Shakespeare and Gesture in Practice PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Shakespeare and Gesture in Practice PDF full book. Access full book title Shakespeare and Gesture in Practice by Darren Tunstall. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Darren Tunstall
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1137606401
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200
Get Book Here
Book Description
When actors perform Shakespeare, what do they do with their bodies? How do they display to the spectator what is hidden in the imagination? This is a history of Shakespearean performance as seen through the actor's body. Tunstall draws upon social, cognitive and moral psychology to reveal how performers from Sarah Siddons to Ian McKellen have used the language of gesture to reflect the minds of their characters and shape the reactions of their audiences. This book is rich in examples, including detailed analysis of recent performances and interviews with key figures from the worlds of both acting and gesture studies. Truly interdisciplinary, this provocative and original contribution will appeal to anyone interested in Shakespeare, theatre history, psychology or body language.
Author: Darren Tunstall
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1137606401
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200
Get Book Here
Book Description
When actors perform Shakespeare, what do they do with their bodies? How do they display to the spectator what is hidden in the imagination? This is a history of Shakespearean performance as seen through the actor's body. Tunstall draws upon social, cognitive and moral psychology to reveal how performers from Sarah Siddons to Ian McKellen have used the language of gesture to reflect the minds of their characters and shape the reactions of their audiences. This book is rich in examples, including detailed analysis of recent performances and interviews with key figures from the worlds of both acting and gesture studies. Truly interdisciplinary, this provocative and original contribution will appeal to anyone interested in Shakespeare, theatre history, psychology or body language.
Author: Farah Karim Cooper
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474234275
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 324
Get Book Here
Book Description
This ground-breaking new book uncovers the way Shakespeare draws upon the available literature and visual representations of the hand to inform his drama. Providing an analysis of gesture, touch, skill and dismemberment in a range of Shakespeare's works, it shows how the hand was perceived in Shakespeare's time as an indicator of human agency, emotion, social and personal identity. It demonstrates how the hand and its activities are described and embedded in Shakespeare's texts and about its role on the Shakespearean stage: as part of the actor's body, in the language as metaphor, and as a morbid stage-prop. Understanding the cultural signifiers that lie behind the early modern understanding of the hand and gesture, opens up new and sometimes disturbing ways of reading and seeing Shakespeare's plays.
Author: Miranda Fay Thomas
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350035491
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Get Book Here
Book Description
Why do the Capulets bite their thumbs at the Montagues? Why do the Venetians spit upon Shylock's Jewish gaberdine? What is it about Volumnia's act of kneeling that convinces Coriolanus not to assault the city of Rome? Shakespeare's Body Language is a ground-breaking new study of Shakespearean drama, revealing the previously unseen history of social tensions found within the performance of gestures – and how such gestures are used to shame those within the body politic of early modern England. The first full study of shaming gestures in Shakespearean drama, this book establishes how shame is often rooted in the gendered expectations of the Renaissance era. Exploring how the performance of gestures such as figging, the cuckold's horns, and even the in-action of stillness created shaming spectacles on the early modern stage and its wider society, Shakespeare's Body Language argues that gestures are embodied social metaphors which epitomise the personal as political. It reveals the tensions of everyday life as key motivators behind the actions of Shakespeare's characters, and considers how honour and its opposite, shame, are constructed in terms of gender norms. Featuring in-depth analyses of plays across Shakespeare's career, this book explores how the playwright's understanding of shame and humiliation is rooted in performance anxiety and gender politics, explaining how theatrical gestures can create dramatic tension in a way that words alone cannot. It offers both rich insights into the early modern context of Shakespeare's drama and confirms the startling relevance of his work to modern audiences.
Author: Miranda Fay Thomas
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350035483
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 274
Get Book Here
Book Description
Why do the Capulets bite their thumbs at the Montagues? Why do the Venetians spit upon Shylock's Jewish gaberdine? What is it about Volumnia's act of kneeling that convinces Coriolanus not to assault the city of Rome? Shakespeare's Body Language is a ground-breaking new study of Shakespearean drama, revealing the previously unseen history of social tensions found within the performance of gestures – and how such gestures are used to shame those within the body politic of early modern England. The first full study of shaming gestures in Shakespearean drama, this book establishes how shame is often rooted in the gendered expectations of the Renaissance era. Exploring how the performance of gestures such as figging, the cuckold's horns, and even the in-action of stillness created shaming spectacles on the early modern stage and its wider society, Shakespeare's Body Language argues that gestures are embodied social metaphors which epitomise the personal as political. It reveals the tensions of everyday life as key motivators behind the actions of Shakespeare's characters, and considers how honour and its opposite, shame, are constructed in terms of gender norms. Featuring in-depth analyses of plays across Shakespeare's career, this book explores how the playwright's understanding of shame and humiliation is rooted in performance anxiety and gender politics, explaining how theatrical gestures can create dramatic tension in a way that words alone cannot. It offers both rich insights into the early modern context of Shakespeare's drama and confirms the startling relevance of his work to modern audiences.
