Author: James Harriman-Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108875629
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
Great art is about emotion. In the eighteenth century, and especially for the English stage, critics developed a sensitivity to both the passions of a performance and what they called the transitions between those passions. It was these pivotal transitions, scripted by authors and executed by actors, that could make King Lear beautiful, Hamlet terrifying, Archer hilarious and Zara electrifying. James Harriman-Smith recovers a lost way of appreciating theatre as a set of transitions that produce simultaneously iconic and dynamic spectacles; fascinating moments when anything seems possible. Offering fresh readings and interpretations of Shakespearean and eighteenth-century tragedy, historical acting theory and early character criticism, this volume demonstrates how a concern with transition binds drama to everything, from lyric poetry and Newtonian science, to fine art and sceptical enquiry into the nature of the self.
Author: James Harriman-Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110883549X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
Recovers eighteenth-century appreciation of transition as a critical tool for analysing the expression and reception of emotion in theatre.
Author: James Harriman-Smith
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350171980
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 151
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Book Description
The stage of the 1700s established a star culture, with the emergence of such acting celebrities as David Garrick, Susannah Cibber, and Sarah Siddons. It placed Shakespeare at the heart of the classical repertoire and offered unprecedented opportunities to female actors. This book demonstrates how an understanding of the practice and theories circulating three hundred years ago can generate new ways of studying and performing plays of all kinds in the present. Eight short essays – on emotions, cultivation, character, voice, action, company, audience, and reflection – provide two things: a vivid introduction to the practice and ideas of the eighteenth-century stage, and the story of how these past practices and ideas were used in collaborative workshops around the UK to create new rehearsal exercises. Designed to work alone or in combination, these exercises are also open to further adaptation and analysis as part of a work that treats theatre writers of the past as potential collaborators for those interested in theatre today. Marrying academic and professional theatre expertise, this book ranges through a vast archive of writing about acting, from private letters and battered promptbooks, through to philosophical treatises and celebrity biographies. The exercises, stories, and ideas shared here capture the strangeness of this material – and sometimes its surprising familiarity, as questions asked of actors then seem to anticipate those questions we ask now. A truly unique offering, What would Garrick Do? Or, Acting Lessons from the Eighteenth Century offers a fascinating deep-dive into an important time in theatre history to illuminate practices and processes today.
Author: Glen McGillivray
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031228995
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 231
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Book Description
This book offers an innovative account of how audiences and actors emotionally interacted in the English theatre during the middle decades of the eighteenth century, a period bookended by two of its stars: David Garrick and Sarah Siddons. Drawing upon recent scholarship on the history of emotions, it uses practice theory to challenge the view that emotional interactions between actors and audiences were governed by empathy. It carefully works through how actors communicated emotions through their voices, faces and gestures, how audiences appraised these performances, and mobilised and regulated their own emotional responses. Crucially, this book reveals how theatre spaces mediated the emotional practices of audiences and actors alike. It examines how their public and frequently political interactions were enabled by these spaces.
Author: Emma Whipday
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135030445X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 441
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Book Description
What is (a) play? How do Shakespeare's plays engage with and represent early modern modes of play – from jests and games to music, spectacle, movement, animal-baiting and dance? How have we played with Shakespeare in the centuries since? And how does the structure of the plays experienced in the early modern playhouse shape our understanding of Shakespeare plays today? Shakespeare / Play brings together established and emerging scholars to respond to these questions, using approaches spanning theatre and dance history, cultural history, critical race studies, performance studies, disability studies, archaeology, affect studies, music history, material history and literary and dramaturgical analysis. Ranging across Shakespeare's dramatic oeuvre as well as early modern lost plays, dance notation, conduct books, jest books and contemporary theatre and film, it includes consideration of Measure for Measure, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, Titus Andronicus, Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear and The Merry Wives of Windsor, among others. The subject of this volume is reflected in its structure: Shakespeare / Play features substantial new essays across 5 'acts', interwoven with 7 shorter, playful pieces (a 'prologue', 4 'act breaks', a 'jig' and a 'curtain call'), to offer new directions for research on Shakespearean playing, playmaking and performance. In so doing, this volume interrogates the conceptions of playing of/in Shakespeare that shape how we perform, read, teach and analyze Shakespeare today.
Author: Amanda Eubanks Winkler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009241206
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 245
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Book Description
The first book on Restoration Shakespeare in performance, drawing on theatre history, musicology and literary criticism.
Author: Kevin L. Cope
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1684484642
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
Rigorously inventive and revelatory in its adventurousness, 1650–1850 opens a forum for the discussion, investigation, and analysis of the full range of long-eighteenth-century writing, thinking, and artistry. Combining fresh considerations of prominent authors and artists with searches for overlooked or offbeat elements of the Enlightenment legacy, 1650–1850 delivers a comprehensive but richly detailed rendering of the first days, the first principles, and the first efforts of modern culture. Its pages open to the works of all nations and language traditions, providing a truly global picture of a period that routinely shattered boundaries. Volume 28 of this long-running journal is no exception to this tradition of focused inclusivity. Readers will experience two blockbuster multi-author special features that explore both the deep traditions and the new frontiers of early modern studies: one that views adaptation and digitization through the lens of “Sterneana,” the vast literary and cultural legacy following on the writings of Laurence Sterne, a legacy that sweeps from Hungarian renditions of the puckish novelist through the Bloomsbury circle and on into cybernetics, and one that pays tribute to legendary scholar Irwin Primer by probing the always popular but also always challenging writings of that enigmatic poet-philosopher, Bernard Mandeville. All that, plus the usual cavalcade of full-length book reviews. ISSN: 1065-3112 Published by Bucknell University Press, distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Author: Shelley Bennett
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 0892365579
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 162
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Book Description
A Passion for Performance: Sarah Siddons and Her Portraitists brings together three engaging essays – by Robyn Asleson, Shelley Bennett and Mark Leonard, and Shearer West – that recreate the eventful life, both on and off the stage, of the great eighteenth-century actress Sarah Siddons. Siddons was renowned for her bravura performances in tragic roles, and her fame was enhanced by the many portraits of her painted by the leading artists of the day. The greatest of these was Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse, a painting now in the Huntington Art Collections and recently studied at the Getty Center. A Passion for Performance places this magnificent portrait within the context of Siddons’s career as an actress and cultural icon. Includes a chronology of Siddons’s life by volume editor Robyn Asleson.
Author: Dorottya Fabian
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351574876
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 329
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Book Description
Analysing over 100 recordings from 1945-1975, this book examines twentieth-century baroque performance practice as evinced in all the commercially available recordings of J.S. Bach's Passions, Brandenburg Concertos and Goldberg Variations. Dorottya Fabian presents a qualitative, style-orientated history of the early music movement in its formative years through a comparison of the performance style heard in these recordings with the scholarly literature on Bach performance practice. Issues explored in the book include the availability of resources, balance, tempo, dynamics, ornamentation, rhythm and articulation. During the decades following the Second World War, the early music movement was more concerned with the revival of repertoire than with the revival of performance style which meant that its characteristics and achievements differed essentially from those of the later 1970s and 1980s. Period practice techniques were not practised even by ensembles using eighteenth-century instruments. Yet, as this survey reveals, several recordings of the period provide unexpectedly stylish interpretations using metre and pulse to punctuate the music. Such metric performance and appropriate articulation helped to clarify structure and texture and assisted in the creation of a musical discourse - the pre-eminent goal of baroque compositions.
Author: Jane Wessel
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472133071
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 229
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Book Description
How playwrights, actors, and theater managers vied for control over the performance of popular plays after the passage of England's first copyright law
