Making Shakespeare: The Pressures of Stage and Page

by Tiffany Stern, Terence Hawkes (Contributor)

Making Shakespeare is a lively introduction to the major issues of the stage and print history, whilst also raising questions about what a Shakespeare play actually is. Tiffany Stern reveals how London, the theatre, the actors and the way in which the plays were written and printed all affect the 'Shakespeare' that we now read. Concentrating on the instability and fluidity of Shakespeare's texts, her book discusses what happened to a manuscript between its first composition, its performance on stage and its printing, and identifies traces of the production system in the plays we read. She argues that the versions of Shakespeare that have come down to us have inevitably been formed by the contexts from which they emerged; being shaped by, for example, the way actors received and responded to their lines, the props and music used in the theatre, or the continual revision of plays by the playhouses and printers. Allowing a fuller understanding of the texts we read and perform, Making Shakespeare is the perfect introduction to issues of stage and page. A refreshingly clear, accessible read, this book will allow even those with no expert knowledge to begin to contextualize Shakespeare's plays for themselves, in ways both old and new.

Genres: Shakespeare, Nonfiction

188 pages, Paperback

First published February 12, 2004

Reviews

[Abbie O'Hara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easy to read, interesting, and conceptual enough to understand with limited exposure to actual Shakespeare plays. Good introductory theory to early plays

[Camila · Rating 4 out of 5]

a great book. provides a general overview of how a shakespeare play made it from performance to printing and all the material conditions that that involves.

[Jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

As an actor of Shakespeare's plays, this book changed much of my way of working from the text. My early training had taught me to give strict attention to every capitalization in the printing and every punctuation mark. What Ms. Stern has done here is not to make me go against that method, but to regard it as an option.
What she has unearthed here, and given to us, is a working knowledge on the printing process which makes some of my early training work obsolete. I still am, and always will be, a text driven actor - but now, having read this book, I feel I can know when I'm being faithful to the author's intention (when I'm following an editor's opinion) and when I'm consciously making a choice that may be great but not necessarily fact based.

[emilia · Rating 4 out of 5]

very interesting stuff, and I enjoyed all the little case studies – although sometimes it feels like Tiffany Stern is piling up a lot of examples of the same kind of thing. but this book works very well in that sense, and I think that's how I'll make use of it in the future, dipping in to find lovely little moments of material text/theatre history chaos! and the chapters are cleverly organised.

[Chriss Corkscrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb. Very readable, very interesting and very enlightening.

[Jiang Yuqi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tiffany Stern is phenomenal.

[Aaron Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is pretty much a game-changer in Shakespearean scholarship aimed at performers and directors (I assume it is aimed at practitioners). I loved it.

[Candy Wood]

This is an interesting and accessible book about how the conditions of putting on Shakespeare's plays and of printing them influenced the content that has come down to us. Instead of focused discussions of individual plays, Stern provides specific examples from a wide variety of plays to support her points. The account of the process of printing (all those confusing details about quartos, folios, formes and such) is as clear as any I've seen and helps explain some of the peculiarities of the texts we have. The focus is on what we know about early modern performance rather than on more recent performance: Stern mentions the reconstruction of the Globe in London and the Blackfriars in Virginia as evidence of recent interest in theater history, without providing any details about what new knowledge those projects have contributed. Still, the whole book convincingly shows that reading only modern editions of Shakespeare provides a limited experience of the plays.

[Davey Morrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading for anyone interested in the study or the performance of Shakespeare.

[Libby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great history of Shakespeare rehearsal practices