Carol Chillington Rutter

Acting women : images of women in theatre

Part 1 Theatrical history and the sign of the female: the power of women on stage - the gender enigma in Renaissance England cross-dressing, the Greeks and the Wily Phallus historical precedents - women unmasked Goethe, Goldoni and woman-hating masques and masking. Part 2 Archetypal images of women in theatre: the penintent whore the speechless heroine the wilful woman the golden girl women as men.

Open-space learning : a study in transdisciplinary pedagogy

Open-space Learning offers a unique resource to educators wishing to develop a workshop model of teaching and learning. The authors propose an embodied, performative mode of learning that challenges the primacy of the lecture and seminar model in higher education. Drawing on the expertise of the CAPITAL Centre (Creativity and Performance in Teaching and Learning) at the University of Warwick, they show how pedagogic techniques developed from the theatrical rehearsal room may be applied effectively across a wide range of disciplines. The book offers rich case-study materials, supplemented by video and documentary resources, available to readers electronically. These practical elements are supplemented by a discursive strand, which draws on the methods of thinkers such as Freire, Vygotsky and Kolb, to develop a formal theory around the notion of Open-space Learning. CAPITAL was a collaboration between the University of Warwicks Department of English and the Royal Shakespeare Company. CAPITAL was succeeded by the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning (IATL) in 2010.

Women Making Shakespeare: Text, Reception and Performance ed. by Gordon McMullan, Lena Cowen Orlin, Virginia Mason Vaughan (review)

Joanna pursues risky scientific trials, and the Duchess is cited for her skill in mixing her own antidotes. Far from rendering women mere objects of analysis, then, the occult powers attributed to their bodies equip them with special expertise in deciphering and manipulating other hidden secrets, offering them a potent, if ambivalent, form of agency. This is an exciting book, a pleasure to read and genuinely illuminating. FloydWilson uncovers a rich trove of early modern thought and uses it to develop original and persuasive readings of familiar plays. She amply demonstrates the omnipresence and shaping force of the period’s occult theories of sympathy, even in plays that lack the conspicuously supernatural devices of Arden’s willful corpse or Ferdinand’s forays into black magic. This realm of hidden secrets also suggests new directions and questions for further research: do the categories of genre shape playwrights’ depictions of these sympathies and antipathies as relatively pleasurable or threatening? Given that these habits of thought recede not long after the period examined here, do they evolve noticeably over the period covered by the book, and do different playwrights show varying levels of belief and skepticism toward preternatural sympathetic effects? This book makes an eloquent and persuasive case for the importance of attending to early modern engagement with occult forces, and Floyd-Wilson’s discoveries and insights are sure to inspire further conversations.

School friend, publisher and printer Richard Field

his original and enlightening book casts fresh light on Shakespeare by examining the lives of his relatives, friends, fellow-actors, collaborators and patrons both in their own right and in relation to his life. Well-known figures such as Richard Burbage, Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton are freshly considered; little-known but relevant lives are brought to the fore, and revisionist views are expressed on such matters as Shakespeares wealth, his family and personal relationships, and his social status. Written by a distinguished team, including some of the foremost biographers, writers and Shakespeare scholars of today, this enthralling volume forms an original contribution to Shakespearian biography and Elizabethan and Jacobean social history. It will interest anyone looking to learn something new about the dramatist and the times in which he lived. A supplementary website offers imagined first-person audio accounts from the featured subjects.

Becoming the RSC: Terry Hands in Conversation

In 2011 the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) celebrated its 50th birthday. In this interview, Terry Hands, who joined the company in 1966 as an assistant director and went on to run it as Artistic Director from 1983 to 1991, remembers the first decade, when the RSC was “becoming” itself. He remembers the “Builders”: Peter Hall, John Barton, Trevor Nunn, Peter Brook and himself, the young Terry Hands. He talks about the people – actors, designers, writers, administrators – and policies that established the RSC as the worlds most significant Shakespeare theatre company, and he gives insight into the companys early practices, both on stage and in the rehearsal room. Terry Hands rehearsing Pericles, R.S.C.1969 (photo credit: Reg Wilson;

Transforming Shakespeare: Contemporary Women's Re-Visions in Literature and Performance (review)

cultural-materialist anachronism, folding the future (the twenty-first century) into the past (the sixteenth century) as a premise of interpretation. As is too often the case with cultural-materialist and new-historicist criticism, Holderness’s attention seems to be so captivated by certain theoretical assumptions that he sometimes makes them a substitute for doing his homework, as the instances I have cited are meant to suggest. Yes, “chivalric cults and courtly games to some extent replaced the professional militarism of the old aristocracy” (29), but the aristocracy remained extraordinarily violent, as Lawrence Stone points out; and the introduction of the rapier into England in the mid-sixteenth century made it possible for everyman to imitate his social betters, because the rapier was light and easy to carry and draw, as Marlowe’s brawling and Jonson’s killing of Gabriel Spencer make clear. When common actors could be swordsmen of such quality, it is little wonder that Thomas Nashe admired the stage battles in 1 Henry VI, and Jonson’s mockery of these battles would seem to manifest an aristocratic social bias in his aesthetic judgment as much as genuine concern about their lack of realism. Yes, Hall and Holinshed manifest an evident Protestant bias against Joan of Arc (124–26), but Holderness was not the first to notice this bias, and his summary of the chronicles is meager compared to Richard Hardin’s, which he does not cite.2 Yes, the voices of the dead are hard to hear and harder to interpret, but listening to as many of them as possible and listening to the conversation of others who listen to them are ways to reduce the risk of listening mostly to oneself.

Documents of the Rose Playhouse

Part 1 Introduction: Henslowe and the scholars Philip Henslowe, citizen and dyer city, court and privy council players and playwrights editorial procedures - reading Henslowe, dates, monetary conversion. Part 2 The documents: references and abbreviations notes to the documents. Part 3 Appendix: statute regulating London wages statute regulating London prices statute regulating apparel.