Download Prologues to Shakespeare's Theatre: Performance and by Douglas Bruster PDF

By Douglas Bruster

ISBN-10: 0203362683

ISBN-13: 9780203362686

ISBN-10: 041533442X

ISBN-13: 9780415334426

ISBN-10: 0415334438

ISBN-13: 9780415334433

This eye-opening research attracts consciousness to the principally ignored kind of the early smooth prologue. studying the prologue in played in addition to published contexts, Douglas Bruster and Robert Weimann take us past innovations of balance and autonomy in dramatic beginnings to bare the the most important cultural features played by means of the prologue in Elizabethan England.While its most simple job is to grab the eye of a loud viewers, the prologue's extra major threshold place is used to usher spectators and actors via a ceremony of passage. attractive competing claims, expectancies and choices, the prologue introduces, authorizes and, severely, straddles the worlds of the particular theatrical occasion and the 'counterfeit' international on level. during this approach, prologues occupy a different and strong place among orders of cultural perform and perception.Close readings of prologues by means of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, together with Marlowe, Peele and Lyly, show the prologue's position in representing either the area within the play and enjoying on the earth. via their special exam of this amazing shape and its capabilities, the authors supply a desirable viewpoint on early sleek drama, a standpoint that enriches our wisdom of the performs' socio-cultural context and their mode of theatrical tackle and motion.

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The Elizabethan prologue 25 We can see in this choice a desire for an authorial prologue, an Italian poet for an Italian story, presumably. Whatever its raison d’être, Russell’s prologue was harbinger to numerous twentieth-century experiments. For instance, both John Gielgud and Orson Welles, in separate productions in the mid-1930s, wore gold masks as they delivered the prologue. This attempt to present a gilded, authoritative speaker was made only slightly less literal when, in a 1954 film version, Gielgud, ‘made up as Shakespeare, speaks directly to the camera with a book in his hand’.

44 The prologue celebrates his transition, in the eyes of the acting company and its patrons, from boy to adult and concomitantly from playing female roles to playing male roles. The ‘in between’ nature of the prologue itself—its position, as form and event, between the audience and the players, the world outside the playhouse and the world of the play, and even, as a text, between the reader and the imagined playworld—must have seemed not only apt but absolutely fitting as a vehicle with which to mark Fenn’s physical and professional rite of passage.

Worth special attention here, however, are the biographical implications of the piece. One could notice the care, for instance, with which Glapthorne augments the actor-as-ship metaphor with concern for Fenn’s sexual maturation. The female roles that Fenn had played are, as Nungezer remarked, doubtless glanced at in the series of references to the actor’s innocence and frailty: ‘infant Piece’ (1); ‘Innocence and timorous Modesty’ (6); ‘blush at my own shadow, prone to fear’ (7); ‘my weak frame’ (10).

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