[PDF] Onstage And Offstage Worlds In Shakespeares Plays eBook

Author : Anthony Brennan
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 323 pages
File Size : 23,4 MB
Release : 2021-03-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1000350142

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Originally published in 1989, this book focuses on the handling of the relationship between the onstage world and the offstage world, between the world that Shakespeare shows us and the one he tells us about. It is developed in two parts. Initially examined is the way reports are used in Shakespeare to relate the offstage and onstage worlds, building from simple examples within individual scenes in various plays to related sequences of reports which can be evaluated as part of broader strategies effecting the structure of a whole play. In the second part the author examines the ways in which several, or all, of these strategies work in individual plays, and what combined effect the prominent employment of them has in shaping the effect of the plays. In all cases the author is concerned to indicate why Shakespeare chose to handle matters as he does rather than in other ways available in the sources or in the speculative alternative methods which can be imaginatively constructed.

Author : Murray Cox
Publisher : Jessica Kingsley Publishers
Page : 482 pages
File Size : 37,2 MB
Release : 1994
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781853021596

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Prompting is the thematic thread that pervades the pages of this book. Its primary connotation is that of the prompter who is urgently called into action, at moments of anxiety, when narrative begins to fail. The central dynamic issue concerns the amending imagination as a prompting resource which, through creativity and the aesthetic imperative, can be invoked in this therapeutic space when the patient - through fear, resistance or distraction - is unable to continue with his story. Psychotherapy can be regarded as a process in which the patient is enabled to do for himself what he cannot do on his own. Shakespeare - as the spokesman for all other poets and dramatists - prompts the therapist in the incessant search for those resonant rhythms and mutative metaphors which augment empathy and make for deeper communication and which also facilitates transference interpretation and resolution. The cadence of the spoken word and the different laminations of silence always call for more finely tuned attentiveness than the therapist, unprompted, can offer. The authors show how Shakespeare can prompt therapeutic engagement with "inaccessible" patients who might otherwise be out of therapeutic reach. At the same time, they demonstrate that the clinical, off-stage world of therapy can also prompt the work of the actor in his on-stage search for representational precision.

Author : Laury Magnus
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 285 pages
File Size : 21,43 MB
Release : 2012
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1611474744

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This volume, examining the ways in which Shakespeare's plays are designed for hearers as well as spectators, has been prompted by recent explorations of the auditory dimension of early modern drama by such scholars as Andrew Gurr, Bruce Smith, and James Hirsh. To look at the dynamics of hearing in Shakespeare's plays involves a paradigm shift that changes how we understand virtually everything about them, from the architecture of the buildings, to playing spaces, to blocking, and to larger interpretative issues, including our understanding of character based on players' responses to what they hear, mishear, or refuse to hear. Who Hears in Shakespeare? Auditory Worlds on Stage and Screen is comprised of three sections on Shakespeare's texts and performance history: "The Poetics of Hearing and the Early Modern Stage"; "Metahearing: Hearing, Knowing, and Audiences, Onstage and Off"; and "Transhearing: Hearing, Whispering, Overhearing, and Eavesdropping in Film and Other Media." Chapters by noted scholars explore the complex reactions and interactions of onstage and offstage audiences and show how Shakespearean stagecraft, actualized on stage and adapted on screen, revolves around various situations and conventions of hearing--soliloquies, asides, avesdropping, overhearing, and stage whispers. In short, Who Hears in Shakespeare? enunciates Shakespeare's nuanced, powerful stagecraft of hearing. The volume ends with Stephen Booth's afterword, his inspiring meditation on hearing that considers Shakespearean "audiences" and their responses to what they hear--or don't hear--in Shakespeare's plays.

Author : Jonathan Walker
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
Page : 329 pages
File Size : 18,94 MB
Release : 2017-05-15
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 0810135035

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Site Unscene: The Offstage in English Renaissance Drama explores the key role of dramatic episodes that occur offstage and beyond the knowledge-generating faculty of playgoers’ sight. Does Ophelia drown? Is Desdemona unfaithful to Othello? Does Macbeth murder Duncan in his sleep? Site Unscene considers how the drama’s nonvisible and eccentric elements embellish, alter, and subvert visible action on the stage. Jonathan Walker demonstrates that by removing scenes from visible performance, playwrights take up the nondramatic mode of storytelling in order to transcend the limits of the stage. Through this technique, they present dramatic action from the subjective, self-interested, and idiosyncratic perspectives of individual characters. By recovering these offstage elements, Walker reveals the pervasive and formative dynamic between the onstage and offstage and between the seen and unseen in Renaissance drama. Examining premodern dramatic theory, Renaissance plays, period amphitheaters, and material texts, this interdisciplinary work considers woodcuts, engravings, archaeology, architecture, rhetoric, the history of the book, as well as plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Kyd, Ford, Middleton, and Webster, among others. It addresses readers engaged in literary criticism, dramatic theory, theater history, and textual studies.

