A Shakespeare Performance Resource with Audio
Slide Shows
ORIGINS OF SHAKESPEARE'S ART
INTRODUCTION
If actors and students understand the backstory to Shakespeare’s art they will have a better understanding of the technique involved in verse-speaking and of what Shakespeare was seeking to achieve with the text in general.
Shakespeare’s art was a culmination of an art-form that began its gestation 2,000 years ago in ancient Greece and Rome. In essence, it is the art of rhetoric;, simply defined as the ability to persuade. We persuade because we make our argument attractive and convincing to hearers. In classical times, rhetoric techniques were honed and developed that politicians and better public-speakers and debaters still use today, consciously or unconsciously.
In Shakespeare’s early History plays characters try to top each other with their rhetoric, never yielding an inch of ground. Accordingly, as Giles Block observes in Speaking the Speech, the only way the argument is finally resolved is that one speaker kills the other speaker – it is literally the only way to conclude the argument.
Conversely, in Shakespeare’s Comedies and late Romance plays people are happy by Act 5 to concede the error of their ways, kiss and make up (though not before sundry banishments, deaths, and other diabolical happenings along the way).
THE SALIENT FACTS IN AN ATTRACTIVE FORMAT
As with everything Versebuster does we are putting the key information into an attractive format that gets away from long dry academic articles few actors and students will read.
We believe a series of short Slide Shows that can be enjoyed for private study or in workshops, drama schools and classrooms with a ‘Get it? Got it!’ quiz after each section is ideal for this purpose. They are designed so that any motivated actor or student over 17 would find them agreeable. However, we hope younger students who are intellectually curious would enjoy them as well.
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