Author's Pen and Actor's Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare's Theatre (Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature & Culture) (Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture)
Cambridge University Press, 7/27/2000
EAN 9780521781305, ISBN10: 0521781302
Hardcover, 316 pages, 23.7 x 15.7 x 2.2 cm
Language: English
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'.
Preface
Introduction
Conjunctures and concepts
1. Performance and authority in Hamlet (1603)
2. A new agenda for authority
3. Pen and voice
versions of doubleness
4. Playing with a difference
5. Histories in Elizabethan performance
6. Hamlet and the purposes of playing
7. Space (in)dividable
Locus and Platea revisited
8. Shakespeare's endings
commodious thresholds
Afterword
thresholds forever after
Notes
Index.