Double Shakespeares: Emotional-Realist Acting and Contemporary Performance

Double Shakespeares examines contemporary performances of Shakespeare plays that employ the emotional realist traditions of acting that were codified by Stanislavski over a century ago. These performances recognize the inescapable doubleness of realism: that the actor may aspire to be the character but can never fully do so. This doubleness troubled the late-nineteenth-century actors and theorists who first formulated realist modes of acting; and it equally troubles theorists and theatre practitioners today. The book first looks at contemporary performances that foreground the doubleness of the actor’s body, particularly through cross-dressing. It then examines narratives of Shakespearean rehearsal-both fictional representations of rehearsal in film and video, and eye-witness narratives of actual rehearsals-and how they show us the process by which the actor does or does not become the character. And, finally, it looks at modern performances that frame Shakespeare’s play as a play-within-a-play, showing the audience both the character in the Shakespeare play-within and the actor in the frame-play acting that character.