Anecdotal Shakespeare
Subtitle: A New Performance History
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 253
ISBN-13: 9781472576156
Subjects: Shakespeare, william, 1564-1616, stage history
Description: "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."--Bloomsbury Publishing.