Shakespearean Characterization: A Guide for Actors and Students »

LESLIE O'DELL is Associate Professor of Theatre and English at Wilfrid Laurier University and Text Consultant for the Stratford Festival in Ontario.

Provides practical advice for the modern actor on how to portray Shakespeare's characters.

Library Journal

The goal of this trio of books by O'Dell (theater and English, Wilfrid Laurier Univ.), the text consultant for the Stratford Festival, is to help actors and students gain access to Shakespeare's plays. Each combines background information with practical techniques and exercises to be used for interpreting Shakespeare in performance. Shakespearean Language covers Shakespeare's use of rhetoric and iambic pentameter patterns to project emotion and to develop character and plot. Instructions on 16th-century scansion, grammar, and rhetorical devices are included. Shakespearean Characterization identifies the challenges involved in bringing 400-year-old characters to life. Solutions for translating Elizabethan theatrical conventions for death scenes, exits and entrances, the passage of time, and personification into conventions understood by 21st-century audiences are presented as well. In Shakespearean Scholarship, O'Dell identifies the materials she feels are the most useful for a performance-based approach, including glossaries and dictionaries, versions of the plays, pictorial representations of Elizabethan life, and other sources of historical information about the details of Shakespeare's world. Recognizing that there are differences between her ideas and scholarly ones, O'Dell emphasizes that her suggestions are intended to provide a practical approach to theatrical productions of Shakespeare's plays. Extensive reference lists and indexes are included. Recommended for public and academic libraries serving people interested in better understanding Shakespeare's plays as audience member, student, or player. Shana C. Fair, Ohio Univ., Zanesville Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.