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Shaping Shakespeare for Performance

The Bear Stage

Edited by Catherine Loomis and Sid Ray - Contributions by Alan Armstrong; Sybille Bruun; Annalisa Castaldo; Heidi Cephus; Christopher Clary; Peter Hyland; Peter Kanelos; James Keegan; Matt Kozusko; Russ McDonald; Ann Pleiss Morris; Cass Morris; Fiona Harris-Ramsby; Paige Martin Reynolds; Deb Streusand; Ann Thompson; Michael M. Wagoner; Kimberly Redman West and Celestine Woo

Shaping Shakespeare for Performance: The Bear Stage collects significant work from the 2013 Blackfriars Conference. The conference, sponsored by the American Shakespeare Center, brings together scholars, actors, directors, dramaturges, and students to share important new work on the staging practices used by William Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The volume’s contributors range from renowned scholars and editors to acclaimed directors, highly-trained actors, and budding researchers. The topics cover a similarly wide range: a close reading of an often-cut scene from Henry V meets an account of staging pregnancy; a meticulous review of early modern contract law collides with an analysis of an actor in a bear costume; an account of printed punctuation from the 1600s encounters a study of audience interaction and empowerment in King Lear; the identification of candid doubling in A Comedy of Errors meets the troubling of gender categories in The Roaring Girl. The essays focus on the practical applications of theory, scholarship, and editing to performance of early modern plays.

University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Pages: 304 • Trim: 6¼ x 9½

978-1-61147-784-9 • Hardback • October 2015 • $121.00 • (£93.00)

978-1-61147-786-3 • Paperback • September 2017 • $60.99 • (£47.00)

978-1-61147-785-6 • eBook • October 2015 • $57.50 • (£44.00)

Series: The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series on Shakespeare and the Stage

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Shakespeare, Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Performing Arts / General, History / Modern / 16th Century

Shaping Shakespeare for Performance

The Bear Stage

Hardback

Paperback

eBook

Summary

Shaping Shakespeare for Performance: The Bear Stage collects significant work from the 2013 Blackfriars Conference. The conference, sponsored by the American Shakespeare Center, brings together scholars, actors, directors, dramaturges, and students to share important new work on the staging practices used by William Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The volume’s contributors range from renowned scholars and editors to acclaimed directors, highly-trained actors, and budding researchers. The topics cover a similarly wide range: a close reading of an often-cut scene from Henry V meets an account of staging pregnancy; a meticulous review of early modern contract law collides with an analysis of an actor in a bear costume; an account of printed punctuation from the 1600s encounters a study of audience interaction and empowerment in King Lear; the identification of candid doubling in A Comedy of Errors meets the troubling of gender categories in The Roaring Girl. The essays focus on the practical applications of theory, scholarship, and editing to performance of early modern plays.

Details

University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Pages: 304 • Trim: 6¼ x 9½

978-1-61147-784-9 • Hardback • October 2015 • $121.00 • (£93.00)

978-1-61147-786-3 • Paperback • September 2017 • $60.99 • (£47.00)

978-1-61147-785-6 • eBook • October 2015 • $57.50 • (£44.00)

Series: The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series on Shakespeare and the Stage

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Shakespeare, Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Performing Arts / General, History / Modern / 16th Century

Author

Catherine Loomis is professor of English and women’s studies at the University of New Orleans. She is the author of William Shakespeare: A Documentary Volume and The Death of Elizabeth I: Remembering and Reconstructing the Virgin Queen.

Sid Ray is professor of English and women’s and gender studies at Pace University, New York campus. She is the author of Holy Estates: Marriage and Monarchy in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries and Mother Queens and Princely Sons: Rogue Madonnas in the Age of Shakespeare.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Dedication
Foreword
Ralph Alan Cohen
The Bear Stage
Catherine Loomis and Sid Ray

Part I “Edit, pursued by a bear”:
Essays on Editing Shakespeare for the Stage and the Page
1 “Now this is where you can bring in Cleopatra’s horse”: Editing Shakespeare for the Stage
Ann Thompson
2 Patient Auditor to Gentle Reader: Transforming the Introduction from Playhouse to Print House
Ann Pleiss Morris
3 “Why do you thus exclaim?”: Emotionally Inflected Punctuation in Editorial Practice and in Performance
Cass Morris

Part II: “I must bear a part”: Essays on Analyzing and Playing Character
4 Why Are Shakespeare’s Characters So Relatable?
Matt Kozusko
5 Anatomiz[ing] Regan: Performing Parts in King Lear”
Paige Martin Reynolds
6 A Piece of Cake, a Bit of Dance, and a Fat Suit on Its Knees: Staging the Epilogue of 2 Henry IV at the Blackfriars in 2010
James Keegan
7 Isabella in Measure for Measure: Discovering the Pleasure of Performance
Celestine Woo
8 “You that way, we this way”: Letters and Possibilities in Love’s Labour’s Lost
Sybille Bruun
9 Moll’s Queer Anatomy: The Roaring Girl and Queer Generation
Christopher Clary
10 Imaginative Bodies and Bodies Imagined in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Fletcher and Massinger’s The Sea Voyage
Michael Wagoner

Part III
“Devil in a bear’s doublet”: Essays on Shaping Performance
11 The Thundering Audience of King Lear
Heidi N. Cephus
12 “Off with his head! … So much for [Hewlett/Brown]”: The African Grove Theatre Presents Richard III
Danielle Rosvally
13 “To make the unskillful laugh”: A Rhetoric of Belches in Twelfth Night
Sid Ray
14 “And are by child with me”: The Performance of Pregnancy in Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well
Kathryn M. Moncrief
15 “Your majesty came not like yourself”: Staging and Understanding the Glove Episode of Henry V
Annalisa Castaldo
16 Bringing Justice to Bear: An Unusual 1609 Trial
Catherine Loomis

Part IV:
“Dissembling Cub[s]”: Essays on Staging the Metatheatrical
17 Doubling in The Comedy of Errors
Alan Armstrong
18 Scare Bear: Playing with Mucedorus
Peter Hyland
19 “Pardon, gentles all”: Performing the Metatheatrical
Deb Streusand
20 Craving the Law in The Merchant of Venice, or How to Draft an Enforceable Contract for a Pound of Flesh
Kimberly West

Part V
“Bear the Verses”: Essays on Rhetoric and Performance
21 Refiguring Richard: Towards a Hermeneutics of the Figure
Peter Kanelos
22 “Ah, poor our sex! This fault in us I find”: Performative Silences in Troilus and Cressida
Fiona Harris-Ramsby
23 Shakespeare and the History of the Bookish
Russ McDonald

About the Contributors

Shaping Shakespeare for Performance

The Bear Stage

Shaping Shakespeare for Performance

The Bear Stage

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