Directorless Shakespeare

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Challenging received scholarship on the practice of Shakespeare’s theatre, this book displaces a contemporary cultural bias towards leadership models to reconsider possibilities of working in a non-hierarchical and inclusive creative theatrical practice.

Challenging received scholarship on the practice of Shakespeare’s theatre, this book displaces a contemporary cultural bias towards leadership models to reconsider possibilities of working in a non-hierarchical and inclusive creative theatrical practice. It offers ways of restoring to actors a sense of what the existentialists termed “autonomy” that Shakespeare’s company would have embodied. Against a critical account of two major Shakespeare playhouses – Shakespeare’s Globe, London and the American Shakespeare Center – the book describes the original practice-based research by Anərkē Shakespeare and V.enice S.hakespeare C.ompany without a controlling director. Their staging of three directorless Shakespeare plays, and his narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece, with diverse actors, performance spaces, languages and countries, explores multilingual, intersectional, cross-disciplinary and international possibilities of early modern performance and study. Directorless Shakespeare as “Embodied Literary Criticism” releases the dialogical forces of Shakespeare’s texts, which are more fully served by the centrifugal force of the collective ensemble rather than the centripetal force of the single director. It allows texts to speak fully and multiply, in democratic exchange with an audience, liberated from directorial or theoretically driven concepts.

Directorless Shakespeare will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre and performance studies, professional practitioners and historians.

Obsah

Prologue. Opening the curtain - Expressing hidden backgrounds, changing the narrative, destabilising hierarchies, empowering the collective

Chapter 1

The Globe: Redistributing power, smashing the mirror up to nature

Chapter 2

“We do it with the lights on”: Actors’ Renaissance Season at the Blackfriars Playhouse

Chapter 3

Anərkē Shakespeare’s Richard II: Devolved authority and decolonising theatrical practice

Chapter 4

Much Ado About Italy: Embracing alterity, Much Ado About Nothing/Molto Rumore Per Nulla, staging Shakespeare’s comedy in Venice, Italy

Chapter 5

Anərkē Shakespeare’s Macbeth: a spectral tragedy, by the graves of Shakespeare and Burbage

Chapter 6

The Rape of Lucrece: “So much grief and not a tongue” - Lucrece’s embodied voice in performance

Epilogue. Tearing the curtain down