Shakespeare's Stagecraft

by J.L. Styan

Book Overview

For many years, critics and students of Shakespeare have tended to stress that his plays are poetic structures embodying 'themes', and these structures have been analysed in great detail. Professor... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521094356
• ISBN13: 9780521094351
• Release Date: November 1967
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

All the World's a Stage

Professor Styan had provided an invaluable service in bringing Shakespeare's plays alive, not for the actors or director, who tend to add their own touches to the stagecraft, nor even for the playgoer, who is a witness to the result, but for the reader of the plays, who must struggle with the fact that what few stage directions survive in the quartos were in many cases cobbled together from memory by the players and are not necessarily Shakespeare's own. Styan looks for clues to what the Bard envisioned in the texts of the plays themselves, as, for example, in this scene from "The Winter's Tale," wherein a father wipes his son's nose: "What! hast thou smutched thy nose? / They say it is a copy of mine. . . Come, captain, / We must be neat. . ." as well as in the physical appearance of the Elizabethan stage, which allowed for a much greater flexibility in terms of blocking and grouping (not to mention violations of the unities) than the Victorian picture-frame stage of the last century. Professor Styan's knowledge of the plays, which is encyclopedic, may lead to the occasional excess, but his analysis is difficult to argue with. I am left with only one question: why doesn't the professor deal with what is undoubtedly Shakespeare's most famous stage direction, also from "The Winter's Tale": "Exit, pursued by a bear"? Maybe he just didn't want to get into a discussion of whether or not a real bear, from a nearby bear-baiting arena, was used for the effect, and whether the bear could be relied upon to chase Antigonus upstage or downstage.