You and Thou in Shakespeare: A Practical Guide for Actors, Directors, Students and Teachers (Arden Performance Companions) - Softcover

Penelope Freedman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1350118672 ISBN 13: 9781350118676

Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare, 2021

Synopsis

Romeo and Juliet always use thou to each other, but they are the only pair of lovers in Shakespeare to do this. Why? All the women in Richard III address Richard as thou, but no man ever does. Why? When characters address the dead, they use thou except for Hamlet, who addresses Yorick as you. Why? Shakespeares contemporaries would have known the answers to these questions because they understood what thou signified, but modern actors and audiences are in the dark. Through performance-oriented analysis of extracts from the plays, this book explores the language of trulls and termagants, true loves and unwelcome wooers, male impersonators, smothering mothers, warring spouses and fighting men, as well as investigating lèse-majesté, Freudian slips, crisis moments and rhetorical flourishes. Drawing on work with RSC actors, as well as the authors experience of playing a range of Shakespearean roles, the book equips the reader with a new tool for tracking emotions, weighing power relations and appreciating dazzling complexity.

About this title

About the Author

Penelope Freedman is a teacher and academic with a background both in linguistics and in theatre. With a first degree in Classics from Oxford, an MA in Linguistics from the University of Kent and a PhD on Shakespeare from Birmingham University, she has been a lecturer at Kent and Warwick universities, as well as at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK. She has also directed several Shakespeare productions and played eight of Shakespeare’s heroines.

Edition details

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1350118672
• ISBN 13: 9781350118676
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176