By Sarah Werner
ISBN-10: 0415227291
ISBN-13: 9780415227292
How do performances of Shakespeare switch the meanings of the performs? during this debatable new e-book, Sarah Werner argues that the textual content of a Shakespeare play is just one of the numerous components that supply a functionality its which means. through concentrating on The Royal Shakespeare corporation, Werner demonstrates how actor education, corporation administration and gender politics essentially have an effect on either how a construction is created and the interpretations it could possibly recommend. Werner concentrates rather on: The influential education tools of Cicely Berry and Patsy Rodenburg The heritage of the RSC Women's team Gale Edwards' creation of The Taming of the Shrew She finds that no functionality of Shakespeare is ready to carry the performs to existence or to grasp the playwright's intentions with no shaping them to reflect our personal assumptions. through analyzing the ideological implications of functionality practices, this publication can assist all drawn to Shakespeare's performs to discover what it capacity to review them in functionality.
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Extra resources for Shakespeare and Feminist Performance: Ideology on Stage
Example text
Rodenburg also takes as a starting-point this belief in the link between voice and self, explaining that our voices reveal “the deepest parts of ourselves” (1992: x) and that work on the voice “can liberate and transform both our use of language and our sense of ourselves” (1993: xv). Those who work with Berry and Rodenburg take this fundamental connection as the root of their praise for the women. Peter Brook’s highest tribute to Berry, that “after a voice session with her I have known actors speak not of the voice but of a growth in human relationships” (Berry 1973: 3), is one echoed by later actors and directors: Trevor Nunn’s foreword to The Actor and the Text (the revised title for the 1992 reprint of The Actor and His Text) and Antony Sher’s foreword to The Need for Words both laud Berry’s and Rodenburg’s personal warmth and strength as human beings.
If actors feel that they must blend their truth with Shakespeare’s and achieve a “sense of inner understanding” (Berry 1992: 141), they will try to explain characters’ actions and emotions in terms with which they are familiar; the belief that breathing like the characters will enable actors 32 Acting ideologies and performance of women to think and feel like the characters encourages this instinct to understand them through modern analogies. But striving to fit the characters into twentieth-century emotional and psychological paradigms overlooks the vast distance between our own culture and that of the Renaissance, a distance that might alter the fundamental way we think of character and subjectivity.
But, as will become clear, these apparently transient elements are as crucial in the production of meaning as Shakespeare’s words. The move away from a New Critical interpretive practice, in which a text’s meaning is understood to be contained solely within the text itself, has led to a wide range of interpretive methods that see meaning located in the web of social relations between individual texts and cultural ideologies. Feminist criticism, new historicism, cultural materialism, queer theory – all insist that meaning does not reside solely within an ahistorical text.