Shakespeare's plays were written some four hundred years ago, and while his characters are enduring, they are also alien. In grappling with the text of his plays, the modern actor must bring Shakespeare's Renaissance characters to life for a modern audience. And while it is difficult enough for twentieth-century spectators to make sense of the plays, it is also hard for modern actors to understand the Elizabethan world that created the personalities so vividly sketched in Shakespeare's texts. This reference is a convenient and practical guide for actors faced with the task of playing Shakespeare's characters. The volume begins with an overview of Elizabethan theatrical conventions, including the training of actors. It then looks at the dramatic tradition of personification, which Shakespeare's world inherited from the medieval stage. Later chapters give special attention to how language reveals character and to the social and cultural contexts of the Renaissance. Throughout, the emphasis is on how to translate Shakespeare's text into action on the stage. While the volume contains much useful information, that information is presented to meet the special needs of theater professionals.

Making a unique intervention in an incipient but powerful resurgence of academic interest in character-based approaches to Shakespeare, this book brings scholars and theatre practitioners together to rethink why and how character continues to matter. Contributors seek in particular to expand our notions of what Shakespearean character is, and to extend the range of critical vocabularies in which character criticism can work. The return to character thus involves incorporating as well as contesting postmodern ideas that have radically revised our conceptions of subjectivity and selfhood. At the same time, by engaging theatre practitioners, this book promotes the kind of comprehensive dialogue that is necessary for the common endeavor of sustaining the vitality of Shakespeare's characters.

The Shakespearean World takes a global view of Shakespeare and his works, especially their afterlives. Constantly changing, the Shakespeare central to this volume has acquired an array of meanings over the past four centuries. "Shakespeare" signifies the historical person, as well as the plays and verse attributed to him. It also signifies the attitudes towards both author and works determined by their receptions. Throughout the book, specialists aim to situate Shakespeare’s world and what the world is because of him. In adopting a global perspective, the volume arranges thirty-six chapters in five parts: Shakespeare on stage internationally since the late seventeenth century; Shakespeare on film throughout the world; Shakespeare in the arts beyond drama and performance; Shakespeare in everyday life; Shakespeare and critical practice. Through its coverage, The Shakespearean World offers a comprehensive transhistorical and international view of the ways this Shakespeare has not only influenced but has also been influenced by diverse cultures during 400 years of performance, adaptation, criticism, and citation. While each chapter is a freshly conceived introduction to a significant topic, all of the chapters move beyond the level of survey, suggesting new directions in Shakespeare studies – such as ecology, tourism, and new media – and making substantial contributions to the field. This volume is an essential resource for all those studying Shakespeare, from beginners to advanced specialists.

The presentation of a complex character such as Shylock bears resemblance to the technique of anamorphic portraiture and trick perspective in the sense that, seen one way he appears a villain, but seen another way he appears a persecuted victim. The clashing and merging of opposed frames of ideological reference that cannot be held apart or resolved and that remain in a kind of uneasy balance may be a technique of comic characterization that exploits relativism and ambiguity in the presentation of human personality and self on stage. A similar technique can be seen at work in the Histories in the characters of Richard and Bolingbroke, who, as has long been noted, compete contrarily for the audience's ideological sympathies over the course of the play.

First published in 1985. In this revisionist history of comic characterization, Karen Newman argues that, contrary to received opinion, Shakespeare was not the first comic dramatist to create self-conscious characters who seem 'lifelike' or 'realistic'. His comic practice is firmly set within a comic tradition which stretches from Plautus and Menander to playwrights of the Italian Renaissance.

A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance provides astate-of-the-art engagement with the rapidly developing field ofShakespeare performance studies. Redraws the boundaries of Shakespeare performance studies. Considers performance in a range of media, including in print,in the classroom, in the theatre, in film, on television and video,in multimedia and digital forms. Introduces important terms and contemporary areas of enquiry inShakespeare and performance. Raises questions about the dynamic interplay betweenShakespearean writing and the practices of contemporary performanceand performance studies. Written by an international group of major scholars, teachers,and professional theatre makers.

'Now I am alone,' says Hamlet before speaking a soliloquy. But what is a Shakespearean soliloquy? How has it been understood in literary and theatrical history? How does it work in screen versions of Shakespeare? What influence has it had? Neil Corcoran offers a thorough exploration and explanation of the origin, nature, development and reception of Shakespeare's soliloquies. Divided into four parts, the book supplies the historical, dramatic and theoretical contexts necessary to understanding, offers extensive and insightful close readings of particular soliloquies and includes interviews with eight renowned Shakespearean actors providing details of the practical performance of the soliloquy. A comprehensive study of a key aspect of Shakespeare's dramatic art, this book is ideal for students and theatre-goers keen to understand the complexities and rewards of Shakespeare's unique use of the soliloquy.

In 1700, Shakespeare was viewed as one of the leading Renaissance playwrights, but not as supreme. By 1800, he was not only widely performed and read but celebrated as a universal genius and a national literary hero. What happened during the intervening years is the subject of this fascinating volume, which brings together Renaissance and eighteenth-century scholars who examine how Shakespeare gradually penetrated, and came to dominate, the culture and intellectual life of people in the English-speaking world. The contributors approach Shakespeare from a wide range of perspectives, to illuminate the way contemporary philosophy, science and medicine, textual practice, theatre studies, and literature both informed and were influenced by eighteenth-century interpretations of his works. Among the topics are Falstaff and eighteenth-century ideas of the sublime, David Garrick's 1756 adaptation of The Winter's Tale and its relationship to medical theories of femininity, the textual practices of George Steevens, Shakespeare's importance in furthering the careers of actors on the eighteenth-century stage, and the influence of Shakespeare on writers as diverse as Edmund Burke, Horace Walpole, and Ann Radcliff. Together, the essays paint a vivid picture of the relationship between eighteenth-century Shakespeare and ideas about shared nationhood, knowledge, morality, history, and the self.

Shakespeare and Character brings together leading scholars in theory, literary criticism, and performance studies in order to redress a serious gap in Shakespeare studies and to put character back at the centre of our understanding of Shakespeare's achievement as an artist and thinker.

The series statement "Oxford handbooks to Shakespeare" taken from dust jacket.