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"Performing Shakespeare is both a challenge and a privilege. His work connects the actor and audience through time, reminding us of our shared humanity."
--Kenneth Branagh
Many actors agree that performing Shakespeare is a vital part of their journey as they hone their craft. From inhabiting the physicality of a character to navigating the bard’s Early Modern English, actors face a unique challenge when they interpret Shakespeare’s classic plays for contemporary audiences. This month, Bloomsbury Collections features content from our Drama and Performance Studies library that illuminates the complexities of performing the plays of Shakespeare in ranging contexts.
Explore Bloomsbury Collection’s Drama and Performance Studies library, which provides applied and scholarly support for students and researchers with thousands of titles spanning the discipline.
Shakespeare’s women rarely reach the end of the play alive. As a result, female actors in Shakespeare’s works often find themselves “playing dead.” But what does this mean for women actors, whose bodies become scrutinized and anatomized by audiences and fellow actors? In her book Performing Shakespeare's Women: Playing Dead, Paige Martin Reynolds engages both performance history and current scholarship to consider practical problems facing the female actor playing Shakespearean characters in a post-feminist world.
Read this provided introduction in which the author presents an overview of her subject, drawing from her own experience as female stage actor.
We know much about theater in Shakespeare’s time but very little about the audiences who attended his plays. Shakespeare: Actors and Audiences places the role of the audience at the center of how we understand Shakespeare in performance, with leading actors, theater makers, and audience members providing insight into the world of theater production and the relationship between performer and spectator.
In this sample chapter, scholar Stephen Purcell draws from notable past performances to consider how the audience itself influences different interpretations of Shakespeare’s works.
For some artists approaching Shakespeare, a significant challenge can be successfully conveying a character’s thoughts and emotions through the playwright’s Early Modern English prose. Kelly Hunter’s book Cracking Shakespeare: A Hands-on Guide for Actors and Directors demystifies the process of speaking Shakespeare’s language, offering hands-on techniques for drama students, young actors and directors who are intimidated by rehearsing, performing and directing Shakespeare’s plays.
Read this chapter in which Hunter discusses how to take ownership of Shakespeare’s language by incorporating an “emotional alphabet”: key letters and sounds that convey certain strong emotions.
According to theater scholars, not all acting methods are compatible with performing Shakespeare; in particular, that of influential practitioner Konstantin Stanislavsky. Acting tutor and director Annie Tyson dispels this notion in her book Shakespeare and Stanislavsky: A Practical Guide for Actors, Directors, Students and Teachers. Tyson makes applying Stanislavsky’s method to Shakespeare simple and accessible, illustrating how Shakespearean text offers clues to specific acting choices connected to action and character.
In this provided chapter, Tyson considers Stanislavsky’s early days as a teacher, and his use of Shakespearean plays in training actors including Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, and Julius Caesar.
What skills did Shakespeare’s early actors bring to their craft, and how do these skills differ from those of contemporary actors? In Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare’s Theatre: Thinking with the Body, professor Evelyn Tribble examines the ‘toolkit’ of the early modern player and suggests new readings of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries through the lens of their many skills.
In this provided chapter, Tribble explores mindful action and gesture in Shakespearean performance, from drawing a sword to embracing a lover.
If you’ve enjoyed this taster of what Bloomsbury Collections has to offer, why not let your librarian know about the resource? Recommend it to your librarian here.
