Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Shakespeare plays on Renaissance stages
- 2 Improving Shakespeare: from the Restoration to Garrick
- 3 Romantic Shakespeare
- 4 Pictorial Shakespeare
- 5 Reconstructive Shakespeare: reproducing Elizabethan and Jacobean stages
- 6 Twentieth-century performance: the Stratford and London companies
- 7 The tragic actor and Shakespeare
- 8 The comic actor and Shakespeare
- 9 Women and Shakespearean performance
- 10 International Shakespeare
- 11 Touring Shakespeare
- 12 Shakespeare on the political stage in the twentieth century
- 13 Shakespeare in North America
- 14 Shakespeare on the stages of Asia
- 15 Shakespeare and Africa
- Further reading
- Index
8 - The comic actor and Shakespeare
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- 1 Shakespeare plays on Renaissance stages
- 2 Improving Shakespeare: from the Restoration to Garrick
- 3 Romantic Shakespeare
- 4 Pictorial Shakespeare
- 5 Reconstructive Shakespeare: reproducing Elizabethan and Jacobean stages
- 6 Twentieth-century performance: the Stratford and London companies
- 7 The tragic actor and Shakespeare
- 8 The comic actor and Shakespeare
- 9 Women and Shakespearean performance
- 10 International Shakespeare
- 11 Touring Shakespeare
- 12 Shakespeare on the political stage in the twentieth century
- 13 Shakespeare in North America
- 14 Shakespeare on the stages of Asia
- 15 Shakespeare and Africa
- Further reading
- Index
Summary
During the summer of 2000, The Tempest was staged at Shakespeare's Globe in London. There was an implicit challenge to traditional readings of the play in the casting of Vanessa Redgrave as Prospero, but her presence was as imposing and her voice as rich as any man's need have been. Perhaps this Prospero was more completely Miranda's parent, less securely the colonialist patriarch, than Michael Redgrave was at Stratford in 1951, but there was never any sense that allowances were being made. This was our Prospero, and we respected him. A cultural shift of great significance is even more evident here than in the reaction to Fiona Shaw's playing of Richard II, because the crossing of gender quickly ceased to be the audience's focus. For one thing, Redgrave's performance of the role brushed lesser considerations aside; for another, Prospero's fecundity is peculiarly genderless; and for a third, there was Caliban.
Actors of comedy and comic actors
The ability to sustain a role in a comedy was no less a routine requirement for professional actors in Elizabethan England than it is now. A genuine comic actor, though, is comparatively a rarity. We do not know who created the role of Caliban, but Shakespeare had someone in mind when he wrote it as an extreme stylistic contrast to Prospero.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage , pp. 137 - 154Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002
- 1
- Cited by