Author's pen and actor's voice : playing and writing in Shakespeare's theatre / Robert Weimann ; edited by Helen Higbee and William West.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Weimann, Robert, author.

Contributor:

Higbee, Helen, editor.

West, William N., editor.

Series:

Cambridge studies in Renaissance literature and culture ; 39.

Cambridge studies in Renaissance literature and culture ; 39

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Knowledge--Performing arts.

Shakespeare, William.

Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Criticism and interpretation.

Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Dramatic production.

Theater in literature.

Acting in literature.

Drama--Technique.

Drama.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiii, 298 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Other Title:

Author's Pen & Actor's Voice

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In this seminal work, Robert Weimann redefines the relationship between writing and performance, or 'playing', in Shakespeare's theatre. Through close reading and careful analysis Weimann offers a reconsideration and redefinition of Elizabethan performance and production practices. The study reviews the most recent methodologies of textual scholarship, the new history of the Elizabethan theatre, performance theory, and film and video interpretation, and offers a new approach to understanding Shakespeare. Weimann examines a range of plays including Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Henry V, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Macbeth, among others, as well as other contemporary works. A major part of the study explores the duality between playing and writing: the imaginary world-in-the-play and the visible, audible playing-in-the-world of the playhouse, and Weimann focuses especially on the gap between these two, between the so-called 'pen' and 'voice'.

Contents:

Introduction: conjunctures and concepts

Performance and authority in Hamlet (1603)

A new agenda for authority

The "low and ignorant" crust of corruption

Towards a circulation of authority in the theatre

Players, printers, preachers: distraction in authority

Pen and voice: versions of doubleness

"Frivolous jestures" vs. matter of "worthiness" (Tamburlaine)

Bifold authority in Troilus and Cressida

"Unworthy scaffold" for "so great an object" (Henry V)

Playing with a difference

To "disfigure, or to present" (A Midsummer Night's Dream)

To "descant" on difference and deformity (Richard III)

The "self-resembled show"

Presentation, or the performant function

Histories in Elizabethan performance

Disparity in mid-Elizabethan theatre history

Reforming "a whole theatre of others" (Hamlet)

From common player to excellent actor

Differentiation, exclusion, withdrawal

Hamlet and the purposes of playing

Renaissance writing and common playing

Unworthy antics in the glass of fashion

"When in one line two crafts directly meet"

(Word)play and the mirror of representation

Space (in)dividable: locus and platea revisited

Space as symbolic form: the locus

The open space: provenance and function

Locus and platea in Macbeth

Banqueting in Timon of Athens

Shakespeare's endings: commodious thresholds

Epilogues vs. closure

Ends of postponement: holiday into workaday

Thresholds to memory and commodity

Liminality: cultural authority 'betwixt-and-between'.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Includes bibliographical references (p. 269-288) and index.

ISBN:

1-107-12031-4

0-511-48407-0

1-280-16217-1

0-521-78735-1

0-511-32516-9

0-511-04600-6

0-511-15365-1

0-511-11866-X

OCLC:

475914655