Product Description

John Barton has been with the Royal Shakespeare Company since 1960 directing 26 of Shakespeare's plays for them. In the first half of the book, Barton attempts an objective analysis of how Shakespeare's text actually works, examining the use of verse and prose, set speeches and soliloquies, language and character. In the second half he concentrates on the more subjective areas such as irony and ambiguity, passion and coolness. The book springs from a nine-part London Weekend Television series, in which these various topics were investigated in front of the cameras by Barton and a group of well-known Shakespearean actors including Peggy Ashcroft, Tony Church, Sinead Cusack, Judi Dench, Susan Fleetwood, Mike Gwilym, Sheila Hancock, Lisa Harrow, Alan Howard, Ben Kingsley, Jane Lapotaire, Barbara Leigh-Hunt, Ian McKellen, Richard Pasco, Michael Pennington, Roger Rees, Norman Rodway, Donald Sinden, Patrick Stewart, David Suchet and Michael Williams.Useful for actors and scholars, this book will also aid teachers and students working on Shakespeare's plays in the classroom.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #241138 in Books
• Published on: 1984-07-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 212 pages

Customer Reviews

Words, words, words
John Barton is an epic figure in Shakespearean acting circles and rightly so. I found this book after watching a masterclass he filmed with Kevin Kline on Sky Arts, and just being bowled over by how much the actors, who were already good, improved under his tutelage.

This book consists of edited transcripts of a series of television programmes Barton made with some incredibly famous actors on how to Play Shakespeare. It does exactly what it says on the tin. It is absolutely fascinating to hear how different actors approach the same role, notably the chapter on Shylock in which David Suchet and Patrick Stewart compare their respective takes on the role.

Barton is eloquent and interesting as are his cast. The work is illuminating and underpins Barton's crucial reliance on what the text is doing, his belief is that Shakespeare uses both the words and the structure of the text to give the actors direction.

I must point out that I am not an actor myself, so how useful this is as a guide to acting I don't know. I am however, studying Shakespeare in production, and for this, this book is perfect. Well worth purchasing. A timeless classic.

fascinating book
One of the best books I've read on Shakespeare's writing - because that is exactly what it concentrates on. John Barton is highly regarded among actors as a practical analyst of Shakespearean verse and prose, giving often simple but penetrating advice. His trademark method is to use verse or sentence structures and lexical choices to decipher some very specific and useful instructions encoded by Shakespeare for the actors. Stands the test of time

definitive toolkit
i am a classicaly trained theatre director. having undergone a good classical training at a school of excellence (at MA level) an awful lot of what we were taught is reflected in this book. mind you - our course leader worked with barton at the RSC. there is a world of difference between reading/studying and playing shakespeare in professional practice - and to ignore verse form and to suppose there is no specific craft to acting it - well do that at your own peril: to do so is to underestimate shkspr. this is, in other words - a book for the professional practitioner. the only drawback with this book is that as a practitioner you'll probably see the sense of it AFTER you've put the text in the air in the way the barton suggests - and having someone outside of the rehearsal or exercise to help you is pretty important. for any actor or director who wants to deepen their understanding of how this stuff works - this is a much less prescriptive and 'thou shalt' book that Sir Peter Halls and gives you a good toolkit for performing shakespeare - if you can, however, watch the videos on which the book is based. for those of you who wish to study shakespeare critically - you may not see the value in this text. however, in this day and age critics are increasingly writing about practice and are beginning to see the value in it - (althoug a lot of their books, while based on practice critisism actually dont do the job) in terms of textual analysis and discovery on the text - this book is a good toolkit if you know how to unlock it.all in all, barton and hall reinvigorated and deepened our understanding of playing shkspr and are our 20th century pioneers for high end modern practice and you'd be hard pushed to match their knowledge and experience. in other words, it's worth more than a nod.