Reading Shakespeare on Stage

Portada
University of Delaware Press, 1995 - 298 páginas
"Reading Shakespeare on Stage offers a straightforward set of criteria whereby anyone, from the first-time playgoer to the most experienced Shakespearean scholar, may evaluate his or her response to a production of one of Shakespeare's scripts. This articulation of response is not a by-product of going to the theater, but a central part of the experience. The "invitation to response" is a function of Shakespeare's stage, which was open to the audience on three sides, and is incorporated into his scripts through soliloquies, asides, and references to Shakespeare's stage and his dramaturgy." "The concept of "script" (as opposed to "text") makes possible an approach to Shakespeare's plays as plays, a function to which their literary quality is subordinate. That fact, however, does not mean that recent critical tendencies are irrelevant to the scripts. Feminist and historicist readings of the plays are "contextualized" in and by the ongoing energy system of production. It remains true, however, that many members of the growing audience for live performances can not determine what may have been strong or weak about a given production. The size and shape of the stage and the size of the auditorium, for example, define what can occur within the given space, but few spectators take that crucial factor into account. Reading Shakespeare on Stage provides the criteria for evaluation, while at the same time admitting that the criteria themselves are subject to debate and that their application emerges from the subjective psychology of perception of individual spectators."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Dentro del libro

Contenido

Television and Live Performance
31
The Concept of Script
39
1987 and the Question of Space
69
Directors Decisions 1989
90
The Summer of King Lear
136
Winter of the Scottish Play
157
Measure for Measure at Stratford Canada 1992
175
The Good the Horrid and the InBetween
186
The Directors and the Critics Stratford on Avon 1992
213
Richard III Large and Small
234
London February 1993
249
Postscript
263
Appendix
268
Works Cited
277
Index
291
Derechos de autor

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Página 29 - A strong presence of actors and a strong presence of spectators can produce a circle of unique intensity in which barriers can be broken and the invisible become real.

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