Abstract
In his Journal entry for 14 January 1940, Bertolt Brecht wrote:
helli is working with naima wifstrand in her school for young actors. she is doing studies of Shakespeare, they act one scene (MACBETH 2, ii) then they improvise a scene from daily life with the same theatrical element, then the Shakespeare scene again.1 the pupils seem to react strongly to the technique of the a-effect2 (to be read with astonishment).3
The reference is to a set of ‘Practice Pieces for Actors’ and ‘Intercalary Scenes’ written by Brecht for students at a private acting school in Stockholm run by Naima Wifstrand and Helene Weigel, in order to ease the students into an unreverential and distanced relationship with Shakespeare’s plays. The effect is to encourage the audience to imagine what is happening ‘below stairs’ and to provide a wider focus. Inevitably, there is an element of politicising the plays and setting them in terms of class conflict.
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Notes
Bertolt Brecht: Journals 1934–1955, transi. Hugh Rorrison, ed. John Willett (Methuen, London, 1993), p. 43.
Konstanze Lauterbach and Bernhard Kartheus, ‘Beziehungen zu Shakespeare in Brechts Galilei’ (Links with Shakespeare in Brecht’s Galilei), Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 115 (1979), pp. 83–6
Douglas Kellner, ‘Brecht’s Marxist Aesthetic: The Korsch Connection’ in Bertolt Brecht: Political Theory and Literary Practice, ed. Betty Nance Weber and Hubert Heinen (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1976), pp. 29–42
The hostility towards Brecht’s theories of theatre of many critics until recently shows just how deeply embedded are the post-Romantic assumptions. Hans Reiss, in his Preface to Paul Kussmaul’s Bertolt Brecht and the English Drama of the Renaissance (Bern/Frankfurt: H. Lang, 1974)
Rose Zimbardo, ‘Understanding Shakespeare in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Comedy from Shakespeare to Sheridan: Change and Continuity in the English and European Dramatic Tradition, ed. A.R. Braunmuller and J.C. Bulman (University of Delaware Press, Newark, 1986), pp. 215–28.
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© 1997 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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White, R.S. (1997). Troilus and Cressida as Brechtian Theatre. In: Batchelor, J., Cain, T., Lamont, C. (eds) Shakespearean Continuities. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26003-4_15
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