A01=Paul Menzer
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Paul Menzer
automatic-update
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DSBD
Category=DSG
Category=DSGS
COP=United Kingdom
Delivery_Pre-order
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=0
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Language_English
PA=Temporarily unavailable
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
softlaunch
Product details
- ISBN 9781472576156
- Weight: 300g
- Dimensions: 129 x 198mm
- Publication Date: 22 Oct 2015
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
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.
Paul Menzer is Professor and Director of the Mary Baldwin College Shakespeare and Performance programme, Mary Baldwin College, USA
