Anecdotal Shakespeare: A New Performance History (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781472576156)

Shakespeare's four-hundred-year performance history is full of anecdotes - ribald, trivial, frequently funny, sometimes disturbing, and always but loosely allegiant to fact. Such anecdotes are nevertheless a vital index to the ways that Shakespeare's plays have generated meaning across varied times and in varied places. Furthermore, particular plays have produced particular anecdotes - stories of a real skull in Hamlet, superstitions about the name Macbeth, toga troubles in Julius Caesar - and therefore express something embedded in the plays they attend. Anecdotes constitute then not just a vital component of a play's performance history but a form of vernacular criticism by the personnel most intimately involved in their production: actors. These anecdotes are therefore every bit as responsive to and expressive of a play's meanings across time as the equally rich history of Shakespearean criticism or indeed the very performances these anecdotes treat. Anecdotal Shakespeare provides a history of post-Renaissance Shakespeare and performance, one not based in fact but no less full of truth.

Author: Paul Menzer
ISBN-10: 1472576152
ISBN-13: 9781472576156
Publisher: Arden Shakespeare
Language: English
Published: 10/22/2015
Pages: 280
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 7.80h x 5.10w x 0.70d