Abstract
Words alone do not bring a play to life; the persons who speak them have to come alive too. Until we observe how Shakespeare achieved this, we have not responded as fully as we might to what he has written. Behind the words on a page lies an imagined reality in which each character is activated distinctively, so that they all appear to be in independent charge of what they say and do.
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Notes
Discussion recorded in John Barton, Playing Shakespeare (London and New York: Methuen, 1985) p. 209.
Georges Banu, ‘Peter Brook’s Six Days’, New Theatre Quarterly, III: 10 (1987) p. 104.
Richard Flecknoe, A Short Discourse of the English Stage (London, 1664); quoted in E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923) vol. IV, p. 370.
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© 1996 John Russell Brown
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Brown, J.R. (1996). Speech and Action. In: William Shakespeare: Writing for Performance. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24634-2_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24634-2_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
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