Shakespeare the actor and the purposes of playing
For the Renaissance, all the world may have been a stage and all its people players, but Shakespeare was also an actor on the literal stage. Meredith Anne Skura asks what it meant to be an actor in Shakespeare's England and shows why a knowledge of actual theatrical practices is essential for understanding both Shakespeare's plays and the theatricality of everyday life in early modern England
Biography
xvi, 325 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780226761794, 9780226761800, 0226761797, 0226761800
27935667
1. Being an Actor: An "Up and Down, In and Out Life"
2. Elizabethan Players: Proud Beggars "Now Up and Now Down" The Player Offstage: Fact and Fantasy. The Player Onstage: Mimesis and Performance. Proud Beggar Onstage: Clown and Epilogue
3. Richard III: Shakespeare's "False Glass" Richard III: "False Glass" Richard III: Shakespeare's Glass?
4. Player King as Beggar in Great Men's Houses
I. Armado and Costard in the French Academy: Player as Clown. Sly in the Cotswold Manor: Player as Beggar. Bottom in Theseus's Palace: Player as Little Boy
5. Player King as Beggar in Great Men's Houses
II. Falstaff in the House of Lancaster: Player as Dog. Falstaff in Ford's House: Player as Deer. Tragedians at Elsinore: Great Man as Player. Lear Outside His Daughter's House: The King and the Player-Beggar
6. Theater as Reflecting Glass: The Two-way Mirror. A Mirror for Monsters. Two Gentlemen of Verona: Woman's Part, Dog's Part
7. "Dogs, Licking, Candy, Melting" and the Flatterer's False Glass. Elizabethan Moths and Fawns. Richard II: The "Tedious" Actor. Julius Caesar: "People Clap Him and Hiss Him" Coriolanus: "It Is a Part That I Shall Blush in Acting" Timon of Athens: Playing Host
8. "Every Man Must Play a Part, and Mine a Sad One": The Player's Passion
Afterword: Circles and Centers