Voices of Shakespeare's England


Book Description

Voices of Shakespeare's England offers students and public library patrons over 50 primary documents that illuminate the character, personalities, and events of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. Voices of Shakespeare's England: Contemporary Accounts of Elizabethan Daily Life helps readers explore the era that produced, among other things, the world's greatest playwright. It brings together excerpts from over 50 primary documents written in William Shakespeare's lifetime, including letters, literature, speeches and polemics, official reports, and descriptive narratives. Voices of Shakespeare's England includes the works of Shakespeare himself, as well as other poets and playwrights, but it also expands beyond the literary world to cover politics, religion, economics, social change, and the royal court. By allowing Shakespeare's contemporaries to speak in their own voices, it offers an illuminating look at the breadth of Elizabethan society, including major historic events in England as well as Scotland, Ireland, the European continent, and even the new world of America.




Voices of Shakespeare's England


Book Description

A collection of excerpts from more than 40 primary documents written in William Shakespeare's lifetime, including letters, literature, speeches and polemics, official reports, and descriptive narratives.




Speaking in Shakespeare's Voice


Book Description

Speaking in Shakespeare's Voice: A Guide for American Actors is a book for undergraduate and graduate students of acting as well as for the professional who would like to perform Shakespeare with the skill of a classical actor. It is also valuable for European actors interested in performing Shakespeare in American English and British actors who would like to explore Shakespeare from an American perspective. This guide focuses on the technical elements of voice and speech, including breathing, resonance, and diction, as well as providing an introduction to verse speaking and scansion and to Shakespeare’s rhetorical devices, such as antithesis, alliteration, onomatopoeia, irony, metaphor, and wordplay. These topics are annotated with examples from Shakespeare’s plays to demonstrate how an actor can apply the lessons to actual performance. The book also explores the history of Shakespearean performance in the United States and provides guidance on current editions of Shakespeare’s text from the Folio to online Open Source Shakespeare. A helpful appendix offers examples of two-person scenes and contextualized monologues.




Shakespeare on Toast


Book Description

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.




Voices and Books in the English Renaissance


Book Description

"Two ideas lie at the heart of this study and its claim that we need a new history of reading: that voices in books can affect us deeply ; that printed books can be brought to life with the voice. Voices and Books offers a new history of reading focussed on the oral and voice-aware silent reader, rather than the historical reader we have privileged in the last few decades, who is invariably male, silent, and alone. It recovers the vocality of education for boys and girls in Renaissance England, and the importance of training in pronuntiatio (delivery) for oral-aural literary culture. It offers the first attempt to recover the voice-and tone-from textual sources. It explores what happens when we bring voice to text, how vocal tone realizes or changes textual meaning, and how the literary writers of the past tried to represent their own and others' voices, as well as manage and exploit the voices of their readers. It offers fresh readings of the key Tudor authors who anticipated oral readers: John Bale, Anne Askew, William Baldwin, Thomas Nashe. And it aims to rethink what a printed book can be, searching the printed page for vocal cues, and exploring the neglected role of the voice in the printing process"-- Provided by publisher.




Shakespeare's Accents


Book Description

A history of the reception of Shakespeare on the English stage focusing on the vocal dimensions of theatrical performance.




English Shakespeares


Book Description

As a regular reviewer for Shakespeare Survey and the BBC, Holland has examined the variety, the strengths and the problems of English productions. His introductory chapter points to themes which are taken up in the detailed accounts that follow: the size and scale of different theatres, the difficulties of over-familiarity, the power of director's theatre, the possibilities of design, the excitement of new actors, the discoveries of regionalism and the variety of playing spaces in which Shakespeare is performed. The main part of the book is a chronological account of productions which charts the work of several English companies, including the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal National Theatre, Cheek by Jowl, Northern Broadsides and the English Shakespeare Company. A final chapter compares the English experience with productions elsewhere, including America, France, Germany and Russia.




Theatre and Testimony in Shakespeare's England


Book Description

Holger Syme presents a radically new explanation for the theatre's importance in Shakespeare's time. He portrays early modern England as a culture of mediation, dominated by transactions in which one person stood in for another, giving voice to absent speakers or bringing past events to life. No art form related more immediately to this culture than the theatre. Arguing against the influential view that the period underwent a crisis of representation, Syme draws upon extensive archival research in the fields of law, demonology, historiography and science to trace a pervasive conviction that testimony and report, delivered by properly authorised figures, provided access to truth. Through detailed close readings of plays by Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare - in particular Volpone, Richard II and The Winter's Tale - and analyses of criminal trial procedures, the book constructs a revisionist account of the nature of representation on the early modern stage.




Shakespeare and Popular Voice


Book Description

In Shakespeare and the Popular Voice Annabel Patterson challenges as counter-intuitive the common opinion that Shakespeare was anti-democratic, contemptuous of the crowd and an unfailing supporter of Elizabethan social hierarchy.




Freeing Shakespeare's Voice


Book Description

A passionate exploration of the process of comprehending and speaking the words of William Shakespeare. Detailing exercises and analyzing characters' speech and rhythms, Linklater provides the tools to increase understanding and make Shakespeare's words one's own.