Anecdotal Shakespeare A New Performance History [Hardcover]

Shakespeare's four-hundred-year performance history is full of anecdotes  ribald, trivial, frequently funny, sometimes disturbing, and always but loosely allegiant to fact. Such anecdotes are nevertheless a vital index to the ways that Shakespeare's plays have generated meaning across varied times and in varied places. Furthermore, particular plays have produced particular anecdotes  stories of a real skull inHamlet, superstitions about the nameMacbeth, toga troubles inJulius Caesar and therefore express something embedded in the plays they attend. Anecdotes constitute then not just a vital component of a play's performance history but a form of vernacular criticism by the personnel most intimately involved in their production: actors. These anecdotes are therefore every bit as responsive to and expressive of a play's meanings across time as the equally rich history of Shakespearean criticism or indeed the very performances these anecdotes treat.Anecdotal Shakespeareprovides a history of post-Renaissance Shakespeare and performance, one not based in fact but no less full of truth.Preface: Curtain Raiser; Introduction: Anecdotal Shakespeare;1. Hamlet:Skulls are good to think with; 2.Othello: The Smudge; 3.Romeo and Juliet:Central Casting;4,Richard III:Oedipus Text; 5.Macbeth:An Embarrassment of Witches; Coda: Archives and Anecdotes; Index

How does Menzer establish this grand reading of idle words on plays? Mostly through plays on words. Menzer is a writer sure never to shun a pun or fail to say oui to a bon mot & The narrative calls attention to the act of impersonation, the doubled reality of the stage. -Alexi Sargeant,First Things

Popular writers such as Augusten Burroughs, Chuck Klosterman, David Sedaris, as well as academics like Judith Pascoe, are reinvigorating the essay form into something both thoughtful, friendly, informal, anecdotal, and pleasurablelC*