Playing Shakespeare: An Actor’s Guide-Quality Guarantee

Description

Playing Shakespeare is the premier guide to understandingand appreciating the mastery of the world’s greatest playwright.

Together with RoyalShakespeare Company actors–among them Patrick Stewart, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen,Ben Kingsley, and David Suchet–John Barton demonstrates how to adapt Elizabethantheater for the modern stage. The director begins by explicating Shakespeare’s verseand prose, speeches and soliloquies, and naturalistic and heightened language todiscover the essence of his characters. In the second section, Barton and the actorsexplore nuance in Shakespearean theater, from evoking irony and ambiguity and strikingthe delicate balance of passion and profound intellectual thought, to finding newapproaches to playing Shakespeare’s most controversial creation, Shylock, from
TheMerchant of Venice. A practical and essential guide,
Playing Shakespeare will standfor years as the authoritative favorite among actors, scholars, teachers, and students.