Author: Marvin Rosenberg
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874134803
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 1006
Get Book Here
Book Description
Every reader is an actor according to Rosenberg. To prepare the actor-reader for insights, Rosenberg draws on major intepretations of the play worldwide, in theatre and in criticism, wherever possible from the first known performances to the present day. The book is rich and provocative on every question about the play.
Author: Marvin Rosenberg
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874134827
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 444
Get Book Here
Book Description
"LEAR: Does Lear walk thus? Speak thus? / Who is it that can tell me who I am?" "Centuries of critics and actors have tried to tell, but Lear's identity, and the meaning of his action in the play, are still touched with enigma." "This book seeks Shakespeare's intentions in King Lear in new ways. It explores major interpretations of distinguished actors and directors as well as of critics from England, the United States, France, Belgium, Japan, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Poland. Is the play unsuited for the stage, as Charles Lamb - and others - have declared? How, in fact, has it been staged, and how visualized by critics? Is Lear designed to be a frail and aging old man? A powerful image of authority? Mad, or senile, to begin with? A kindly old father? Everyman? All of these? None? Does the play end with redemption? Unmitigated despair? Is it Christian? Pagan? Mr. Rosenberg confronts these and other questions from the base of his study and personal experience of the play." "To deepen the theatrical side of that experience, he began, as he did in his The Masks of Othello, with an involvement in the staged play: he directed and acted in Othello, and he followed a production of King Lear through two months of rehearsal and performance. One by-product of this intense participation was a discovery of some special qualities in the language of the play." "To achieve a better understanding of these qualities, Mr. Rosenberg put Lear's vocabulary through a computer, and established a concordance of every word both for the play as a whole and for each character. Interesting structural elements in Shakespeare's language become apparent." "Recognizing the difficulty, for a critic, of responding afresh to Shakespeare's craftsmanship in characterization and in arousing expectation, Mr. Rosenberg also arranged to expose the play to spectators who had never seen or read it. The response of this naive audience, after attending performances, was curious and illuminating. The author believes that any critical approach must be used that will increase our understanding of Shakespeare's work."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Author: Marvin Rosenberg
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874134810
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 340
Get Book Here
Book Description
In what Norman Sanders has termed [a] now classic study, noted Shakespearean Marvin Rosenberg sets out to discover how the complex, troubled characters of the play have been interpreted by actors and critics from Shakespeare's time to the present.
Author: Kerrie Roberts
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000821358
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 206
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book explores a fresh and insightful interpretation of Hamlet’s Gertrude as a prominent and powerful figure in the play. It shows how traditional readings of this character, both performance-based and scholarly, have been guided and constrained by misogynistic perspectives on female power. Bringing together the author’s wealth of insight from a theatre practitioner’s perspective and combining it with a scholarly perspective, the book argues that Gertrude need not be limited to sex and motherhood. She could instead be played as Denmark’s blood royal Queen, her role in the play then being about female political power. Gertrude’s royal status could play out on stage through a variety of possible performance choices for stage design, stage business, acting processes, and the actor’s presence – both speaking and silent. Hamlet's Hereditary Queen takes into consideration Shakespeare’s source myths, historical studies of the position of queens and the issues concerning them in early modern England, Hamlet’s performance history, and the text itself. It questions traditional readings of Hamlet, and offers detailed analyses of relevant scenes to demonstrate how Gertrude’s Hamlet might play out on stage in the twenty-first century. This is an engaging and insightful interpretation for students and scholars of theatre and performance studies and Shakespeare studies, as well as theatre practitioners.
Author: Kenneth Chan
Publisher: Quintessence of Dust
ISBN: 9780595313372
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
Shakespeare's Hamlet contains a profound spiritual message for mankind that has been largely unrecognized for centuries. The meaning of Hamlet so perplexed critics over the last four hundred years that many finally concluded, after immense struggle, that the play lacks a binding philosophy. Nothing, in fact, is more wrong. Quintessence of Dust now explains how Shakespeare meticulously crafted every scene to convey, through our emotional involvement in the drama, a central spiritual message. The book also explains by a single coherent theme practically every aspect of the play that has puzzled critics for centuries. It demonstrates that Hamlet is nothing short of an artistic miracle, reflected both in its poetic brilliance and in its profound meaning.
Author: William David Shaw
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813935447
Category : Aesthetics, Modern
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
In The Ghost behind the Masks, W. David Shaw traces Shakespeare's influence on nine Victorian poets: Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, Thomas Hardy, Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Algernon Swinburne, Arthur Hugh Clough, and George Meredith. Often, he writes, the transparency of Shakespeare's influence on Victorian poets and the degree of their engagement with Shakespeare exist in inverse ratio. Instead of imitating a play by Shakespeare or merely quoting his lines, a Victorian poet may embrace more elusive elements of rhetoric and style, adapting them to his or her own ends. Shaw argues that the most Shakespearean attribute of the Victorian poets is not their addiction to any particular trope or figure of speech but their reticence, the classical restraint of their great monologues, and their sudden descent from grandeur to simplicity. He explores such topics as man-made law versus natural right, Stoic fatalism versus self-reliance, and the sanity of lunatics, lovers, and poets versus the madness of commonplace minds.
Author: Marvin Carlson
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472119850
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 157
Get Book Here
Book Description
Exploring the historical antecedents and mimetic dimensions of "Theater of the Real"
Author: Jay L. Halio
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874136999
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 356
Get Book Here
Book Description
"Jay L. Halio is internationally distinguished as an editor of Shakespeare's plays and as a critic of Shakespeare in performance. This collection, with an international list of contributors, honors both those interests and explores their interconnectedness."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Author: David Marno
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022641602X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 328
Get Book Here
Book Description
The seventeenth-century French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche thought that philosophy could learn a valuable lesson from prayer, which teaches us how to attend, wait, and be open for what might happen next. Death Be Not Proud explores the precedents of Malebranche’s advice by reading John Donne’s poetic prayers in the context of what David Marno calls the “art of holy attention.” If, in Malebranche’s view, attention is a hidden bond between religion and philosophy, devotional poetry is the area where this bond becomes visible. Marno shows that in works like “Death be not proud,” Donne’s most triumphant poem about the resurrection, the goal is to allow the poem’s speaker to experience a given doctrine as his own thought, as an idea occurring to him. But while the thought must feel like an unexpected event for the speaker, the poem itself is a careful preparation for it. And the key to this preparation is attention, the only state in which the speaker can perceive the doctrine as a cognitive gift. Along the way, Marno illuminates why attention is required in Christian devotion in the first place and uncovers a tradition of battling distraction that spans from ascetic thinkers and Church Fathers to Catholic spiritual exercises and Protestant prayer manuals.
Author: Joanne Cormac
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316857859
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 381
Get Book Here
Book Description
Franz Liszt was preoccupied with a fundamental but difficult question: what is the content of music? His answer lay in his symphonic poems, a group of orchestral pieces intended to depict a variety of subjects drawn from literature, visual art and drama. Today, the symphonic poems are usually seen as alternatives to the symphony post-Beethoven. Analysts stress their symphonic logic, thereby neglecting their 'extramusical' subject matter. This book takes a different approach: it returns these influential pieces to their original performance context in the theatre, arguing that the symphonic poem is as much a dramatic as a symphonic genre. This is evidenced in new analyses of the music that examines the theatricality of these pieces and their depiction of voices, mise-en-scène, gesture and action. Simultaneously, the book repositions Liszt's legacy within theatre history, arguing that his contributions should be placed alongside those of Mendelssohn, Berlioz and Wagner.
