Shakespeare's Visual Theatre

Shakespeare's Visual Theatre PDF

Author: Frederick Kiefer

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2003-09-25

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 9780521827256

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In this study of Shakespeare's visual culture Frederick Kiefer looks at the personified characters created by Shakespeare in his plays, his walking, talking abstractions. These include Rumour in 2 Henry IV, Time in The Winter's Tale, Spring and Winter in Love's Labour's Lost, Revenge in Titus Andronicus, and the deities in the late plays. All these personae take physical form on the stage: the actors performing the roles wear distinctive attire and carry appropriate props. The book seeks to reconstruct the appearance of Shakespeare's personified characters; to explain the symbolism of their costumes and props; and to assess the significance of these symbolic characters for the plays in which they appear. To accomplish this reconstruction, Kiefer brings together a wealth of visual and literary evidence including engravings, woodcuts, paintings, drawings, tapestries, emblems, civic pageants, masques, poetry and plays. The book contains over forty illustrations of personified characters in Shakespeare's time.

A Shakespearean Theatre

A Shakespearean Theatre PDF

Author: Jacqueline Morley

Publisher: Scribo

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781905638598

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Elizabethan London was a vibrant, growing city and theater, especially that of William Shakespeare, played a major role in its lively culture. There was even a different play every day of the week Here's your ticket to the Globe, the legendary 20-sided building where Shakespeare's plays were staged. Go backstage to discover how the theater was run, who chose the actors, how big an audience it could hold, and why it was build on the banks of the Thames. Extraordinary illustrations give a dramatic look at life and art in the sixteenth century. "

Looking at Shakespeare

Looking at Shakespeare PDF

Author: Dennis Kennedy

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2001-12-20

Total Pages: 468

ISBN-13: 9780521785488

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Most studies of the performance of Shakespeare's work concentrate on how the text has been played and what meanings have been conveyed through acting and interpretive directing. Dennis Kennedy demonstrates that much of audience response is determined by the visual representation, which is normally more immediate and direct than the aural conveyance of a text. Ranging widely over productions in Britain, Europe, Japan and North America, Kennedy gives a thorough account of the main scenographic movements of the century, investigating how the visual relates to Shakespeare on the stage. The second edition of this acclaimed history includes a new chapter on Shakespeare performance in the 1990s, bringing the story up to date by drawing on examples from a wide international field. There are more than twenty new illustrations, some of them in colour (bringing the total number of illustrations to almost 200), and previous references have been updated.

Shakespeare and the Visual Arts

Shakespeare and the Visual Arts PDF

Author: Michele Marrapodi

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-02-17

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 1351815121

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Critical investigation into the rubric of 'Shakespeare and the visual arts' has generally focused on the influence exerted by the works of Shakespeare on a number of artists, painters, and sculptors in the course of the centuries. Drawing on the poetics of intertextuality and profiting from the more recent concepts of cultural mobility and permeability between cultures in the early modern period, this volume’s tripartite structure considers instead the relationship between Renaissance material arts, theatre, and emblems as an integrated and intermedial genre, explores the use and function of Italian visual culture in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, and questions the appropriation of the arts in the production of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. By studying the intermediality between theatre and the visual arts, the volume extols drama as a hybrid genre, combining the figurative power of imagery with the plasticity of the acting process, and explains the tri-dimensional quality of the dramatic discourse in the verbal-visual interaction, the stagecraft of the performance, and the natural legacy of the iconographical topoi of painting’s cognitive structures. This methodolical approach opens up a new perspective in the intermedial construction of Shakespearean and early modern drama, extending the concept of theatrical intertextuality to the field of pictorial arts and their social-cultural resonance. An afterword written by an expert in the field, a rich bibliography of primary and secondary literature, and a detailed Index round off the volume.