Author : Tim Fitzpatrick
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 366 pages
File Size : 32,49 MB
Release : 2016-04-22
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 1317079779

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Analyzing Elizabethan and Jacobean playtexts for their spatial implications, this innovative study discloses the extent to which the resources and constraints of public playhouse buildings affected the construction of the fictional worlds of early modern plays. The study argues that playwrights were writing with foresight, inscribing the constraints and resources of the stages into their texts. It goes further, to posit that Shakespeare and his playwright-contemporaries adhered to a set of generic conventions, rather than specific local company practices, about how space and place were to be related in performance: the playwrights constituted thus an overarching virtual 'company' producing playtexts that shared features across the acting companies and playhouses. By clarifying a sixteenth- to seventeenth-century conception of theatrical place, Tim Fitzpatrick adds a new layer of meaning to our understanding of the plays. His approach adds a new dimension to these particular documents which-though many of them are considered of great literary worth-were not originally generated for any other reason than to be performed within a specific performance context. The fact that the playwrights were aware of the features of this performance tradition makes their texts a potential mine of performance information, and casts light back on the texts themselves: if some of their meanings are 'spatial', these will have been missed by purely literary tools of analysis.

Author : Mr Tim Fitzpatrick
Publisher : Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 29,32 MB
Release : 2013-05-28
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 140947898X

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Analyzing Elizabethan and Jacobean playtexts for their spatial implications, this innovative study discloses the extent to which the resources and constraints of public playhouse buildings affected the construction of the fictional worlds of early modern plays. The study argues that playwrights were writing with foresight, inscribing the constraints and resources of the stages into their texts. It goes further, to posit that Shakespeare and his playwright-contemporaries adhered to a set of generic conventions, rather than specific local company practices, about how space and place were to be related in performance: the playwrights constituted thus an overarching virtual 'company' producing playtexts that shared features across the acting companies and playhouses. By clarifying a sixteenth- to seventeenth-century conception of theatrical place, Tim Fitzpatrick adds a new layer of meaning to our understanding of the plays. His approach adds a new dimension to these particular documents which–though many of them are considered of great literary worth–were not originally generated for any other reason than to be performed within a specific performance context. The fact that the playwrights were aware of the features of this performance tradition makes their texts a potential mine of performance information, and casts light back on the texts themselves: if some of their meanings are 'spatial', these will have been missed by purely literary tools of analysis.

Author : Stanley Wells
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 282 pages
File Size : 40,53 MB
Release : 2002-11-28
Category : Drama
ISBN : 9780521523837

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The first fifty volumes of this yearbook of Shakespeare studies are being reissued in paperback.

Author : Stephen Ratcliffe
Publisher : Counterpath Press
Page : 211 pages
File Size : 25,47 MB
Release : 2010
Category : Drama
ISBN : 1933996145

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Drama. Literary Nonfiction. Literary Criticism. READING THE UNSEEN: (OFFSTAGE) HAMLET is about the presence and significance of offstage action in Hamlet, things we hear about in words but do not see performed physically onstage--things like King Hamlet's murder "while [he] was sleeping in [his] orchard," Ophelia's death in "the glassy stream," Hamlet's visit to Ophelia's "closet ... with his doublet all unbraced," Gertrude and Claudius having sex "in the rank sweat of an enseamed bed." In a series of brilliantly original "close readings," Ratcliffe examines how it is that passages such as these make physically absent things verbally "present," how they "show" us things we do not actually see, how they bring us face to face with the "Words, words, words" that are what Hamlet is, he argues, most of all about.

Author : Various
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 3794 pages
File Size : 19,46 MB
Release : 2021-11-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1000519384

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This 14-volume set contains titles originally published between 1926 and 1992. An eclectic mix, this collection examines Shakespeare’s work from a number of different perspectives, looking at history, language, performance and more it includes references to many of his plays as well as his sonnets.

Author : S.P. Cerasano
Publisher : Associated University Presse
Page : 255 pages
File Size : 46,17 MB
Release : 2016-09-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0838644821

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Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England is an international journal committed to the publication of essays and reviews relevant to drama and theatre history to 1642. This issue includes eight new articles, a review essays, and review of six books.