Anecdotal Shakespeare : a new performance history / Paul Menzer.

Online resource; title from PDF title page (Ebsco, viewed June 24, 2015).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: Anecdotal Shakespeare -- Tarlton's head -- Guildenstern's bassoon -- Shylock's son -- Richard's will -- 1 Hamlet: Skulls are good to think with -- Yorick's skulls -- Skull caps -- Like father, like son -- Ghost walkers -- 2 Othello: The smudge -- Pillow talk -- Desdemona's beard -- Another man -- The impossible fix -- One moor -- 3 Romeo and Juliet: Central casting -- Be some other name -- Old Montague -- Young Capulet -- Something old, something new . . . -- Romeo must die -- Unromantic altitudes -- Duck! -- 4 Richard III: Oedipus text -- Olivier's Dick -- Richard's whose self again? -- Heart-throbs and hamstrings -- Booth's trunk -- 5 Macbeth: An embarrassment of witches -- The unfortunate comedy -- Of curses and kilts -- Tangible properties -- Crude mechanicals -- Stage frights -- Exeunt, cursing.

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 in Hamlet, superstitions about the name Macbeth, toga troubles in Julius 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 Shakespeare provides a history of post-Renaissance Shakespeare and performance, one not based in fact but no less full of truth.

English.

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