fresh-fair virginsâ and have â oeyour naked infants spitted upon pikesâ , is he (and by inference his creator) barbarous? Or is he doing an hilarious comic imitation of Marloweâ (TM)s Tamburlaine before the walls of Damascus? {â oeThere exists an interesting Marlovian source for the Tamburlaine protagonist himselfâ "Ivan the Terrible. He proposed marriage to Queen Elizabeth, who tactfully turned him down.â } Rule Number 1: If a good writer seems surprisingly inept and has been known to be a wit or humorist, suspect parody or satire. Well, esteemed readers, you decide where to place your bets. On the critics? Or on William Shakespeare?

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.

What is (a) play? How do Shakespeare's plays engage with and represent early modern modes of play – from jests and games to music, spectacle, movement, animal-baiting and dance? How have we played with Shakespeare in the centuries since? And how does the structure of the plays experienced in the early modern playhouse shape our understanding of Shakespeare plays today? Shakespeare / Play brings together established and emerging scholars to respond to these questions, using approaches spanning theatre and dance history, cultural history, critical race studies, performance studies, disability studies, archaeology, affect studies, music history, material history and literary and dramaturgical analysis. Ranging across Shakespeare's dramatic oeuvre as well as early modern lost plays, dance notation, conduct books, jest books and contemporary theatre and film, it includes consideration of Measure for Measure, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, Titus Andronicus, Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear and The Merry Wives of Windsor, among others. The subject of this volume is reflected in its structure: Shakespeare / Play features substantial new essays across 5 'acts', interwoven with 7 shorter, playful pieces (a 'prologue', 4 'act breaks', a 'jig' and a 'curtain call'), to offer new directions for research on Shakespearean playing, playmaking and performance. In so doing, this volume interrogates the conceptions of playing of/in Shakespeare that shape how we perform, read, teach and analyze Shakespeare today.