Recovering Shakespeare's Theatrical Vocabulary

Dessen investigates what a playgoer actually saw on stage at the first performance of, for example, Hamlet or Macbeth.

Alan C. Dessen (Author)

9780521032414, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 23 November 2006

300 pages
21.5 x 13.7 x 1.8 cm, 0.397 kg

"Recovering Shakespeare's Theatrical Vocabulary is a very strong book...." Philip C. McGuire, Shakespeare Quarterly

In this rigorous investigation of the staging of Shakespeare's plays, Alan Dessen wrestles with three linked questions: (1) what did a playgoer at the original production actually see? (2) how can we tell today? and (3) so what? His emphasis is upon images and on-stage effects (e.g. the sick-chair, early entrances, tomb scenes) easily obscured or eclipsed today. Basing his analysis on the 600 English professional plays performed before 1642, Dessen identifies a vocabulary of the theatre shared by Shakespeare, his theatrical colleagues and his playgoers, in which stage directions do not admit of neat dictionary definitions but can be glossed in terms of options and potential meanings. To explore such terms, along with various costumes and properties (keys, trees, coffins, books), is to challenge assumptions that underlie how Shakespeare is read, edited and staged today.

Preface
Note on texts and old spelling
1. The problem, the evidence, and the language barrier
2. Lost in translation
3. Interpreting without a dictionary
4. Juxtapositions
5. Theatrical italics
6. Sick chairs and sick thrones
7. Much virtue in as
8. The vocabulary of 'place'
9. 'Romeo opens the tomb'
10. Vanish and vanishing
Conclusion: so what?
Notes
Plays and editions cited
Index.

Subject Areas: Shakespeare studies & criticism [DSGS]