Shakespeare’s Body Language

Shakespeare’s Body Language PDF Author: Miranda Fay Thomas
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350035491
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Why do the Capulets bite their thumbs at the Montagues? Why do the Venetians spit upon Shylock's Jewish gaberdine? What is it about Volumnia's act of kneeling that convinces Coriolanus not to assault the city of Rome? Shakespeare's Body Language is a ground-breaking new study of Shakespearean drama, revealing the previously unseen history of social tensions found within the performance of gestures – and how such gestures are used to shame those within the body politic of early modern England. The first full study of shaming gestures in Shakespearean drama, this book establishes how shame is often rooted in the gendered expectations of the Renaissance era. Exploring how the performance of gestures such as figging, the cuckold's horns, and even the in-action of stillness created shaming spectacles on the early modern stage and its wider society, Shakespeare's Body Language argues that gestures are embodied social metaphors which epitomise the personal as political. It reveals the tensions of everyday life as key motivators behind the actions of Shakespeare's characters, and considers how honour and its opposite, shame, are constructed in terms of gender norms. Featuring in-depth analyses of plays across Shakespeare's career, this book explores how the playwright's understanding of shame and humiliation is rooted in performance anxiety and gender politics, explaining how theatrical gestures can create dramatic tension in a way that words alone cannot. It offers both rich insights into the early modern context of Shakespeare's drama and confirms the startling relevance of his work to modern audiences.

Shakespeare’s Body Language

Shakespeare’s Body Language PDF Author: Miranda Fay Thomas
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350035491
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book

Book Description
Why do the Capulets bite their thumbs at the Montagues? Why do the Venetians spit upon Shylock's Jewish gaberdine? What is it about Volumnia's act of kneeling that convinces Coriolanus not to assault the city of Rome? Shakespeare's Body Language is a ground-breaking new study of Shakespearean drama, revealing the previously unseen history of social tensions found within the performance of gestures – and how such gestures are used to shame those within the body politic of early modern England. The first full study of shaming gestures in Shakespearean drama, this book establishes how shame is often rooted in the gendered expectations of the Renaissance era. Exploring how the performance of gestures such as figging, the cuckold's horns, and even the in-action of stillness created shaming spectacles on the early modern stage and its wider society, Shakespeare's Body Language argues that gestures are embodied social metaphors which epitomise the personal as political. It reveals the tensions of everyday life as key motivators behind the actions of Shakespeare's characters, and considers how honour and its opposite, shame, are constructed in terms of gender norms. Featuring in-depth analyses of plays across Shakespeare's career, this book explores how the playwright's understanding of shame and humiliation is rooted in performance anxiety and gender politics, explaining how theatrical gestures can create dramatic tension in a way that words alone cannot. It offers both rich insights into the early modern context of Shakespeare's drama and confirms the startling relevance of his work to modern audiences.

Shakespeare’s Body Language

Shakespeare’s Body Language PDF Author: Miranda Fay Thomas
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350035483
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Why do the Capulets bite their thumbs at the Montagues? Why do the Venetians spit upon Shylock's Jewish gaberdine? What is it about Volumnia's act of kneeling that convinces Coriolanus not to assault the city of Rome? Shakespeare's Body Language is a ground-breaking new study of Shakespearean drama, revealing the previously unseen history of social tensions found within the performance of gestures – and how such gestures are used to shame those within the body politic of early modern England. The first full study of shaming gestures in Shakespearean drama, this book establishes how shame is often rooted in the gendered expectations of the Renaissance era. Exploring how the performance of gestures such as figging, the cuckold's horns, and even the in-action of stillness created shaming spectacles on the early modern stage and its wider society, Shakespeare's Body Language argues that gestures are embodied social metaphors which epitomise the personal as political. It reveals the tensions of everyday life as key motivators behind the actions of Shakespeare's characters, and considers how honour and its opposite, shame, are constructed in terms of gender norms. Featuring in-depth analyses of plays across Shakespeare's career, this book explores how the playwright's understanding of shame and humiliation is rooted in performance anxiety and gender politics, explaining how theatrical gestures can create dramatic tension in a way that words alone cannot. It offers both rich insights into the early modern context of Shakespeare's drama and confirms the startling relevance of his work to modern audiences.

Shakespeare's Knowledgeable Body

Shakespeare's Knowledgeable Body PDF Author: Martha Kalnin Diede
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9781433101335
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
Taking a new approach to the metaphor of the political body, this book examines Shakespeare's representation of that body as possessing epistemological faculties. The theater is one of these faculties, and is, therefore, essential to the health and survival of the Early Modern state. By depicting the theater as an essential faculty of the body politic, Shakespeare offers a defense of the theater against anti-theatrical critics. Students and teachers interested in the body and its representations in literature will find this text illuminating as will those scholars whose work focuses on knowledge, its relationship to the body, ways of knowing, and anti-theatrical prejudice.

Shakespeare and the Body Politic

Shakespeare and the Body Politic PDF Author: Bernard J. Dobski
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739170961
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
The chapters in Shakespeare and the Body Politic examine the tensions between the passion and ambition of individuals and the limits of the political communities that encompass and inform them. Shakespeare provides his audiences and readers both timely and timeless political lessons through his diverse portraits of the body politic in his plays and poetry–from ancient city-states of Greece and Rome to the early modern cities and kingdoms of his own time.

Shakespeare's Body Parts

Shakespeare's Body Parts PDF Author: Huw Griffiths
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474448720
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
This book provides a sustained, formalist reading of the multiple body parts that litter the dialogue and action of Shakespeare's history plays.

