What Would Garrick Do? Or, Acting Lessons from the Eighteenth Century

What Would Garrick Do? Or, Acting Lessons from the Eighteenth Century PDF Author: James Harriman-Smith
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350171972
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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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.

What Would Garrick Do? Or, Acting Lessons from the Eighteenth Century

What Would Garrick Do? Or, Acting Lessons from the Eighteenth Century PDF Author: James Harriman-Smith
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350171972
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

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.

What Would Garrick Do? Or, Acting Lessons from the Eighteenth Century

What Would Garrick Do? Or, Acting Lessons from the Eighteenth Century PDF Author: James Harriman-Smith
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781350171992
Category : Acting
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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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.

The Art of Gesture

The Art of Gesture PDF Author: Dene Barnett
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Acting
Languages : en
Pages : 516

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Book Description


A Philosophical Analysis and Illustration of Some of Shakespeare's Remarkable Characters

A Philosophical Analysis and Illustration of Some of Shakespeare's Remarkable Characters PDF Author: William Richardson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description


Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century

Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Fiona Ritchie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521898609
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 469

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Book Description
This book examines Shakespeare's influence and popularity in all aspects of eighteenth-century literature, culture and society.

David Garrick and the Mediation of Celebrity

David Garrick and the Mediation of Celebrity PDF Author: Leslie Ritchie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108475876
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Explores how David Garrick - actor, newspaper proprietor and part-owner of Drury Lane Theatre - mediated his own celebrity.

Poetics and Politics

Poetics and Politics PDF Author: Toni Bernhart
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110603527
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Far from teleological historiography, the pan-European perspective on Early Modern drama offered in this volume provides answers to why, how, where and when the given phenomena of theatre appear in history. Using theories of circulation and other concepts of exchange, transfer and movement, the authors analyze the development and differentiation of European secular and religious drama, within the disciplinary framework of comparative literature and the history of literature and concepts. Within this frame, aspects of major interest are the relationship between tradition and innovation, the status of genre, the proportion of autonomous and heteronomous creational dispositions within the artefacts or genres they belong to, as well as strategies of functionalization in the context of a given part of the cultural net. Contributions cover a broad range of topics, including poetics of Early Modern Drama; political, institutional and social practices; history of themes and motifs (Stoffgeschichte); history of genres/cross-fertilization between genres; textual traditions and distribution of texts; questions of originality and authorship; theories of circulation and net structures in Drama Studies.

Pope to Burney, 1714-1779

Pope to Burney, 1714-1779 PDF Author: Moyra Haslett
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350317586
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
This essential guide defines literature of the eighteenth century as a literature written and received as public conversation. Moyra Haslett discusses and challenges conventional ways of reading the period, particularly in relation to notions of the public sphere. In her wide-ranging study, Haslett reads key texts - including The Dunciad, Gulliver's Travels and Pamela - in their literary and cultural contexts, and examines such genres as the periodical, the familiar letter, the verse epistle and the novel as textual equivalents of coterie culture.

The Birth of Modern Theatre

The Birth of Modern Theatre PDF Author: Norman S. Poser
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429820038
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
The Birth of Modern Theatre: Rivalry, Riots, and Romance in the Age of Garrick is a vivid description of the eighteenth-century London theatre scene—a time when the theatre took on many of the features of our modern stage. A natural and psychologically based acting style replaced the declamatory style of an earlier age. The theatres were mainly supported by paying audiences, no longer by royal or noble patrons. The press determined the success or failure of a play or a performance. Actors were no longer shunned by polite society, some becoming celebrities in the modern sense. The dominant figure for thirty years was David Garrick, actor, theatre manager and playwright, who, off the stage, charmed London with his energy, playfulness, and social graces. No less important in defining eighteenth-century theatre were its audiences, who considered themselves full-scale participants in theatrical performances; if they did not care for a play, an actor, or ticket prices, they would loudly make their wishes known, sometimes starting a riot. This book recounts the lives—and occasionally the scandals—of the actors and theatre managers and weaves them into the larger story of the theatre in this exuberant age, setting the London stage and its leading personalities against the background of the important social, cultural, and economic changes that shaped eighteenth-century Britain. The Birth of Modern Theatre brings all of this together to describe a moment in history that sowed the seeds of today’s stage.

Criticism, Performance and the Passions in the Eighteenth Century

Criticism, Performance and the Passions in the Eighteenth Century PDF 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.