Playing Shakespeare is the premier guide to understanding and appreciating the mastery of the world’s greatest playwright. Together with Royal Shakespeare Company actors–among them Patrick Stewart, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Ben Kingsley, and David Suchet–John Barton demonstrates how to adapt Elizabethan theater for the modern stage. The director begins by explicating Shakespeare’s verse and prose, speeches and soliloquies, and naturalistic and heightened language to discover the essence of his characters. In the second section, Barton and the actors explore nuance in Shakespearean theater, from evoking irony and ambiguity and striking the delicate balance of passion and profound intellectual thought, to finding new approaches to playing Shakespeare’s most controversial creation, Shylock, from The Merchant of Venice. A practical and essential guide, Playing Shakespeare will stand for years as the authoritative favorite among actors, scholars, teachers, and students.

Secrets of Acting Shakespeare isn't a book that gently instructs. It's a passionate, yes-you-can designed to prove that anybody can act Shakespeare. By explaining how Elizabethan actors had only their own lines and not entire playscripts, Patrick Tucker shows how much these plays work by ear. Secrets of Acting Shakespeare is a book for actors trained and amateur, as well as for anyone curious about how the Elizabethan theater worked.

Thinking Shakespeare gives theater artists practical advice about how to make Shakespeare’s words feel spontaneous, passionate, and real. Based on Barry Edelstein’s thirty-year career directing Shakespeare’s plays, this book provides the tools that artists need to fully understand and express the power of Shakespeare’s language.

PUBLICITY TITLE Will appear in 1998 Theatre Craft leaflet and in a New Theatre Quarterly advert Re-issue of hardback published by CUP - this received exceptional review coverage M. Mahood is an all-time old-school Great: well known for Shakespeare's Wordplay and her Penguin editions of Twelfth Night and Merchant of Venice The Pb will include a new appendix aimed at helping directors and actors Will appeal to actors and directors, critics and students The six studies of individual plays offers models for students to follow in studying and writing about the other thirty plays. Includes an index of characters as well as a detailed general index - very user friendly

Man of the Millennium' he may be but William Shakespeare is a shadowy historical figures. His writings have been analysed exhaustively but much of his life remains a mystery. This controversial biography aims to redress the balance. To his contemporaries, Shakespeare was known not as a playwright but as an actor, yet this has been largely ignored or marginalised by most modern writers. here John Southworth overturns traditional images of the Bard and his work, arguing that Shakespeare cannot be separated from his profession as a player any more than he can be separated from his works. Only by approaching Shakespeare's life from this new angle can we hope to learn or understand anything new about him. Following Shakespeare's life as an actor as he learns his craft and begins work on his own plays, Southworth presents the Bard and his plays in their proper context for the first time. Groundbreaking, contentious and a work of deep scholarship and understanding, 'Shakespeare the Player' should change the way we think about the English language's greatest artist.

Examines the role of Elizabethan drama in the shape of cultural belief, values, and understanding of political authority.

In this critical volume, leading scholars in the field examine the performance of Shakespeare in Asia. Emerging out of the view that it is in "play" or performance, and particularly in intercultural / multicultural performance, that the cutting edge of Shakespeare studies is to be found, the essays in this volume pay close attention to the modes of transference of the language of the text into the alternative languages of Asian theatres; to the history and politics of the performance of Shakespeare in key locations in Asia; to the new Asian experimentation with indigenous forms via Shakespeare and the consequent revitalizing and revising of the traditional boundaries of genre and gender; and to Shakespeare as a cultural capital world wide. Focusing specifically on the work of major directors in the central and emerging areas of Asia – Japan, China, India, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines - the chapters in this volume encompass a broader and more representative swath of Asian performances and locations in one book than has been attempted till now.