Speaking Shakespeare

Speaking Shakespeare PDF Author: Patsy Rodenburg
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350161675
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
From A Midsummer Night's Dream's Puck to Othello's Desdemona, this new edition of Speaking Shakespeare gives you all the necessary tools to bring any of Shakespeare's eclectic characters to life. Patsy Rodenburg uses practical exercises and textual analysis to hone in on your dramatic resonance, breathing and placement in order to unlock your potential for playing these iconic characters. Speeches and scenes such as Mark Antony's 'O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth' and the bloody scene in which Macbeth admits to Lady Macbeth that he has 'done the deed' are placed in context and discussed in depth. Combining clear practical, textual and imaginative work with a brilliant analysis of scenes and speeches from the whole range of Shakespeare's plays, this is an essential and inspiring guide for anyone working on his plays today. It brings a renewed focus on the language of power, so frequently spoken in the worlds of politicians and company directors, which will give readers insight into the potency of clear, direct communication, specifically in the context of Shakespeare. Each chapter has been revised following the author's 20 additional years of experience as a voice coach and includes techniques necessary for a clear and convincing performance.

Shakespeare's Language in Digital Media

Shakespeare's Language in Digital Media PDF Author: Janelle Jenstad
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317056108
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
The authors of this book ask how digital research tools are changing the ways in which practicing editors historicize Shakespeare's language. Scholars now encounter, interpret, and disseminate Shakespeare's language through an increasing variety of digital resources, including online editions such as the Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE), searchable lexical corpora such as the Early English Books Online-Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP) or the Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME) collections, high-quality digital facsimiles such as the Folger Shakespeare Library's Digital Image Collection, text visualization tools such as Voyant, apps for reading and editing on mobile devices, and more. What new insights do these tools offer about the ways Shakespeare's words made meaning in their own time? What kinds of historical or historicizing arguments can digital editions make about Shakespeare's language? A growing body of work in the digital humanities allows textual critics to explore new approaches to editing in digital environments, and enables language historians to ask and answer new questions about Shakespeare's words. The authors in this unique book explicitly bring together the two fields of textual criticism and language history in an exploration of the ways in which new tools are expanding our understanding of Early Modern English.

The Anatomy of Insults in Shakespeare’s World

The Anatomy of Insults in Shakespeare’s World PDF Author: Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350055514
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
The Anatomy of Insults in Shakespeare's World explores Shakespeare's complex art of insults and shows how the playwright set abusive words at the heart of many of his plays. It provides valuable insights on a key aspect of Shakespeare's work that has been little explored to date. Focusing on the most memorable scenes of insult, abusive characters and insulting effects in the plays, the volume shifts how readers understand and read Shakespeare's insults. Chapters analyze the spectacular rhetoric of insult in Henry IV, Troilus and Cressida and Timon of Athens; the 'skirmishes of wit' in Much Ado about Nothing and A Midsummer Night's Dream; insult and duelling codes in Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It and Twelfth Night, the complex relationships between slander and insult in Much Ado about Nothing and Measure for Measure; the taming of the tongue in Richard III and The Taming of the Shrew, the trauma of insults in Othello, The Merchant of Venice and Cymbeline and insult beyond words in Henry V and King lear. Grasping insult as a specific speech act, the volume explores the issues of verbal violence and verbal shields and the importance of reception and interpretation in matters of insult. It offers a panorama of the Elizabethan politics of insult and redefines Shakespeare's drama as a theatre of insults.

Shakespeare and Disability Studies

Shakespeare and Disability Studies PDF Author: Sonya Freeman Loftis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192650076
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
Shakespeare and Disability Studies argues that an understanding of disability theory is essential for scholars, teachers, and directors who wish to create more inclusive and accessible theatrical and pedagogical encounters with Shakespeare's plays. Previous work in the field of early modern disability studies has focused largely on Renaissance characters that a modern audience might view as disabled. This volume argues that the conception of disability as residing within individual literary characters limits understandings of disability in Shakespeare: by theorizing disability vis-a-vis characters, previous studies have largely overlooked readers, performers, and audience members who self-identify as disabled. Focusing on issues such as accessible performances, inclusive casting, and Shakespeare-based therapy, Shakespeare and Disability Studies reinvigorates textual approaches to disability in Shakespeare by reading accessibility as an art form and exploring both the powers and potential limits of universal design in theatrical performance. The book examines the complex interdependence among the concepts of theory, access, and inclusion—demonstrating the crucial role of disability theory in building access and examining the ways that access may both open and foreclose inclusive dramatic practice. Shakespeare and Disability Studies challenges Shakespearians, from students to audience members, from classroom teachers to theatre practitioners, to consider how Shakespeare, as industry, as high art, and as cultural symbol, impacts the lived reality of those with disabled bodies and/or minds.

Aspects of Communication in The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare

Aspects of Communication in The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare PDF Author: Juliane von Heimendahl
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 363815940X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 28

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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2001 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3 (A), Free University of Berlin (Institute for English Philology), course: HS Dialogue and Drama im WiSe00/01, 27 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: In the following I am going to approach Shakespeare’s „The Taming of the Shrew,“ by analyzing selected dialogues according to their communication patterns. Main focus here is it to look at relationship and gender structures and their manifestations. The question raised is whether language is specifically used to affirm polarities, or even if these polarities are only a result of defining language. To what extent is reality constructed through this language and for what reason? What positions do non-verbal communication signs, such as clothes and body-language have, and do they influence the interaction as well? Working with a text always brings up questions and conclusions that may be subjective and just one possible interpretation. I have tried to show different approaches and have backed up my analysis with studies in communication sciences such as works by Watzlawick and Schultz von Thun. The main axiom on which I base this paper on is: “All behaviour is communication.” I am going to present different aspects of language to picture communication as a whole, as a system with various elements, supporting each other.