Thursday, July 30, 2020

Book Note: Thinking Shakespeare: A Working Guide for Actors, Directors, Students . . . and Anyone Else Interested in the Bard

Edelstein, Barry. Thinking Shakespeare: A Working Guide for Actors, Directors, Students . . . and Anyone Else Interested in the Bard. Rev. ed. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2018.

I'm frequently asked by our theatre majors questions about Shakespeare. I love it. That's what I'm here for.

Often, the questions are about less-often-performed monologues for auditions. I have resources and ideas that I can point them toward.

Sometimes, the questions are about acting. And I'm much less sure of myself then.

But I've found a very good resource that I can point them toward. Barry Edelstein's Thinking Shakespeare is a clear and relatively informal handbook on understanding Shakespeare's language and ways to put it into practice for the actor—the actor in particular, but also for the director, the student, and the teacher.

The best I can do is give you the first chapter and then send you off to buy the book.





Click below to sample more of the book and then to purchase it from amazon.com.

Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

—The Tempest