Shakespeare'S Staging And Properties

Shakespeare's Staging and PropertiesIn the third of his books on Elizabethan stage practice, David Albert Mann shows how the commonplace hand property was one of the few performance aids needed as the Elizabethan player emerged from the itinerant tradition, and how Shakespeare transformed it into the pivot of character interaction, 'physicalizing'the hitherto purely verbal. Mann stresses the centrality of the actor in the newly-built theatres, modelled on the simple demands of the earlier playing places in which he had developed his art. The concept of scenery, he suggests, was inimical to a fast-moving production process, with little preparation or rehearsal, relying instead on the suggestive possibilities of the theatre structures themselves to suggest locale.Based on a lifetime of experiment and close analysis of hundreds of plays and associated materials, this study concentrates on the practical issues of property construction and stage business, and shows how Shakespeare blended the hitherto peripheral performance skills of music, combat and clowning into a new and indivisible whole to create an art-form that integrated spoken poetry with movement, gesture, and mis en scene into a single unified experience, and with the humble stage property at its centre.

Author: David Albert Mann

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Publication Date: Feb 19, 2017

Number of Pages: 290 pages

Language: English

Binding: Paperback

ISBN-10: 1542416981

ISBN-13: 9781542416986