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  • Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries ed. by Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kathryn R. McPherson, Sarah Enloe
  • Robert Young (bio)
Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. Edited by Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kathryn R. McPherson, and Sarah Enloe. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013. Illus. Pp. xvi + 298. $85.00 cloth.

Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kathryn R. McPherson, and Sarah Enloe have undertaken the challenging task of editing a text that represents the combined energies of scholars, theater practitioners, and educators from an event where scholarship, performance, and pedagogy meet to encourage exploration and discovery, insight and revelation: the Blackfriars Conference held at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia. Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries succeeds in capturing the spirit of the 2011 Blackfriars Conference, incorporating “a full range of intellectual and artistic expression” (2). [End Page 511] The editors have organized Shakespeare Expressed into five thematic strands: “The Body of the Actor,” “Playing the Text,” “Staging Choices,” “Playhouse and Playing Conditions,” and “Technical and Material Matters.” These strands “represent some of the issues preoccupying scholars and practitioners and, as such, suggest current trends in the study of early modern drama in performance” (3). Each thematic section includes a series of essays followed by suggested assignments for classroom use. Moncrief and McPherson write that the book’s focus on “academic, theoretical, and theatrical issues might seem impractical or distant from common experience” (3), but they note that “the interchange between teachers and actors, professors and directors, graduate students and theater administrators belies any narrow conception of how and why Shakespeare and his contemporaries matter” (3).

“The Body of the Actor” includes several chapters that address the ways in which “performance choices embody interpretive issues” (55). Lezlie C. Cross’s paper, Speaking in the Silence: Deaf Performance at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival,” reflects on the decision to cast Howie Seago, who is deaf, as the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and considers how this decision resulted in the company’s closer examination of the intricacies of language. Through the rehearsal process, the company came to “discover how sign language, verbal language, and silence can each be used to greatest effect in the world of the play” (7–8). Sign language, oral language, and silence are not the only interpretive choices up for consideration in this section. Chelsea Phillips’s essay, “‘I Have Given Suck’: The Maternal Body in Sarah Siddon’s Lady Macbeth,” provides an informative view of Siddons as a maternal figure onstage. Jemma Alix Levy’s essay, “Competing Heights in Shakespeare’s As You Like It,” looks at the implications of text and the actors’ bodies, while in “The Mirror and the Monarchs: Suggestive Presences and Shakespeare’s Cast Size,” Brett Gamboa explores the possibility that actors in Shakespeare’s time might have doubled up on roles, citing as one example Cordelia’s leaving for France and returning as Lear’s Fool (45). Miriam Gilbert’s assignment for the classroom, “‘the staging paper’” (55), asks students to take on the roles of actors, directors, and designers, requiring them to delve deeply into the text and avoid generalizations about it.

Among the papers in “Playing the Text” is Peter Kanelos’s “Ghost in the Machine: Shakespeare, Stanislavski, and Original Practices.” Kanelos invites the reader to consider the question “What is the subtext beneath the claim that there is no subtext in Shakespeare?” (73). Matthew Vadnais examines the challenge of “the ratio of private study to collective rehearsal” (85) in “‘Speake[ing] the speech[es]’: Reassessing the Playability of the Earliest Printings of Hamlet.” Vadnais describes how it was “difficult for players to know when to deliver individual portions of their ‘finished’ solo performances” (85) because actors were frequently given one-word cues to begin their lines or actions rather than complete scripts. Bill Gelber looks at the debate concerning whether or not early modern soliloquies should be “internal and introspective or external and taken to the audience, or whether some speeches are more internal or external than others” (93) in “A ‘Ha’ in Shakespeare: The Soliloquy...

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