Costuming the Shakespearean Stage

Costuming the Shakespearean Stage PDF

Author: Robert I. Lublin

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1409436837

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Robert Lublin's new study considers royal proclamations, religious writings, paintings, woodcuts, plays, historical accounts, sermons, and legal documents to investigate what Shakespearean actors actually wore in production and what cultural information those costumes conveyed.

Shakespeare's Theatres and the Effects of Performance

Shakespeare's Theatres and the Effects of Performance PDF

Author: Farah Karim Cooper

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2015-01-05

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 1408157055

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How did Elizabethan and Jacobean acting companies create their visual and aural effects? What materials were available to them and how did they influence staging and writing? What impact did the sensations of theatre have on early modern audiences? How did the construction of the playhouses contribute to technological innovations in the theatre? What effect might these innovations have had on the writing of plays? Shakespeare's Theatres and The Effects of Performance is a landmark collection of essays by leading international scholars addressing these and other questions to create a unique and comprehensive overview of the practicalities and realities of the theatre in the early modern period.

Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare

Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare PDF

Author: Richard Meek

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 1351915940

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This book examines Shakespeare's fascination with the art of narrative and the visuality of language. Richard Meek complicates our conception of Shakespeare as either a 'man of the theatre' or a 'literary dramatist', suggesting ways in which his works themselves debate the question of text versus performance. Beginning with an exploration of the pictorialism of Shakespeare's narrative poems, the book goes on to examine several moments in Shakespeare's dramatic works when characters break off the action to describe an absent, 'offstage' event, place or work of art. Meek argues that Shakespeare does not simply prioritise drama over other forms of representation, but rather that he repeatedly exploits the interplay between different types of mimesis - narrative, dramatic and pictorial - in order to beguile his audiences and readers. Setting Shakespeare's works in their literary and rhetorical contexts, and engaging with contemporary literary theory, the book offers new readings of Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, Hamlet, King Lear and The Winter's Tale. The book will be of particular relevance to readers interested in the relationship between verbal and visual art, theories of representation and mimesis, Renaissance literary and rhetorical culture, and debates regarding Shakespeare's status as a literary dramatist.

Shakespeare in the Theatre: The American Shakespeare Center

Shakespeare in the Theatre: The American Shakespeare Center PDF

Author: Paul Menzer

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-02-23

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1472585003

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The original Blackfriars closed its doors in the 1640s, ending over half-a-century of performances by men and boys. In 2001, in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, it opened once again. The reconstructed Blackfriars, home to the American Shakespeare Center, represents an old playhouse for the new millennium and therefore symbolically registers the permanent revolution in the performance of Shakespeare. Time and again, the industry refreshes its practices by rediscovering its own history. This book assesses how one American company has capitalised on history and in so doing has forged one of its own to become a major influence in contemporary Shakespearean theatre.

Costuming the Shakespearean Stage

Costuming the Shakespearean Stage PDF

Author: Robert I. Lublin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-05-13

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1317159004

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Although scholars have long considered the material conditions surrounding the production of early modern drama, until now, no book-length examination has sought to explain what was worn on the period's stages and, more importantly, how articles of apparel were understood when seen by contemporary audiences. Robert Lublin's new study considers royal proclamations, religious writings, paintings, woodcuts, plays, historical accounts, sermons, and legal documents to investigate what Shakespearean actors actually wore in production and what cultural information those costumes conveyed. Four of the chapters of Costuming the Shakespearean Stage address 'categories of seeing': visually based semiotic systems according to which costumes constructed and conveyed information on the early modern stage. The four categories include gender, social station, nationality, and religion. The fifth chapter examines one play, Thomas Middleton's A Game at Chess, to show how costumes signified across the categories of seeing to establish a play's distinctive semiotics and visual aesthetic.

Shakespeare and the Visual Imagination

Shakespeare and the Visual Imagination PDF

Author: Stuart Sillars

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-08-06

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1107029953

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A fully illustrated study of Shakespeare's awareness of traditions in visual art and their presence in his plays and poems.