Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Shakespeare plays on Renaissance stages
- 2 Improving Shakespeare: from the Restoration to Garrick
- 3 Romantic Shakespeare
- 4 Pictorial Shakespeare
- 5 Reconstructive Shakespeare: reproducing Elizabethan and Jacobean stages
- 6 Twentieth-century performance: the Stratford and London companies
- 7 The tragic actor and Shakespeare
- 8 The comic actor and Shakespeare
- 9 Women and Shakespearean performance
- 10 International Shakespeare
- 11 Touring Shakespeare
- 12 Shakespeare on the political stage in the twentieth century
- 13 Shakespeare in North America
- 14 Shakespeare on the stages of Asia
- 15 Shakespeare and Africa
- Further reading
- Index
1 - Shakespeare plays on Renaissance stages
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- 1 Shakespeare plays on Renaissance stages
- 2 Improving Shakespeare: from the Restoration to Garrick
- 3 Romantic Shakespeare
- 4 Pictorial Shakespeare
- 5 Reconstructive Shakespeare: reproducing Elizabethan and Jacobean stages
- 6 Twentieth-century performance: the Stratford and London companies
- 7 The tragic actor and Shakespeare
- 8 The comic actor and Shakespeare
- 9 Women and Shakespearean performance
- 10 International Shakespeare
- 11 Touring Shakespeare
- 12 Shakespeare on the political stage in the twentieth century
- 13 Shakespeare in North America
- 14 Shakespeare on the stages of Asia
- 15 Shakespeare and Africa
- Further reading
- Index
Summary
The business of playing
Shakespeare's plays were born on stage. They might have been conceived 'In the quick forge and working-house of thought', but for Shakespeare that house where you should 'Work, work, your thoughts' was itself a playhouse (Henry V 5.0.23, 3.0.25). Shakespeare did his thinking in theatres. 'My muse labours', Shakespeare wrote, 'and thus she is delivered', Iago says, enacting thought, the actor delivering his line as the character delivers his rhyme (Othello 2.1.126-7). What the muse conceives is not properly born until it cries out, giving voice to what had before been only 'bare imagination' (Richard II 1.3.296). So it should not surprise us that Shakespeare imagined being 'born' as an entrance onto 'this great stage' (Tragedy of King Lear 4.5.175). That metaphor depended, in part, upon the Latin motto of the Globe Theatre, 'Totus mundus agit histrionem' (translated in As You Like It as 'All the world's a stage'). But it also reflected Shakespeare’s own frequent association of the womb that delivers newborn babes with the theatre that delivers newborn plays. He compares the walls of a circular amphitheatre to a ‘girdle’, encompassing a ‘pit’ that is also an ‘O’ (Henry V Pro. 19, 11, 13); he imagines a ‘concave womb’ echoing with words (Lover’s Complaint I), and asserts that a ‘hollow womb resounds’ (Venus 268), as though a uterus were a resonating auditorium. Such associations subordinate female anatomy to the emotional and professional experience of a male actor and playwright.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage , pp. 1 - 20Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002
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