Jaq Bessell, Shakespeare in Action, London and New York: Bloomsbury (The Arden Shakespeare), 2019, pp. 213

Authors

  • Elena Pellone

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13136/sjtds.v6i1.269

Abstract

Jaq Bessell’s new Arden publication Shakespeare in Action is just that. Bessell collates a compendium of invaluable insights from practitioners in the United States and United Kingdom, working at major theatres to bring Shakespeare actively to life on stage. Bessell determines to give access to an understanding of the process, rather than simply the product, of Shakespeare production, interviewing actors and creatives from the major stakeholders of the Shakespeare theatre industry. Bessell intuits a first-hand understanding from her expertise as head of the acting programme at Guilford School of acting, head of Globe research during Mark Rylance’s tenure, teaching at the Shakespeare Institute and her extensive work on both sides of the Atlantic. An engaging resource for anyone with an interest in Shakespeare performance, the politics of who can speak Shakespeare, how to speak Shakespeare, whom Shakespeare belongs to, and the alchemic transformation from words on a page, to actions on a stage.

Keywords: Shakespeare; Stanislavski; performance; actions; verse speaking; Globe; Royal Shakespeare Company; American Shakespeare Centre; Shakespeare directors; Shakespeare actors

Downloads

Published

2020-06-23

Issue

Vol. 6 No. 1 (2020): Awry Crowns: Queenship and Its Discontents

Section

Special Section

License

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

This Journal is a CC-BY 4.0 publication (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This Licence allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this Journal, providing a link to the Licence and explicitly underlining any change (full mention of Issue number, year, pages and DOI is required).

  1.  The Author retains (i) the rights to reproduce, to distribute, to publicly perform, and to publicly display the Article in any medium for any purpose; (ii) the right to prepare derivative works from the Article; and (iii) the right to authorise others to make any use of the Article so long as the Author receives credit as Author and the Journal in which the Article has been published are cited as the source of first publication of the Article. For example, the Author may make and distribute copies in the course of teaching and research and may post the Article on personal or institutional Web sites and in other open-access digital repositories.
  2. The Author is free to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the Journal’s published version of the work, with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this Journal and explicitly underlining any change (full mention of Issue number, year, pages and DOI is required).
  3.  The Author is permitted and encouraged to post their work online after the evaluation process has been successfully passed, as it can lead to productive exchanges as well as to a wider dissemination of the published work.