Author's pen and actor's voice : playing and writing in Shakespeare's theatre

Authors:Robert Weimann, Helen Higbee, William N. West

Summary:In this seminal work, Robert Weimann redefines the relationship between writing and performance, or 'playing', in Shakespeare's theatre. Through close reading and careful analysis Weimann offers a reconsideration and redefinition of Elizabethan performance and production practices. The study reviews the most recent methodologies of textual scholarship, the new history of the Elizabethan theatre, performance theory, and film and video interpretation, and offers a new approach to understanding Shakespeare. Weimann examines a range of plays including Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Henry V, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Macbeth, among others, as well as other contemporary works. A major part of the study explores the duality between playing and writing: the imaginary world-in-the-play and the visible, audible playing-in-the-world of the playhouse, and Weimann focuses especially on the gap between these two, between the so-called 'pen' and 'voice'

Print Book, English, 2000

Edition:View all formats and editions

Publisher:Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K., 2000

Series:

Cambridge studies in Renaissance literature and culture

Genre:Criticism, interpretation, etc

Physical Description:xiii, 298 pages ; 24 cm.

ISBN:

9780521781305, 9780521787352, 9786610162178, 0521781302, 0521787351, 6610162174

OCLC Number / Unique Identifier:43109884

Contents:

Preface

Introduction: conjunctures and concepts

(17)

Performance and authority in Hamlet (1603)

(11)

A new agenda for authority

(25)

The ``low and ignorant'' crust of corruption

(5)

Towards a circulation of authority in the theatre

(7)

Players, printers, preachers: distraction in authority

(11)

Pen and voice: versions of doubleness

(25)

``Frivolous jestures'' vs. matter of ``worthiness'' (Tamburlaine)

(6)

Bifold authority in Troilus and Cressida

(8)

``Unworthy scaffold'' for ``so great an object''

(9)

Henry V

Playing with a difference

(30)

To ``disfigure, or to present'' (A Midsummer Night's Dream)

(8)

To ``descant'' on difference and deformity

(10)

Richard III

The ``self-resembled show''

(4)

Presentation, or the performant function

102

(7)

Histories in Elizabethan performance

109

(42)

Disparity in mid-Elizabethan theatre history

110

(11)

Reforming ``a whole theatre of others''

121

(10)

Hamlet

From common player to excellent actor

131

(5)

Differentiation, exclusion, withdrawal

136

(15)

Hamlet and the purposes of playing

151

(29)

Renaissance writing and common playing

153

(8)

Unworthy antics in the glass of fashion

161

(8)

``When in one line two crafts directly meet''

169

(5)

(Word)play and the mirror of representation

174

(6)

Space (in)dividable: locus and platea revisited

180

(36)

Space as symbolic form: the locus

182

(10)

The open space: provenance and function

192

(4)

Locus and platea in Macbeth

196

(12)

Banqueting in Timon of Athens

208

(8)

Shakespeare's endings: commodious thresholds

216

(30)

Epilogues vs. closure

220

(6)

Ends of postponement: holiday into workaday

226

(8)

Thresholds to memory and commodity

234

(6)

Liminality: cultural authority `betwixt-and-between'

240

(6)

Afterword: thresholds forever after

246

(5)

Notes

251

(18)

List of works cited

269

(20)

Index

289

More Information:

Sample text

Table of contents

Publisher description

2000. (v. 39)

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