The best-selling script analysis book for thirty-five years
Considered an essential text since its publication thirty-five years ago, this guide for students and practitioners of both theater and literature complements, rather than contradicts or repeats, traditional methods of literary analysis of scripts.
Ball developed his method during his work as literary director at the Guthrie Theater, building his guide on the crafts playwrights of every period and style use to make their plays stageworthy. The text is full of tools for students and practitioners to use as they investigate plot, character, theme, exposition, imagery, conflict, theatricality, and the other crucial parts of the superstructure of a play. Also included are guides for discovering what the playwright considers a play’ s most important elements, thus permitting interpretation based on the foundation of the play rather than its details.
Using Shakespeare’s Hamlet as illustration, Ball assures a familiar base for clarifying script-reading techniques as well as exemplifying the kinds of misinterpretation readers can fall prey to by ignoring the craft of the playwright. Of immense utility to those who want to put plays on the stage (actors, directors, designers, production specialists) Backwards & Forwards is also a fine playwriting manual because the structures it describes are the primary tools of the playwright.
Hamlet has inspired four outstanding film adaptations that continue to delight a wide and varied audience and to offer provocative new interpretations of Shakespeare’s most popular play. Cinematic Hamlet contains the first scene-by-scene analysis of the methods used by Laurence Olivier, Franco Zeffirelli, Kenneth Branagh, and Michael Almereyda to translate Hamlet into highly distinctive and remarkably effective films.
Applying recent developments in neuroscience and psychology, Patrick J. Cook argues that film is a medium deploying an abundance of devices whose task it is to direct attention away from the film’s viewing processes and toward the object represented. Through careful analysis of each film’s devices, he explores the ways in which four brilliant directors rework the play into a radically different medium, engaging the viewer through powerful instinctive drives and creating audiovisual vehicles that support and complement Shakespeare’s words and story.
Cinematic Hamlet will prove to be indispensable for anyone wishing to understand how these films rework Shakespeare into the powerful medium of film.
This edition is the first that treats Hamlet as the work of a philosophical poet concerned with knowing the nature of the world, particularly the human world. Where conventional editions lift the play out of its specific setting and analyze it in the light of the social, cultural, and political circumstances of Elizabethan England, Jan Blits takes the play’s dramatic setting of early Renaissance Denmark as indispensable to understanding its rich meaning. In providing notations and commentary on Hamlet, Blits sets aside the historicist principle or prejudice, pervasive throughout literary studies today. Blits, by contrast, strives to understand the play entirely on its own terms. He inflicts no literary or philosophic theory—no parochial professional preconceptions—upon the play. Instead, he aims to be fully receptive to what Shakespeare wrote and try to draw out of the play the substance that he deliberately put into it. His treatment of Horatio is particularly stunning in this regard.
Though they differ from each other, there are two generally trustworthy texts of Hamlet—namely, the Second Quarto (1604–5) and the Folio (1623). Blits does not consult the First Quarto (1603), which contains a much different dialogue, some different character names, and omits some famous passages. Blits points out important variations and refrains from pronouncing which are clearly right or wrong. He omits references to secondary works (including his own) as distractions from the play itself. The Bibliography lists many primary and secondary readings that readers will find helpful. He follows the line-numbering of the New Cambridge Shakespeare Edition, edited by Philips Edwards.
Teachers and students of Shakespeare will find a valuable resource in Blits' new edition of Hamlet, which brings readers as close to the mind and heart of the real Shakespeare as possible and remains untouched by the fingerprints of literary theory and other mechanisms unknown and inconsequential to Shakespeare. This is also an indispensable tool in helping teachers in one of the greatest challenges of the classical classroom––namely, how to teach Shakespeare?
In Modern Hamlets and Their Soliloquies (Iowa, 1992), Mary Maher examined how modern actors have chosen to perform Hamlet’s soliloquies, and why they made the choices they made, within the context of their specific productions of the play.
Adding to original interviews with, among others, Derek Jacobi, David Warner, Kevin Kline, and Ben Kingsley, Modern Hamlets and Their Soliloquies: An Expanded Edition offers two new and insightful interviews, one with Kenneth Branagh, focusing on his 1997 film production of the play, and one with Simon Russell Beale, discussing his 2000-2001 run as Hamlet at the Royal National Theatre.
Now back in print with a new introduction by the author, this is the classic study of America's most admired instant city, from its days as a sleepy Mexican village, through the Gold Rush and into its establishment as a major international port. Roger Lotchin examines the urbanizing influences in San Francisco and compares these to other urban centers, doing so against a colorful backdrop of opium dens and other sinful institutions.
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