Author: Alex MacConochie
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192857363
Category : English drama
Languages : en
Pages : 259
Get Book Here
Book Description
When Shakespearean characters kiss, embrace, or shake hands, what does it mean? Are dramatic characters following established rules of conduct, or breaking them? Are there rules to break? Staging Touch in Shakespeare's England addresses these and related questions and, in the process, uncovers the social semiotics of contact in the early modern theatre. Its central argument is twofold. First, dramatic characters use touch to define and contest the nature of their relationships: taking hands means something different than embracing or, indeed, holding hands a different way. Second, the definitions, the social roles of actions like these, are up for debate in venues ranging from sermons to the era's burgeoning literature on conduct. The drama not only portrays but participates in these debates. Where characters touch, so do different ideas about contact's role in a variety of contexts, from love and friendship to politics and business deals. Attending to the social roles of touch--what it signifies as much as how it feels--the book develops an outside-in approach to our understanding of early modern sensation: a sociology, rather than a phenomenology, of theatrical contact. It will be of use to editors, performers, and anyone interested in Shakespearean approaches to embodiment. Locating interpersonal touch at the centre of dialogues on consent, subjection, agency, and sexuality, this study offers new perspectives on an essential element of Renaissance drama.
Author: David Wiles
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108498876
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 381
Get Book Here
Book Description
Outlining a classical 'rhetorical' system, this is the first serious overview of how European actors c.1550-1800 thought about acting.
Author: Darlena Ciraulo
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1683933613
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 253
Get Book Here
Book Description
This collection of essays brings together innovative scholarship on Shakespeare’s afterlives in tribute to Christy Desmet. Contributors explore the production and consumption of Shakespeare in acts of adaptation and appropriation across a range of performance topics, from book history to the novel to television, cinema, and digital media.
Author: Scott Newstok
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691227691
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 206
Get Book Here
Book Description
"This book offers a short, spirited defense of rhetoric and the liberal arts as catalysts for precision, invention, and empathy in today's world. The author, a professor of Shakespeare studies at a liberal arts college and a parent of school-age children, argues that high-stakes testing and a culture of assessment have altered how and what students are taught, as courses across the arts, humanities, and sciences increasingly are set aside to make room for joyless, mechanical reading and math instruction. Students have been robbed of a complete education, their imaginations stunted by this myopic focus on bare literacy and numeracy. Education is about thinking, Newstok argues, rather than the mastery of a set of rigidly defined skills, and the seemingly rigid pedagogy of the English Renaissance produced some of the most compelling and influential examples of liberated thinking. Each of the fourteen chapters explores an essential element of Shakespeare's world and work, aligns it with the ideas of other thinkers and writers in modern times, and suggests opportunities for further reading. Chapters on craft, technology, attention, freedom, and related topics combine past and present ideas about education to build a case for the value of the past, the pleasure of thinking, and the limitations of modern educational practices and prejudices"--
Author: Farah Karim Cooper
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474234283
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 324
Get Book Here
Book Description
This ground-breaking new book uncovers the way Shakespeare draws upon the available literature and visual representations of the hand to inform his drama. Providing an analysis of gesture, touch, skill and dismemberment in a range of Shakespeare's works, it shows how the hand was perceived in Shakespeare's time as an indicator of human agency, emotion, social and personal identity. It demonstrates how the hand and its activities are described and embedded in Shakespeare's texts and about its role on the Shakespearean stage: as part of the actor's body, in the language as metaphor, and as a morbid stage-prop. Understanding the cultural signifiers that lie behind the early modern understanding of the hand and gesture, opens up new and sometimes disturbing ways of reading and seeing Shakespeare's plays.
Author: Mark Monday
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100073286X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 194
Get Book Here
Book Description
Application of the Michael Chekhov Technique to Shakespeare's Sonnets, Soliloquies, and Monologues illustrates how to apply the Michael Chekhov Technique, through exercises and rehearsal techniques, to a wide range of Shakespeare's works. The book begins with a comprehensive chapter on the definitions of the various aspects of the Technique, followed by five chapters covering Shakespeare's sonnets, comedies, tragedies, histories, and romances. This volume offers a very specific path, via Michael Chekhov, on how to put theory into practice and bring one's own artistic life into the work of Shakespeare. Offering a wide range of pieces that can be used as audition material, Application of the Michael Chekhov Technique to Shakespeare's Sonnets, Soliloquies, and Monologues is an excellent resource for acting teachers, directors, and actors specializing in the work of William Shakespeare. The book also includes access to a video on Psychological Gesture to facilitate the application of this acting tool to Shakespeare’s scenes.
