University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Pages: 196
•
Trim: 6 x 8¾
978-1-61147-938-6 • Hardback • December 2016 • $88.00 • (£68.00)
978-1-61147-940-9 • Paperback • May 2018 • $44.99 • (£35.00)
978-1-61147-939-3 • eBook • December 2016 • $42.50 • (£33.00)
Travis Curtright is associate professor of humanities and literature at Ave Maria University, where he directs the minor of studies in Shakespeare in Performance. He is the author of The One Thomas More and coeditor of Shakespeare's Last Plays: Readings in Literature and Politics.
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Actors and Orators
1. King Richard III and Characters as Actors
2. Kate’s Audacious Speech of Submission
3. Much Ado about Personation
4. Iago’s Acting Style
5. Marina as Charorator
Conclusion: Direct Address as an “Original Practice”
Bibliography
Index
In 1615, John Webster famously observed of 'the excellent actor' that 'whatsoever is commendable to the grave orator is most exquisitely perfect in him.' In this thoroughly persuasive book, Travis Curtright demonstrates that playwrights, like excellent actors, were accomplished rhetoricians; that Shakespeare, in different ways over the course of his career, created dramatic characters from the building blocks of formal rhetorical devices; and that how characters speak and argue and persuade create the illusion of psychology, emotion, inwardness, and subjectivity. There is no other book like it.
— Cary M. Mazer, University of Pennsylvania
Travis Curtright’s book is one of those rare books on Shakespeare that combines the scholar’s understanding of the architecture and language of Shakespeare’s plays with the practitioner’s understanding of how that information is useful to the actor and the director. Here’s a book that teaches you about rhetoric and character at the same time that it teaches you why it matters on the stage. In front of me on my desk I keep a row of books I know I’ll need to dip back into as I work: Shakespeare’s Dramatic Persons will make that row.
— Ralph Alan Cohen, Gonder Professor of Shakespeare, Mary Baldwin University; Founder Executive Director, American Shakespeare Center