Research Catalog

Title

Shakespeare the actor and the purposes of playing / Meredith Anne Skura.

Author

Skura, Meredith Anne, 1944-

Publication

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, ©1993.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xvi, 325 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

• For the Renaissance, all the world may have been a stage and all its people players, but Shakespeare was also an actor on the literal stage. Meredith Anne Skura asks what it meant to be an actor in Shakespeare's England and shows why a knowledge of actual theatrical practices is essential for understanding both Shakespeare's plays and the theatricality of everyday life in early modern England.
• Despite the obvious differences between our theater and Shakespeare's, sixteenth-century testimony suggests that the experience of acting has not changed much over the centuries. Beginning with a psychoanalytically informed account of acting today, Skura shows how this intense and ambivalent experience appears not only in literal references to acting in Shakespearean drama but also in recurring narrative concerns, details of language, and dramatic strategies used to engage the audience. Looking at the plays in the context of both public and private worlds outside the theater, Skura rereads the canon to identify new configurations in the plays and new ways of understanding theatrical self-consciousness in Renaissance England. Rich in theatrical, psychoanalytic, biographical, and historical insight, this book will be invaluable to students of Shakespeare and instructive to all readers interested in the dynamics of performance.

Subject

• Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 > Knowledge and learning
• Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 > Characters > Actors
• Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616
• Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 > Knowledge > Performing arts
• 1500-1699
• Theater > England > History > 16th century
• Theater > England > History > 17th century
• Actors > Great Britain > Biography
• Acting in literature
• Actors in literature
• Actors
• Performing arts
• Theater
• Theater > Great Britain > 16th century
• Theater > Great Britain > 17th century
• England
• Great Britain

Genre/Form

• Biography
• Biographies.
• History.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 235-314) and index.

Contents

1. Being an Actor: An "Up and Down, In and Out Life" -- 2. Elizabethan Players: Proud Beggars "Now Up and Now Down" The Player Offstage: Fact and Fantasy. The Player Onstage: Mimesis and Performance. Proud Beggar Onstage: Clown and Epilogue -- 3. Richard III: Shakespeare's "False Glass" Richard III: "False Glass" Richard III: Shakespeare's Glass? -- 4. Player King as Beggar in Great Men's Houses -- I. Armado and Costard in the French Academy: Player as Clown. Sly in the Cotswold Manor: Player as Beggar. Bottom in Theseus's Palace: Player as Little Boy -- 5. Player King as Beggar in Great Men's Houses -- II. Falstaff in the House of Lancaster: Player as Dog. Falstaff in Ford's House: Player as Deer. Tragedians at Elsinore: Great Man as Player. Lear Outside His Daughter's House: The King and the Player-Beggar -- 6. Theater as Reflecting Glass: The Two-way Mirror. A Mirror for Monsters. Two Gentlemen of Verona: Woman's Part, Dog's Part -- 7. "Dogs, Licking, Candy, Melting" and the Flatterer's False Glass. Elizabethan Moths and Fawns. Richard II: The "Tedious" Actor. Julius Caesar: "People Clap Him and Hiss Him" Coriolanus: "It Is a Part That I Shall Blush in Acting" Timon of Athens: Playing Host -- 8. "Every Man Must Play a Part, and Mine a Sad One": The Player's Passion -- Afterword: Circles and Centers.

ISBN

• 0226761797
• 9780226761794
• 0226761800
• 9780226761800

LCCN

93017317

OCLC

• ocm27935667
• 27935667
• SCSB-14652401

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library