Doing Shakespeare

Description

A thoroughly revised edition of the successful student text Doing Shakespeare, first published in 2005. The book's success lies in the close readings of speeches and scenes it gives students, demystifying the language of the plays and critical approaches to them. This new edition introduces a new way of approaching Shakespeare's text, through ideas of performance and the actor's role and restructures the content to make it easier to navigate, with clear signposting throughout, guiding students to the content most useful to them. Simon Palfrey takes a direct approach to the common difficulties faced by students ""doing"" Shakespeare and tackles them head-on in a no-nonsense style, making the book especially accessible. He brings us much closer to the animate life of the plays, as things that are not finished monuments but living material, in process and up for grabs, empowering students to see opportunities for their own creative or re-creative readings of Shakespeare. Cover Contents Preface to the Second Edition Acknowledgements Introduction Shakespeare in company Playtexts in time Audiences Part I: Shakespeare’s Difficulty and Excessiveness Difficulty and excessiveness: introduction 1 Difficulty Taking the words literally Original metaphor Bodies in words Paired words Forward and backward syntax 2 Excess Repetition Bombast Lyricism Satiric style Excessive rhetoric and characterisation 3 Shakespeare’s Puns Puns in Comedy Puns in Tragedy Part II: Words as Action 4 Performance Cues Cues Repeated cues 5 The Line The single line Half-lines and shared lines 6 Prose, Verse, Rhyme Prose Prose for the actor Shifts between verse and prose Verse–prose: Othello Prose-like verse: Macbeth Rhyme Rhyme and theme: Richard II Part III: Making Characters 7 A Character? Where is a character’s life? Building character in the dramatic moment: Lear What should we call these speaking things? The self as actor: Viola What is a character? Part IV: In Search of the Individual 8 The Soliloquy Rhetorical levels: Gloucester in Richard III Political soliloquy: Hal in 1 Henry IV Who is being addressed? Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ Private and public rhetoric: Brutus in Julius Caesar 9 Disguise and Doubles Disguise Doubles Scenically constructed character: Pericles Macduff and Macbeth 10 Elusive Subjects Elusive women Elusive men Suggestions for Further Reading Index of Characters A B C D E F G H I K L M O P R S T U V W Y Index of Plays A C H J K L M O P R T W General Index A B C D F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S V