Cleopatra and a Boy Actor

Cleopatra and a Boy Actor PDF Author: Satoshi Yoshida
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description

Cleopatra and a Boy Actor

Cleopatra and a Boy Actor PDF Author: Satoshi Yoshida
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description


Boy Actors in Early Modern England

Boy Actors in Early Modern England PDF Author: Harry R. McCarthy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009098950
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
This innovative study draws on theatre history and present-day performance to re-appraise the remarkable skills of early modern boy actors.

The Cleopatra Boy

The Cleopatra Boy PDF Author: Eric Malpass
Publisher: House of Stratus
ISBN: 0755101987
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
William Shakespeare has reached middle age. England is at a critical point in its history: Queen Elizabeth is dead, James I is waiting to claim the English throne, and the plague menaces once again. William Shakespeare is a much-changed man. Returning to London from Stratford, he is struggling with his own personal crises - not least the death of his son, Hamnet. He no longer wants to write comic plays and his mind is obsessed with the story of a beautiful Egyptian queen and her Roman lover? This compelling and evocative sequel to 'Sweet Will' is a magnificent portrayal of life in and around London's Globe Theatre.

Erotic Politics

Erotic Politics PDF Author: Susan Zimmerman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134919840
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Identifying the stage as a primary site for erotic display, these essays take eroticism in Renaissance culture as a paradigm for issues of sexuality and identity in early modern culture. Contributors examine how the Renaissance stage functioned as a decoder for erotic experience, both reinforcing and subverting expected sexual behaviour. They argue that the dynamics of theatrical eroticism served to deconstruct gender definitions, leaving conventional categories of sexuality blurred, confused - or absent. In seeking to reposition the conventions and subversions of gender and desire in terms of one another, these essays open up an attractive and distinctive perspective in cultural debate.

The Great White Bard

The Great White Bard PDF Author: Farah Karim-Cooper
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0861545354
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
SHAKESPEARE: increasingly irrelevant or lone literary genius of the Western canon? 'Powerful and illuminating' James Shapiro, author of 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, winner of the Baillie Gifford 'Winner of Winners' 2023 Professor Farah Karim-Cooper grew up loving the Bard, perhaps because Romeo and Juliet felt Pakistani to her. But why was being white as a ‘snowy dove’ essential to Juliet’s beauty? Combining piercing analysis of race, gender and otherness in beloved plays from Othello to The Tempest with a radical reappraisal of Elizabethan London, The Great White Bard entreats us neither to idealise nor to fossilise Shakespeare but instead to look him in the eye and reckon with the discomforts of his plays, playhouses and society. If we persist in reading Shakespeare as representative of only one group, as the very pinnacle of the white Western canon, then he will truly be in peril. But if we dare to bring Shakespeare down from his plinth, we might unveil a playwright for the twenty-first century. We might expand and enrich his extraordinary legacy. We might even fall in love with him all over again. *** A TIME MAGAZINE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 'Insightful, passionate, piled with facts and has a warm, infectious love for theatre and Shakespeare running through every chapter.' ADRIAN LESTER, CBE 'Dive in and your whole cultural landscape will be refreshed and reframed... A challenging, riveting read, The Great White Bard reminds us how powerful the stories we tell can be on our lives.' ADJOA ANDOH 'Vivid… a thorough analysis but also a kind of love letter… Karim-Cooper sees Shakespeare as holding a mirror to this society, with his plays interrogating live issues around race, identity and the colonial enterprise… Her arguments come to feel essential and should be absorbed by every theatre director, writer, critic, interested in finding new ways into the work.’ GUARDIAN 'There are plenty of books on Shakespeare: but this one is different. This is Shakespeare as we’ve (most of us) never been willing to see him – and the works emerge from the analysis as newly complicit, powerful and yet recuperative.' EMMA SMITH, AUTHOR OF PORTABLE MAGIC

I Was Cleopatra

I Was Cleopatra PDF Author: Dennis Abrams
Publisher: Groundwood Books Ltd
ISBN: 1773060236
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 133

