Rescripting Shakespeare: The Text, the Director, and Modern Productions

by Alan C. Dessen

Alan Dessen focuses on the playtexts used for staging Shakespeare's plays, from almost three hundred productions of the last twenty five years. Dessen examines the process of rescripting--when directors make cuts to streamline the playscript, save running time, etc., and rewriting--when more extensive changes are made. He assesses what is lost and gained by rescripting, and the demands of presenting to contemporary audiences words targeted at players, playgoers, and playhouses that no longer exist. The results are of interest to theatrical professionals and historians.

282 pages, Paperback

First published June 19, 1998

Reviews

[Jeffrey Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent, conscientious. An important resource for anyone doing critical or theatrical work on Da Shake. Dessen examines how Shakespeare's plays are changed in production by production choices in staging, rewriting, and especially cutting. Dessen examines the mechanisms of how productions bent on making Shakespeare more accessible and palatable to their notion of modern audiences essentially are rewriting Shakespeare, often making nonsense where the original made elegant sense. Which suggests that those who do this rescripting either have such a high opinion of themselves that they think they can improve Shakespeare and/or have such a poor opinion of their audience's intelligence that they think they need to write down to their audience.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall, an excellent book ... and one to which I will return again and again. I think the major theme - that there are tradeoffs and costs with each cut - sounds clearly, and the wealth of detail is simply astonishing. Both for scholar and director, this book contains fascinating insight. Dessen perhaps too often betrays on which side of that divide he falls by something of a failure to understand the in-the-room decisions a director makes, but that's honestly a minor point. The minutae he records can be overwhelming at times, but it's well worth it. The specificity of the examples are what we make me glad I own this, and can refer to it again and again.