Pivotal Lines in Shakespeare and Others

Finding the Heart of the Play

Sidney Homan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781032348629
• eBook ISBN: 9781000893038
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama
• Index: Literature

Sidney Homan defines a pivotal line as "a moment in the script that serves as a pathway into the larger play … a magnet to which the rest of the play, scenes before and after, adheres." He offers his personal choices of such lines in five plays by Shakespeare and works by Beckett, Brecht, Pinter, Shepard, and Stoppard. Drawing on his own experience in the theatre as actor and director and on campus as a teacher and scholar, he pairs a Shakespearean play with one by a modern playwright as mirrors for each other. One reviewer calls his approach "ground-breaking." Another observes that his "experience with the particular plays he has chosen is invaluable" since it allows us to find "a wedge into such iconic texts." Academics and students alike will find this volume particularly useful in aiding their own discovery of a pivotal line or moment in the experience of reading about, watching, or performing in a play.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Pivotal Lines in Shakespeare and Others: Finding the Heart of the Play
• PART I The Theatre’s Other Side: Hamlet and Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
• PART II Pivotal Moments: The Taming of the Shrew and Pinter’s Old Times
• PART III Expanding the World Onstage: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Shepard’s True West
• PART IV Theatrical Presence: The Comedy of Errors and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot
• PART V Playing Offstage: Brecht’s and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera and King Lear
• Index