Easting examines William Shakespeare's The Tempest and Virgil. Shakespeare is credited by OED with the earliest recorded use of the now commonplace expression, to vanish "into thin air." He suggests ...that Shakespeare may have been prompted by Virgil's line describing the disappearance of Mercury as he comes to the end of delivering to Aeneas Jupiter's injunction to sail from Carthage. In sum, although seemingly not recognized by Shakespearean commentators, or the OED, it appears that Shakespeare took the expression "into thin air" from Virgil, and most likely from Aeneid IV.278.
Stritmatter examines the 'Parable of the Talents' in Measure for Measure. In the 'Parable of the Talents' (Matt. 25.14-30) a wealthy estate owner, intending to travel, delegates the management of his ...estate to three servants and gives them sums of money to manage. Matthew summarizes the idea of the parable with an analogy: "the kingdom of heaven is as a man that, going into a strange country, called his servants and delivered unto them his goods". The long reach of this parable on the modern imagination is shown through the history of the word "talent"--literally and originally an ancient sum of money, which "passed into English usage in the Middle Ages as a synonym for abilities and/or natural endowments" a meaning which lives on even though the word has now shed its numismatic origins.
Shakespeare’s Muse of Fire Keyser, Emelye
Notes and queries,
06/2023, Letnik:
70, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Keyser examines William Shakespeare's Muse of Fire. In 1599 both Shakespeare and Thomas Dekker debuted works with choruses that evoked muses and enjoined audiences to augment the limits of theatre ...with their power of imagination. Sometime in the spring or early summer, Shakespeare's Chorus sighed onstage for "a muse of fire that would ascend/The brightest heaven of invention" and create "a kingdom for a stage." Addressing the audience directly, the Chorus directs that they allow the actors to "cram/Within this wooden O the?very casques/That did affright the air at Agincourt". And at Christmastime, Dekker's prologue to Old Fortunatus informed playgoers that "this small Circumference must stand/For the imagined Surface of much land" and begged "your thoughts to help poore Art". The conceit is unusual and unlike any earlier dramatic prologues: both Dekker and Shakespeare set the stage, so to speak, by drawing attention to theatre's status as mimetic art.
Shakespeare’s Theatre consolidates the author’s forty years of experience in studying and staging Shakespeare’s plays. Under an alphabetical list of relevant terms, names and concepts, the book ...reviews current knowledge of the character and operation of theatres in Shakespeare’s time, with an explanation of their origins. Coverage includes the practices of Elizabethan actors and script writers: methods of characterization; gesture, blocking and choreography, including music, dance and fighting; actors’ rhetorical interaction with audiences; and use of costumes, stage props, and make-up.The author makes use of scripts and scholarship about original stagings of Shakespeare and suggests how those productions related to modern staging. Much of this material has developed as a result of the recent increased interest in the significance of performance for interpreting Shakespeare, including the recovery of the archaeological evidence about the original Rose and Globe Theaters. The book contains current bibliographies for each topic and consolidates these in an overall bibliography for Shakespeare and his theaters.
In Praise of Performance Reviews Wooden, Isaiah Matthew
Theatre journal (Washington, D.C.),
12/2023, Letnik:
75, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
For decades, Theatre Journal has served as an important venue for documenting what made past theatrical productions or performances compelling and significant. As the journal commemorates its ...achievements over its first seventy-five volumes, this essay reflects on the vital contributions of the performance review section by considering its enduring impact on the field. In addition to tracing the evolution of the section from its earliest days as a single-authored article highlighting productions from the Broadway season to its current iteration, the essay argues that performance reviews have afforded authors crucial opportunities to hone their critical voices and vocabularies. It further contends that, even as performance reviews have been instrumental in introducing the journal’s readers to artists and events that they might not have otherwise known about, the influence of the section has also manifested in more practical ways. For example, it has been key in cultivating a pipeline of editors, thereby shaping how we think, read, and write about drama, theatre, and performance critically. Central to the essay is a consideration of the meaningful ways that the performance review section has advanced and enhanced the journal’s rich legacy of accomplishments.
Difficult as it is to imagine today, in 1937 America’s two leading media companies fought over the right to perform Shakespeare for an American radio audience in an attempt to bring prestige to their ...networks. The resulting fourteen broadcasts are among the more remarkable recreations of Shakespeare of their time. This lively and engaging book shows the cultural dominance of radio in the 1930s, and tells the story of why the networks each wanted to lord Shakespeare’s prestige over the other, how they put their series together, the critical reception, and the cultural impact and legacies of the broadcasts.
Shakespeare's poems, aside from the enduring appeal of the Sonnets, are much less familiar today than his plays, despite being enormously popular in his lifetime. This Introduction celebrates the ...achievement of Shakespeare as a poet, providing students with ways of understanding and enjoying his remarkable poems. It honours the aesthetic and intellectual complexity of the poems without making them seem unapproachably complicated, outlining their exquisite pleasures and absorbing enigmas. Schoenfeldt suggests that today's readers are better able to analyze aspects of the poems that were formerly ignored or the source of scandal - the articulation of a fervent same-sex love, for example, or the incipient racism inherent in a hierarchy of light and dark. By engaging closely with Shakespeare's major poems - 'Venus and Adonis', 'Lucrece', 'The Phoenix and the Turtle', the Sonnets and 'A Lover's Complaint' - the Introduction demonstrates how much these extraordinary poems still have to say to us.
