Author: Peter Groves
Publisher: Literary Studies
ISBN: 9781921867811
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 193
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Book Description
Rhythm and Meaning in Shakespeare explores the rhythmical organization of Shakespeare's verse and how it creates and reinforces meaning both in the theatre and in the mind of the reader. Because metrical form in the pentameter is not passively present in the text, but rather something that the performer must co-operatively re-create in speaking it, pentameter is what John Barton calls "stage-direction in shorthand," a supple instrument through which Shakespeare communicates valuable cues to performance. This book is thus an essential guide for actors wishing to perform in Shakespeare's plays, as well as a valuable resource for anyone wishing to enhance their understanding of and engagement with Shakespeare's verse. Contents include: an exploration of meter and its performance - the prosody of English speech * the normal ways in which material is structured and patterned into blank verse, with its essential metrical and prosodic variations from the prototype, discussing ways in which those variations are performed * the 'short' pentameter, a feature more or less unique to Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic verse, with its innovative use of silent beats and silent offbeats * considering how to recognize and perform such lacunae and how they function as performance indicators * the breaks and pauses within lines, and transitions between lines - how they work in the theatre, how to recognize them, and how they are performed * other kinds of spoken verse in the plays * how to explore systematically, through metrical and prosodic analysis, the possibilities of the verse for performance * appendices that cover the pronunciation - specifically, the stress-pattern - of words that differ in Shakespeare's English and the pronunciation of names in the plays. *** ". . . beautifully written, rich with meaning, humorous and deeply knowledgeable, with a full feeling for the life of the stage. Groves analyses the way that Shakespeare uses speech to create and reinforce meaning: and in so doing he engages in an alive and alert way with many of the complexities this entails. . . . this is one of the most originally conceived and useful books I've read for a long while. I am going to use it all the time in my work with the California Shakespeare Company. . . . it is just so useful for people working in the theatre and for courses in theatre practice and interpretation." - Philippa Kelly, Resident Dramaturge, California Shakespeare Theatre *** "This has clearly been a labour of love for the author who offers his detailed knowledge now for the benefit of everyone from vocal coaches and speech specialists to jobbing actors. It is a dense and precise study, all the way down to the vocal minutiae of phonetics and a guide to pronounciation of unfamiliar names in Shakespeare's plays. Do you know what a schwa is? Do you know what its influence is in scansion of a line? These and much more are explained in this master work." - Jay McKee, Stage Whispers Magazine, November-December 2013
Author: Charles H. Frey
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838638316
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
He argues that Lear's "howl," for example, targets and rewards physical hearing, physical speaking, and their accompanying emotions as somatically connected to current or remembered sensations in mouth, throat, and lungs."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Ben Crystal
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141941529
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1347
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Book Description
A vital resource for scholars, students and actors, this book contains glosses and quotes for over 14,000 words that could be misunderstood by or are unknown to a modern audience. Displayed panels look at such areas of Shakespeare's language as greetings, swear-words and terms of address. Plot summaries are included for all Shakespeare's plays and on the facing page is a unique diagramatic representation of the relationships within each play.
Author: Thomas Carper
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415311748
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 184
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Book Description
Table of contents
Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 1443441554
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 104
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Book Description
Among the most enduring poetry of all time, William Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets address such eternal themes as love, beauty, honesty, and the passage of time. Written primarily in four-line stanzas and iambic pentameter, Shakespeare’s sonnets are now recognized as marking the beginning of modern love poetry. The sonnets have been translated into all major written languages and are frequently used at romantic celebrations. Known as “The Bard of Avon,” William Shakespeare is arguably the greatest English-language writer known. Enormously popular during his life, Shakespeare’s works continue to resonate more than three centuries after his death, as has his influence on theatre and literature. Shakespeare’s innovative use of character, language, and experimentation with romance as tragedy served as a foundation for later playwrights and dramatists, and some of his most famous lines of dialogue have become part of everyday speech. HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.
Author: Frank Kermode
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374527741
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 342
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Book Description
In this magnum opus, Britain's most distinguished scholar of 16th-century and 17th-century literature restores Shakespeare's poetic language to its rightful primacy.
Author: Peter L. Groves
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Author: Cal Pritner
Publisher: Santa Monica Press
ISBN: 159580756X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 103
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Book Description
In How to Speak Shakespeare, authors Cal Pritner and Louis Colaianni teach readers how to make sound and sense out of the Bard. Their methods have taught thousands of people—from high school students to English literature and theater arts graduate students, from beginning actors to professional actors—how to understand and effectively communicate the poetry of Shakespeare. In order to make the book user-friendly, the authors have organized it around passages from Romeo and Juliet. The material has been tested successfully with high school students, graduate students, amateur actors, and professional actors. The authors' teaching method is essentially a simple three step process: Test Your Understanding, Stress for Meaning, and Celebrate the Poetry. Classroom and rehearsal-tested exercises are included along with additional background on Shakespeare and his work.
Author: Dolores M. Burton
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292771487
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 383
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Book Description
Shakespeare’s Grammatical Style is the first full-scale, systematic study using an examination of Shakespeare’s syntax as a key to the interpretation of his work. Dolores M. Burton presents information on the application of linguistic and statistical techniques to the description and analysis of style, and she has applied the insights and techniques of the major schools of linguistic inquiry, including those of London and Prague. Just as studies of imagery and vocabulary have aided interpretations of the plays, so an examination of the grammatical features of Shakespeare’s language indicates that they, too, perform a poetic and dramatic function. For example, noun modifiers like possessives and definite articles yield insights into a speaker’s point of view or subtly aid in defining the fictional world of the plays. With respect to stylistic development, Shakespeare’s handling of word order moved from a concentration of dislocated sentences and clause constituents to greater emphasis on varied and frequent permutations in nominal and verbal phrases. A computer-generated concordance of function words facilitated the study of syntactic features, which included an examination of formal aspects of diction, nominal group structure, the function and frequency of relative clauses, and the classification of sentences by mood and type. Several problems associated with quantitative and linguistic studies of a full-length literary work are discussed and exemplified. Style itself is defined mathematically as a propositional function S(A), and from this definition stylistic parameters are derived by correlating critical notions like fictional world, point of view, and characterization with differences in the syntax of the two plays.
Author: Marina Tarlinskaja
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317056345
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 362
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Book Description
Surveying the development and varieties of blank verse in the English playhouses, this book is a natural history of iambic pentameter in English. The main aim of the book is to analyze the evolution of Renaissance dramatic poetry. Shakespeare is the central figure of the research, but his predecessors, contemporaries and followers are also important: Shakespeare, the author argues, can be fully understood and appreciated only against the background of the whole period. Tarlinskaja surveys English plays by Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline playwrights, from Norton and Sackville’s Gorboduc to Sirley’s The Cardinal. Her analysis takes in such topics as what poets treated as a syllable in the 16th-17th century metrical verse, the particulars of stressing in iambic pentameter texts, word boundary and syntactic segmentation of verse lines, their morphological and syntactic composition, syllabic, accentual and syntactic features of line endings, and the way Elizabethan poets learned to use verse form to enhance meaning. She uses statistics to explore the attribution of questionable Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, and to examine several still-enigmatic texts and collaborations. Among these are the poem A Lover's Complaint, the anonymous tragedy Arden of Faversham, the challenging Sir Thomas More, the later Jacobean comedy The Spanish Gypsy, as well as a number of Shakespeare’s co-authored plays. Her analysis of versification offers new ways to think about the dating of plays, attribution of anonymous texts, and how collaborators divided their task in co-authored dramas.
