- 280 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
About This Book
Shakespeare's four-hundred-year performance history is full of anecdotes â 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 â stories of a real skull in Hamlet, superstitions about the name Macbeth, toga troubles in Julius Caesar â 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.
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Table of contents
- Cover page
- Halftitle page
- Series page
- Title page
- Copyright page
- Epigraph
- Dedication
- CONTENTS
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
- PREFACE: CURTAIN RAISER
- Introduction: Anecdotal Shakespeare
- 1 Hamlet: Skulls are good to think with
- 2 Othello: The smudge
- 3 Romeo and Juliet: Central casting
- 4 Richard III: Oedipus text
- 5 Macbeth: An embarrassment of witches
- CODA: ARCHIVES AND ANECDOTES
- NOTES
- INDEX