Author: Peter Hall
Publisher: Oberon Books
ISBN: 9781849433556
Release Date: 2012-06-18
Genre: Performing Arts
This is the ebook edition of Peter Hall's best-selling guide to acting Shakespeare that has sold over 10,000 copies. This is a new edition for a new generation – compact and concise with the facts, the way modern students and actors need it. The pay off the book according to Sir Peter is simple – it will make you a better actor! Shakespeare tells the actor when to go fast and when to go slow; when to pause, when to come in on cue and when to accent a word. His text is full of such clues. Shakespeare heard the lines as he wrote them. Shakespeare’s Advice to the Players makes watching or reading Shakespeare a richer experience, for audiences as well as actors.
Author: John Barton
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 9780307773913
Release Date: 2010-11-10
Genre: Performing Arts
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.
Author: Peter Hall
Publisher: Oberon Books
ISBN: 9781849432603
Release Date: 2012-06-18
Genre: Drama
In these four lectures Peter Hall reveals a lifetime of discoveries about classical theatre, Shakespeare, opera and modern drama. The central argument is that form and structured language paradoxically give freedom to power of thought and feeling, much as the masks of early Greek drama enabled actors to express extreme emotion. The mask may take many forms – the precise language of Beckett and Pinter, the classical form of Mozart’s operas, or Shakespeare’s verse. Reprinted to form part of the Oberon Masters series, a brand new collection of attractive hardbacks on key themes within the arts written by leading lights in each subject. ‘The wisest and most stimulating short book about theatre since Peter Brook’s The Empty Space - Charles Spencer, Sunday Telegraph
Author: Sally F. Porterfield
Publisher: Greenwood Publishing Group
ISBN: UOM:39015033950299
Release Date: 1994-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
Shakespeare's problem plays present an unusually fertile field for Jungian tillage. Like a face glimpsed in a crowd and then lost, these works seem to hint at truths just beyond our grasp. Viewed through the lens of Jung's theory of archetypes, pieces fall into place with remarkable clarity, each revolving around a specific critical axis that allows us to see the form and structure that elude us in other readings. The author argues that Jung's theories offer the best key to date for these most intriguing of literary and dramatic puzzles.
Throughout the book, the author subjects Shakespeare's language to rigorous examination, illuminating his extraordinary ability to bring his characters to life by a simple turn of phrase, a breath or even a pause. Block shows how we can only fully understand these characters, and the meaning of the plays, by speaking the words out loud. Drawing on characters from across all of Shakespeare's plays - and looking in detail at Macbeth, The Winter's Tale, Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado About Nothing Block covers everything the actor needs to know, including: the essential distinctions between prose, rhymed verse and unrhymed verse, and the different strategies to be used when speaking them; the difference between 'you' and 'thou'; Shakespeare's use of silence; and the vital importance of paying attention to Shakespeare's 'original' punctuation. Speaking the Speech is a book for actors and directors who want to improve their understanding of Shakespeare's language in order to speak it better. It is also a fascinating read for anyone who wants to deepen their appreciation of Shakespeare's language and the way it comes to life when spoken aloud.
Author: Ralph Alan Cohen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 9781474228732
Release Date: 2018-05-03
Genre: Drama
For teachers and lovers of Shakespeare, ShakesFear and How to Cure It provides a comprehensive approach to the challenge and rewards of teaching Shakespeare and gives teachers both an overview of each of Shakespeare's 38 plays and specific classroom tools for teaching it. Written by a celebrated teacher, scholar and director of Shakespeare, it shows teachers how to use the text to make the words and the moments come alive for their students. It refutes the idea that Shakespeare's language is difficult and provides a survey of the plays by someone who has lived intimately with them on the page and on the stage.
Author: Rhona Silverbush
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 9781429998499
Release Date: 2002-09-18
Genre: Drama
The most comprehensive sourcebook of Shakespeare's monologues ever available in one volume. A detailed guide to approaching Shakespearean text, Speak the Speech! contains everything an actor needs to select and prepare a Shakespeare monologue for classwork, auditions, or performance. Included herein are over 150 monologues. Each one is placed in context with a brief introduction, is carefully punctuated in the manner that best illustrates its meaning, and is painstakingly and thoroughly annotated. Each is also accompanied by commentary that will spark the actor's imagination by exploring how the interrelationship of meter and the choice of words and sounds yields clues to character and performance. And throughout the book sidebars relate historical, topical, technical, and other useful and entertaining information relevant to the text. In addition, the authors include an overview of poetic and rhetorical elements, brief synopses of all the plays, and a comprehensive index along with other guidelines that will help readers locate the perfect monologue for their needs. More than just an actor's toolkit, Speak the Speech! is also an entertaining resource that will help demystify Shakespeare's language for the student and theater lover alike.
Author: Robert Cohen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781317429388
Release Date: 2015-09-07
Genre: Performing Arts
In Shakespeare on Theatre, master acting teacher Robert Cohen brilliantly scrutinises Shakespeare's implicit theories of acting, paying close attention to the plays themselves and providing a wealth of fascinating historical evidence. What he finds will surprise scholars and actors alike – that Shakespeare's drama and his practice as an actor were founded on realism, though one clearly distinct from the realism later found in Stanislavski. Shakespeare on Acting is an extraordinary introduction to the way the plays articulate a profound understanding of performance and reflect the life and times of a uniquely talented theatre-maker.
Author: Robert Lewis
Publisher:
ISBN: 1559360038
Release Date: 1989
Genre: Performing Arts
"The best theatre book I read this year. The remarkable thing is its lack of bunk. Actors and watchers of actors will find it a book to mark up and read again."--Dan Sullivan, Los Angeles Times
Author: John Gielgud
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN: 1557833745
Release Date: 1999
Genre: Performing Arts
The renowned actor draws on his experiences with Shakespeare's plays, as both actor and director, to illuminate the challenges of staging Shakespeare's works.
