Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2004, offers Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies, concentrating on a feature of the drama closely connected to the nature of the early stage. James Hirsh (Georgia State) is on firmer ground than Meagher, having basically texts rather than texts and speculations to go by. He is more likely to change the way we look at Shakespeares art of monologue than Meagher is to convince us that Shakespeare was as dominant in his theater as some of the actor-managers of the Victorian period were in theirs. Maybe he was, as a rival said, a Johannes Factotum and had a hand in staging, but I suspect that Elizabethan actors rehearsed lines, not blocking, and having quickly committed their parts to memory went onstage and just kept from bumping into each other. Plays were essentially . Shakespeare being a poet in the theater, of course, the dramatic monologue must have greatly appealed to him despite the fact that drama is by definition action, not , and theater essentially a place to see. Elizabethans were ready to welcome oratory and elocution more than audiences of modern drama do. Soliloquy was to Elizabethans the equivalent of the balloon over the head of comic-strip characters or the voice-over of films and television. It permitted the expression of the inner self and it played with what on Victorian dramatist called . On occasion soliloquies gave the audience information --that actions might not be up to conveying or that appearance might contradict in Shakespeares world of intrigue where . Hirsh well understand the origin of the soliloquy and all its play with surfaces and essences, appearance and reality in Shakespeares theater. This is an ingenious and successfully revisionist book. You ought to read it though if you are a director it will not give you practical advice the way that Harley Granville Barker or Stanislavsky did. --Bibliothque dHumanisme et Renaissance (2005)
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