Anecdotal Shakespeare : a new performance history / Paul Menzer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Menzer, Paul, 1966- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Stage history--Anecdotes.

Shakespeare, William.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (281 p.)

Place of Publication:

London : Bloomsbury Publishing, [2018]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

"Shakespeare's four-hundred-year performance history is full of anecdotes--ribald, trivial, frequently funny, sometimes disturbing, and always but loosely allegiant to fact. Such anecdotes are nevertheless a vital index to the ways that Shakespeare's plays have generated meaning across varied times and in varied places. Furthermore, particular plays have produced particular anecdotes--stories of a real skull in Hamlet, superstitions about the name Macbeth, toga troubles in Julius Caesar--and therefore express something embedded in the plays they attend. Anecdotes constitute then not just a vital component of a play's performance history but a form of vernacular criticism by the personnel most intimately involved in their production: actors. These anecdotes are therefore every bit as responsive to and expressive of a play's meanings across time as the equally rich history of Shakespearean criticism or indeed the very performances these anecdotes treat. Anecdotal Shakespeare provides a history of post-Renaissance Shakespeare and performance, one not based in fact but no less full of truth."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

Contents:

Preface: Curtain Raiser

Introduction: Anecdotal Shakespeare

1. Hamlet: Skulls are good to think with

2. Othello: The Smudge

3. Romeo and Juliet: Central Casting

4. Richard III: Oedipus Text

5. Macbeth: An Embarrassment of Witches

Coda: Archives and Anecdotes

Index.

Notes:

Previously issued in print: London: Arden Shakespeare, 2015. Digital resource published 2018.

Description based on online resource; title from home page (viewed on February 9, 2018).

ISBN:

9781472576194

1472576195

9781472576187

1472576187

OCLC:

944225511