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Winner of the 2009 David Bevington Award for Best New Book in Early Drama Studies awarded by the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society
Shakespeare in Parts
Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern
560 pages
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4 halftones
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234x156mm
978-0-19-959110-7
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Paperback
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08 December 2010
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This item is printed to order. Items which are printed to order are normally despatched and charged within 5-10 days.
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- With a new Afterword by the Authors
- A totally new subject and focus: the first book to explore the original form in which Shakespeare's drama circulated
- An exciting cross-fertilisation of methods, techniques, and sensibilities: archival history, close attention to language and technique, performance, the metaphysics of drama
- Plotted through set-piece chapters on carefully chosen individual plays (Merchant, Lear, Tempest), and by set-piece analyses of particular 'parts' (including Richard II and III, Shylock, six romantic heroines, Macbeth).
- Written in very clear language in a fluently readable style, with no jargon
A truly groundbreaking collaboration of original theatre history with exciting literary criticism, Shakespeare in Parts is the first book fully to explore the original form in which Shakespeare's drama overwhelmingly circulated. This was not the full play-text; it was not the public performance. It was the actor's part, consisting of the bare cues and speeches of each individual role. With group rehearsals rare or non-existent, the cued part alone had to furnish the actor with his character. But each such part-text was riddled with gaps and uncertainties. The actor knew what he was going to say, but not necessarily when, or why, or to whom; he may have known next to nothing of any other part. It demanded the most sensitive attention to the opportunities
inscribed in the script, and to the ongoing dramatic moment. Here is where the young actor Shakespeare learnt his trade; here is where his imagination, verbal and technical, learnt to roam.
This is the story of Shakespeare in Parts. As Shakespeare developed his playwriting, the apparent limitations of the medium get transformed into expressive opportunities. Both cue and speech become promise-crammed repositories of meaning and movement, and of individually discoverable space and time. Writing always for the same core group of players, Shakespeare could take - and insist upon - unprecedented risks. The result is onstage drama of astonishing immediacy.
Starting with a comprehensive history of the part in early modern theatre, Simon Palfrey and
Tiffany Stern's mould-altering work of historical and imaginative recovery provides a unique keyhole onto hitherto forgotten practices and techniques. It not only discovers a newly active, choice-ridden actor, but a new Shakespeare.Readership: Students and scholars of Shakespeare and the theatre; general readers with an interest in Shakespeare and the history of theatre
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Simon Palfrey, Fellow and Tutor in English, Brasenose College, Oxford, and Tiffany Stern, Fellow and Tutor in English, University College, Oxford
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Review(s) from previous edition
"Elegantly written...a ground-breaking study, which shows how Shakespeare the technician sought always to expand the mental possibilities for the actors. - Ralph Berry, Contemporary Review
"Rarely has so much new and exciting information about Shakespeare been gathered in a single study. The challenges of this book for how we conceive of, teach, write about and perform Shakespeare will surely be felt for years to come." - Douglas Bruster, The Review of English Studies
"undeniably of major importance." - Paul Dean, English Studies
"stunningly fresh and rewarding...among the field's finest scholarly monographs this year." - Paul Whitfield White, Studies in English Literature
"a groundbreaking new study...The consideration of characters and their textual construction is a revelation. ..The book is exactly as scrupulous and thorough as the subject deserves...For professional Shakespeareans in the theatre or the university, it is required reading." - Tom Cornford, Around the Globe
"this is a lucid and persuasive study that successfully infuses academic Shakespeare with the vibrancy and insecurity of live performance: "Shakespeare's actors had to play their parts now, perilously in the present."" - Peter J. Smith, THES
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INTRODUCTION
I: HISTORY
1: The Actor's Part
2: The Actors
3: Rehearsing and Performing
II: INTERPRETING CUES
4: History of the Cue
5: Interpreting Shakespeare's Cues
6: Cues and Characterisation
7: Waiting and Suddenness: the Part in Time
8: Repeated Cues
9: Repeated cues: from Crowds to Clowns
10: Repeated cues: comi-tragic/tragic-comic pathos
11: Repeated cues and the battle for the cue-space: The Merchant of Venice
12: Repeated cues and tragedy
13: Repeated cues and the cue-space in King Lear
14: Repeated cues and post-tragic effects
15: Repeated Cues and the Cue-Space in The Tempest
III: THE ACTOR WITH HIS PART
16: History
17: Dramatic prosody
18: Prosodic Switches: From Actor's Prompt to Absent Presence
19: Midline shifts in 'mature' Shakespeare: from actorly instruction to 'virtual' presence
20: Case studies: six romantic heroines and three lonely men
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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