Anecdotal Shakespeare: A New Performance History

Description

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.

Paul Menzer is Professor and Director of the Mary Baldwin College Shakespeare and Performance programme, Mary Baldwin College, USA

[Menzer] has carried out considerable research to present detailed analysis of anecdotes surrounding five of Shakespeare's most high-profile plays ... Quirky ... enjoyable. * British Theatre Guide * How does Menzer establish this grand reading of idle words on plays? Mostly through plays on words. Menzer is a writer sure never to shun a pun or fail to say oui to a bon mot. ... The narrative calls attention to the act of impersonation, the doubled reality of the stage. -- Alexi Sargeant * First Things * Popular writers such as Augusten Burroughs, Chuck Klosterman, David Sedaris, as well as academics like Judith Pascoe, are reinvigorating the essay form into something both thoughtful, friendly, informal, anecdotal, and pleasurable. That Menzer can be added to the list is a real boon to Shakespeare studies. His mastery of tone shows a real engagement with the stage that you just don't see much of anymore ... Menzer's voice is throughout confessional, fresh, funny, and good-natured ... What Menzer has done here is a marvelous achievement, so out of step with jargon and yet not at all idiosyncratic. It is, I think, an important stylistic turn in academia, one that personalizes the author, conveys the mystery and wonder of theater, and deepens the imaginative capacities of readers. * Shakespeare Newsletter * The prose style is one of the most distinctive things about the book-lively, witty, belletristic, even chummy. Puns, alliteration, and sly allusions abound ... The value of the book derives less from its theoretical orientation or any particular facts it delivers than from the way it encourages us to rethink the value of anecdotes ... Anecdotal Shakespeare is an engaging and thought-provoking work. * Theatre Survey *