Actors and the body

Gesture ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
John H. Astington

The ways in which the performing of gesture is inscribed into the very texts of Shakespeare’s plays constitutes a “meta-theatrical” and “meta-gestural” discourse which this article analyses with reference to Hamlet, Othello, The Winter’s Tale and Twelfth Night. Shakespeare is shown to be a “gestural writer”, well versed in the rhetorical tradition and sensitive to the subtleties of body language within and without the world of stage.

Author(s):  
J. F. Bernard

What’s so funny about melancholy? Iconic as Hamlet is, Shakespearean comedy showcases an extraordinary reliance on melancholy that ultimately reminds us of the porous demarcation between laughter and sorrow. This richly contextualized study of Shakespeare’s comic engagement with sadness contends that the playwright rethinks melancholy through comic theatre and, conversely, re-theorizes comedy through melancholy. In fashioning his own comic interpretation of the humour, Shakespeare distils an impressive array of philosophical discourses on the matter, from Aristotle to Robert Burton, and as a result, transforms the theoretical afterlife of both notions. The book suggests that the deceptively potent sorrow at the core of plays such as The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, or The Winter’s Tale influences modern accounts of melancholia elaborated by Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler, and others. What’s so funny about melancholy in Shakespearean comedy? It might just be its reminder that, behind roaring laughter, one inevitably finds the subtle pangs of melancholy.


PMLA ◽  
1941 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 369-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. C. Bald

The Folger Shakespeare Library possesses a number of separate plays, all from the Shakespearian Third Folio, and all bearing unmistakable signs of theatrical annotation. They were acquired by Mr. Folger from a variety of sources: the majority were bought from a bookseller in Munich, one was purchased in London, and another came with the Warwick Castle collection of Shakespeariana. There are nine plays in all: The Comedy of Errors, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Twelfth Night, The Winter's Tale, Henry VIII, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, King Lear, and Othello, but three of them—The Merry Wives, Macbeth, and Othello—are imperfect. It soon became clear that they were all from the same original volume, which, apparently, had belonged to Halliwell-Phillipps and was dismembered by him. The bindings of the separate plays—half leather, with boards of marbled paper or purplish-brown cloth—are obviously all the work of one binder, and are similar to the bindings of other books which have passed through Halliwell-Phillipps's hands. In addition, his handwriting is to be found in six of them: in The Merry Wives and Macbeth there is an inscription on one of the preliminary flyleaves, and in the other four there is a mere “C. and P.” on a fly-leaf at the end of the book.


2018 ◽  
Vol 222 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-164
Author(s):  
Assit. Prof: Dr.luay .sh. Mahmood

shrug researcher note Bcharih hope Donqol, unless the pain the life of the poet, which was characterized by (b deprivation, poverty, oppression), and they form (rejection), which led to the insurgency; and because poet haunted by Jesse excellence who longed to find the form of guarantees for Vshehadh job: (Interestingness and persuasion), Interestingness: document to sculpture in the body language, and the wealth of aesthetic and cultural variety of the elements, and persuasion: backed deep devoutly usefulness of poetry and its ability to achieve communication, and payment collective conscience that transcends to achieve attributes: (penetration and combustion), breakthrough: to block out time, and then the combustion creative to constitute a poet -aml Dnql- read, but based on the way that warms the joints of the society in which injury weakness, as well as on the fire of the motor to rise to the world of purity is impossible combustion breakthrough


Sincronía ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol XXV (79) ◽  
pp. 223-234
Author(s):  
Joselyn Pérez Pérez ◽  

This article is a literary approach that seeks to answer the question about the phenomenological relationship between body-language and the storyteller Cuento amarillo. For this, he uses the Merleau-Ponty phenomenology as a theoretical base in two base works, The Prose of the World and The Phenomenology of Perception, from which he seeks to explore how the concepts of body, language and fiction are operating within the narrative with the purpose is to glimpse the textual guidelines that make up the characters of this literary work and within phenomenology itself and therefore create a new proposal towards the body with a view to a theoretical discussion with language.


Author(s):  
Julie Sanders

‘Water memory’ was a phrase coined in the late twentieth century to refer to the supposed ability of water to retain a memory of previously dissolved substances even after numerous dilutions. Though now a disproven scientific theory, ‘water memory’ is, as metaphor, a powerful conceptual tool for understanding Shakespeare’s comedies and their engagement with cultures of memory. Plays such as The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, and All’s Well That Ends Well presage later dramas in the canon, including Pericles and The Winter’s Tale, with their narratives of grief, remembrance and preservation. This essay considers these topics in relation to everyday household practices of pickling and preserving foodstuffs and the deeper traces of customary practice and religious rite in post-Reformation England.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document