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Book Description
The provocative fictional memoir of a boy actor in Shakespearian London. In Shakespeare’s time, women were not allowed to appear on stage, and so female parts were played by boy actors. In I Was Cleopatra, readers meet John Rice — perhaps the most beautiful and acclaimed boy actor of them all. It is believed by many that John Rice originated the roles of Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra and Cordelia, and this fictional memoir explores his life both on and off the stage. With graceful prose and an encyclopedic knowledge of the period, Dennis Abrams invites readers to experience gender fluidity and sexuality through the fictional recollections of a fascinating historical figure as he reflects on his life in this “farewell” to his theatrical past. The story follows John from the age of thirteen, when he leaves his family in Reading to join the King’s Men theater troupe in London as an apprentice boy actor. Over the course of the next few years, John eagerly hones the acting skills necessary to portray female roles. He memorizes lines, reads all the plays he can get his hands on, and works on imitating female gestures and mannerisms. He becomes a friend, and eventually a lover, of Alexander, a boy actor who is getting too old to play female roles. And he works closely with Shakespeare himself, who coaches him through the roles of Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra, among others. But around the time he turns sixteen, John starts to worry about inevitably becoming too old to convincingly portray women onstage, which leads to some unsettling choices. Key Text Features literary references author’s note Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.3 Describe how a particular story's or drama's plot unfolds in a series of episodes as well as how the characters respond or change as the plot moves toward a resolution. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.6 Explain how an author develops the point of view of the narrator or speaker in a text.

Theatre Under Louis XIV

Theatre Under Louis XIV PDF Author: J. Prest
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230600921
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
This book explores the fascinating phenomenon of cross-casting and related gender issues in different theatrical genres and different performance contexts during the heyday of French theatre. Although professional acting troupes under Louis XIV were mixed, cross-casting remained an important feature of French court ballet (in which the King himself performed a number of women's roles) and an occasional feature of spoken comedy and tragic opera. Cross-casting also persisted out of necessity in the school drama of the period. This book fills an important gap in the history of French theatre and provides new insight into wider theoretical questions of gender and theatricality. The inclusion of chapters on ballet and opera (as well as spoken drama) opens up the richness of French theatre under Louis XIV in a way that has not been achieved before.

Shakespearean Character

Shakespearean Character PDF Author: Jelena Marelj
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350061409
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Why do we continue to experience many of Shakespeare's dramatic characters as real people with personal histories, individual personalities, and psychological depth? What is it that makes Falstaff seem to jump off the page, and what gives Hamlet his complexity? Shakespearean Character: Language in Performance examines how the extraordinary lifelikeness of some of Shakespeare's most enigmatic and self-conscious characters is produced through language. Using theories drawn from linguistic pragmatics, this book claims that our impression of characters as real people is an effect arising from characters' pragmatic use of language in combination with the historical and textual meanings that Shakespeare conveys to his audience by dramatic and meta-dramatic means. Challenging the notion of interiority attributed to Shakespeare's characters by many contemporary critics, theatre professionals, and audiences, the book demonstrates that dramatic characters possess anteriority which gives us the impression that they exist outside of- and prior to- the play-texts as real people. Jelena Marelj's study examines five linguistically self-conscious characters drawn from the genres of history, tragedy and comedy, which continue to be subjects of extensive critical debate: Falstaff, Cleopatra, Henry V, Katherine from The Taming of the Shrew, and Hamlet. She shows that by inferring Shakespeare's intentions through his characters' verbal exchanges and the discourses of the play, the audience becomes emotionally involved with or repulsed by characters and it is this emotional response that makes these characters strikingly memorable and intimately human. Shakespearean Character will equip readers for further work on the genealogy of Shakespearean character, including minor characters, stock characters, and allegorical characters.

Shakespeare's Insults

Shakespeare's Insults PDF Author: Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474252680
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 513

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Book Description
Why are certain words used as insults in Shakespeare's world and what do these words do and say? Shakespeare's plays abound with insults which are more often merely cited than thoroughly studied, quotation prevailing over exploration. The purpose of this richly detailed dictionary is to go beyond the surface of these words and to analyse why and how words become insults in Shakespeare's world. It's an invaluable resource and reference guide for anyone grappling with the complexities and rewards of Shakespeare's inventive use of language in the realm of insult and verbal sparring.

Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright

Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright PDF Author: Patrick Cheney
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521839235
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright is an important book which reassesses Shakespeare as a poet and dramatist. Patrick Cheney contests critical preoccupation with Shakespeare as 'a man of the theatre' by recovering his original standing as an early modern author: he is a working dramatist who composes some of the most extraordinary poems in English. The book accounts for this form of authorship by reconstructing the historical preconditions for its emergence, in England as in Europe, including the building of the commercial theatres and the consolidation of the printing press. Cheney traces the literary origin to Shakespeare's favourite author, Ovid, who wrote the Amores and Metamorphoses alongside the tragedy Medea. Cheney also examines Shakespeare's literary relations with his contemporary authors Edmund Spenser and Christopher Marlowe. The book concentrates on Shakespeare's freestanding poems, but makes frequent reference to the plays, and ranges widely through the work of other Renaissance writers.