Playing Shakespeare: An Actor's Guide

Couverture
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 21 août 2001 - 288 pages
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.
 

Table des matières

The Two TraditionsElizabethan and Modern Acting
3
Using the VerseHeightened and Naturalistic Verse
27
Language and CharacterMaking the Words Ones Own
56
Using the ProseWhy Does Shakespeare Use Prose?
83
S Set Speeches and Soliloquies Taking the Audience with You
106
Using the SonnetsGoing Over Some Old Ground
128
Subjective Things
147
Irony and AmbiguityText That Isnt What It Seems
149
Passion and CoolnessA Question of Balance
167
Rehearsing the TextOrsino and Viola
188
Exploring a CharacterPlaying Shylock
211
Contemporary ShakespeareA Discussion
227
Poetry and Hidden PoetryThree Kinds of Failure
243
Droits d'auteur

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À propos de l'auteur (2001)

John Barton has been associate director of the Royal Shakespeare Company for more than thirty-five years and has directed more than fifty productions. He lives in London and conducts Shakespeare workshops throughout the U.K. and the U.S.

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