Anecdotal Shakespeare

By Paul Menzer

Book Overview

Shakespeare's four-hundred-year performance history is full of anecdotes - ribald, trivial, frequently funny, sometimes disturbing, and always but loosely allegiant to fact. Such anecdotes are nevertheless a vital index to the ways that Shakespeare's plays have generated meaning across varied times and in varied places. Furthermore, particular plays have produced particular anecdotes - stories of a real skull in Hamlet , superstitions about the name Macbeth , toga troubles in Julius Caesar - and therefore express something embedded in the plays they attend. Anecdotes constitute then not just a vital component of a play's performance history but a form of vernacular criticism by the personnel most intimately involved in their production: actors. These anecdotes are therefore every bit as responsive to and expressive of a play's meanings across time as the equally rich history of Shakespearean criticism or indeed the very performances these anecdotes treat. Anecdotal Shakespeare provides a history of post-Renaissance Shakespeare and performance, one not based in fact but no less full of truth.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1472576160
• ISBN13: 9781472576163
• Release Date: October 2015
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 7.9"