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Writing Performative Shakespeares

Writing Performative Shakespeares

Writing Performative Shakespeares

New Forms for Performance Criticism
Rob Conkie , La Trobe University, Victoria
January 2019
Available
Paperback
9781107421301

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    This innovative study offers a genuinely groundbreaking approach to Shakespeare in performance. Six chapters work like case studies, each highly creative in terms of visual form and structure - including puzzles, comics and pinboards - inviting the reader into playful engagement with the performative dimensions of Shakespearean production. The case studies include discussion of training and rehearsal processes; the materiality of the performance event and its various embodiments; the intertextual citations through which productions make meaning; and, in response to all of this, the multiplicity and variety of audience perspectives and interpretations. Conkie's production choices range from original practices to politicised adaptations, small-scale workshops to multimedia spectacles, offering inventive analyses of what Shakespeare might mean, or can be made to mean, at particular times and in specific places, at the start of the twenty-first century.

    • Radically reinvents writing about Shakespeare in performance
    • Provides six case studies of recent Shakespearean productions
    • Integrates theoretical and practice-based approaches

    Reviews & endorsements

    "This is an ambitious and innovative book, which breaks genuinely new ground in Shakespeare performance studies, and which will make a significant contribution to the field … There are plenty of Shakespeareans who work practically, and many who work in conversation with professional practitioners, but relatively few who subject this experience to the kind of searching interrogation that is found here … This is a terrifically enjoyable and provocative read, one that suggests new avenues of enquiry and new ways of navigating them."
    Robert Shaughnessy, University of Kent

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    Product details

    January 2019
    Paperback
    9781107421301
    176 pages
    246 × 188 × 10 mm
    0.35kg
    51 b/w illus.
    Available

    Table of Contents

    • Introduction
    • 1. Materialising Shakespeare
    • 2. Sudoku Shakespeare
    • 3. Red button Shakespeare
    • 4. Graphic Shakespeare with Bernard Caleo
    • 5. Engaging Shakespeare
    • 6. Ghosting Shakespeare
    • Conclusion
    • Bibliography
    • Index.
      Contributors
    • Bernard Caleo

    • Author
    • Rob Conkie , La Trobe University, Victoria

      Rob Conkie is Senior Lecturer of Theatre and Drama at La Trobe University, Victoria. His research integrates practical and theoretical approaches to Shakespeare in performance. He is the author of The Globe Theatre Project: Shakespeare and Authenticity (2006) and has published articles in journals including Shakespeare, Shakespeare Bulletin and Shakespeare Survey.