Author's Pen and Actor's Voice
Playing and Writing in Shakespeare's Theatre

Redefines the relationship between writing and performance in Shakespeare's theatre.

Robert Weimann (Author), Helen Higbee (Edited by), William West (Edited by)

9780521787352, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 27 July 2000

316 pages
22.9 x 15 x 1.7 cm, 0.465 kg

'… impressively detailed… The breadth of Robert Weiman's research and the depth of his thought are evident on every page.' New Theatre Quarterly

In this seminal work, Robert Weimann redefines the relationship between writing and performance, or 'playing', in Shakespeare's theatre. Through close reading and careful analysis Weimann offers a reconsideration and redefinition of Elizabethan performance and production practices. The study reviews the most recent methodologies of textual scholarship, the new history of the Elizabethan theatre, performance theory, and film and video interpretation, and offers a new approach to understanding Shakespeare. Weimann examines a range of plays including Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Henry V, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Macbeth, among others, as well as other contemporary works. A major part of the study explores the duality between playing and writing: the imaginary world-in-the-play and the visible, audible playing-in-the-world of the playhouse, and Weimann focuses especially on the gap between these two, between the so-called 'pen' and 'voice'.

Preface
Introduction: Conjunctures and concepts
1. Performance and authority in Hamlet (1603)
2. A new agenda for authority
3. Pen and voice: versions of doubleness
4. Playing with a difference
5. Histories in Elizabethan performance
6. Hamlet and the purposes of playing
7. Space (in)dividable: Locus and Platea revisited
8. Shakespeare's endings: commodious thresholds
Afterword: thresholds forever after
Notes
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]