Shaping Shakespeare for Performance

The Bear Stage

Catherine Loomis, Sid Ray

• Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781611477856
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: Literature

Shaping Shakespeare for Performance: The Bear Stage collects significant work from the 2013 Blackfriars Conference. The conference, sponsored by the American Shakespeare Center, brings together scholars, actors, directors, dramaturges, and students to share important new work on the staging practices used by William Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The volume's contributors range from renowned scholars and editors to acclaimed directors, highly-trained actors, and budding researchers. The topics cover a similarly wide range: a close reading of an often-cut scene from Henry V meets an account of staging pregnancy; a meticulous review of early modern contract law collides with an analysis of an actor in a bear costume; an account of printed punctuation from the 1600s encounters a study of audience interaction and empowerment in King Lear; the identification of candid doubling in A Comedy of Errors meets the troubling of gender categories in The Roaring Girl. The essays focus on the practical applications of theory, scholarship, and editing to performance of early modern plays.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I: “Edit, pursued by a bear”
• Chapter 1: “Now this is where you can bring in Cleopatra’s horse”
• Chapter 2: Patient Auditor to Gentle Reader
• Chapter 3: “Why do you thus exclaim?”
• Part II: “I must bear a part”
• Chapter 4: Why Are Shakespeare’s Characters So Relatable?
• Chapter 5: “Anatomiz[ing] Regan”
• Chapter 6: A Piece of Cake, a Bit of Dance, and a Fat Suit on Its Knees
• Chapter 7: Isabella in Measure for Measure
• Chapter 8: “You that way, we this way”
• Chapter 9: Moll’s Queer Anatomy
• Chapter 10: Imaginative Bodies and Bodies Imagined
• Part III: “Devil in a bear’s doublet”
• Chapter 11: The Thundering Audience of King Lear
• Chapter 12: “Off with his head! . . . so much for Hewlett/Brown”
• Chapter 13: To “make the unskillful laugh”
• Chapter 14: “And are by child with me”
• Chapter 15: “Your majesty came not like yourself”
• Chapter 16: Bringing Justice to Bear
• Part IV: “Dissembling Cub[s]”
• Chapter 17: Doubling in The Comedy of Errors
• Chapter 18: Scare Bear
• Chapter 19: “Pardon, gentles all”
• Chapter 20: Craving the Law in The Merchant of Venice
• Part V: “Bear the Verses”
• Chapter 21: Refiguring Richard
• Chapter 22: “Ah, poor our sex! This fault in us I find”
• Chapter 23: Shakespeare and the History of the Bookish
• About the Contributors