I've recently learned (thanks Elana!) that Alexander Schmidt's Shakespeare Lexicon is online. This is the two volume set of all the words of Shakespeare, defined, and with citations for where the words appear. I'm still learning how to navigate it, but oh the possibilities...
And, Rebecca Ennals, AD of the SF Shakespeare Festival, is now blogging! I was particularly excited to read her mid-August post announcing new casting policies for the festival.
And hey, read a little bit about Charlotte Cushman! I'm learning more about this mid 1800's actor who played both male and female Shakespearean characters. I've added this book to my library cue.
Showing posts with label Shakespeare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Shakespeare. Show all posts
Friday, September 6, 2013
Friday, December 14, 2012
News Round-Up
International: The Guardian UK has been running a thoughtful, articulate and passionate series of articles this week on representation of women on British stages. There are infographics, data analysis articles, a feature, an opinion piece, and a second infographic that focuses specifically on the gender breakdown in Shakespeare. It was interesting to me to see how similar the British data was to what I've been finding with the Counting Actors project: especially at the higher budget levels, the ratio of representation male to female is roughly 2:1.
Local: Theatre Bay Area's Chatterbox blog has new content relating to last week's Diversity Symposium. Staff member Dale Albright has a wrap-up post that includes suggestions for taking action. And several attendees share their reactions, thoughts and reflections in this blog post (and a few mentions of the Counting Actors project there as well!). Finally, today, there's a post from me on the TBA site as well, which should be cross-posted to the Works by Women SF site very soon as well.
Monday, August 13, 2012
Parklet!
It's kind of like a Shakespeare flash mob or pop-up. It's really cool to see how the audiences respond, and to think of how San Francisco and the stories of Shakespeare fit together - putting the Macbeths' in the shadow of the Transamerica Pyramid, or Kate and Petruchio in a playground with a water feature.
Tomorrow, I'm playing Adriana in a scene from Comedy of Errors. We're at 5:30 in the Fisherman's Wharf area - specific location tbd by end of today. I'm so excited to reunite w/castmates from the production we did a few years ago.
The facebook listing is here. You can and should follow/friend SF Shakes on Twitter and Facebook for info on the rest of these FREE performances.
Friday, July 20, 2012
Not Hamlet
An essay in the Guardian UK by Janet Suzman shows me that this 1960's LAMDA grad w/RSC & film credits as well as a Dame of the British Empire has been thinking about this topic for a long time.
A few choice quotes from the article:
What I am struck by – as I write in my new book, Not Hamlet, about the frail position of women in drama – is that none of the women are awarded interiority in nearly the same measure as the male characters.
Women have never been, perhaps never will never be, autonomous creatures, unshackled. Even Shakespeare ducked giving their thoughts extended airtime, as if listening to women was not quite worth it.
RTWT.
And here's a description of the book.
Friday, April 20, 2012
Big Time Shakespearean Geekery
The dream team of the British Museum and the BBC are back again with another awesome series! They're calling it 'Shakespeares Restless World' and it's a series of twenty programs, each running approx 15 minutes.
It follows a similar format to the History of the World in 100 Objects series that I wrote about here. But this time, each program picks an object from the British Museum's collection and uses that as a jumping off point to explore a specific aspect of the history and culture of Shakespeare's England.
Already pretty awesome, but then they add in a little bit of Shakespearean text analysis on the theme at hand, and my teen Shakespeare geek heart goes pitter pat.
You can find the programs detailed here. As of this writing, the first five programs are online, and they'll keep adding new ones M-F through May 11th.
Huzzahs all around for Emily Weak, my sister and librarian supreme, who tipped me off to this new series.
It follows a similar format to the History of the World in 100 Objects series that I wrote about here. But this time, each program picks an object from the British Museum's collection and uses that as a jumping off point to explore a specific aspect of the history and culture of Shakespeare's England.
Already pretty awesome, but then they add in a little bit of Shakespearean text analysis on the theme at hand, and my teen Shakespeare geek heart goes pitter pat.
You can find the programs detailed here. As of this writing, the first five programs are online, and they'll keep adding new ones M-F through May 11th.
Huzzahs all around for Emily Weak, my sister and librarian supreme, who tipped me off to this new series.
Monday, January 23, 2012
links on Shakespeare&gender&sexism
Both from the UK's Guardian -
Link #1 is an examination of the current usage of single gender casting in Shakespeare plays. My favorite part:
"By making the familiar unfamiliar and levelling gender differences, single-sex casting can make us look afresh at plays that have become an accepted part of our cultural fabric. This allows audiences to reassess not only the gender relations in these classics, but also the ways in which men and women still treat one another in today's society."
RTWT
Link #2 looks specifically at Taming of the Shrew - and asks Brit actors and directors who've tackled the play in recent years how they interpret a play that often gets called barbaric and mysogynistic. Go here to read!
Link #1 is an examination of the current usage of single gender casting in Shakespeare plays. My favorite part:
"By making the familiar unfamiliar and levelling gender differences, single-sex casting can make us look afresh at plays that have become an accepted part of our cultural fabric. This allows audiences to reassess not only the gender relations in these classics, but also the ways in which men and women still treat one another in today's society."
RTWT
Link #2 looks specifically at Taming of the Shrew - and asks Brit actors and directors who've tackled the play in recent years how they interpret a play that often gets called barbaric and mysogynistic. Go here to read!
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Resource: Monologue hunting and overdone monologues
Don't know about you, but my monologues are feeling stale, I'm not in rehearsal or production for anything, so now seems like a good time to do some looking for new monologues.
I'll be using the library to get started, of course. But, I just found this cool website that lists overdone monologues for women, men, and Shakespeare. It looks like a terrific resource.
I'll be using the library to get started, of course. But, I just found this cool website that lists overdone monologues for women, men, and Shakespeare. It looks like a terrific resource.
Monday, January 17, 2011
Resource of the Week: Online Shakespeare and the International Dialects of English Archive
Hey - since I was sick last week, there was no resource of the week. So for this week, two of them.
1. http://shakespeare.mit.edu/ - all of Shakespeare's plays are online here. The punctuation can be a little wonky, but the words are there.
2. http://web.ku.edu/~idea/ - the International Dialects of English Archive or IDEA is a resource for recordings of native and regional speakers. Just choose a continent, then a country, then a state or region, and you'll see a list of recordings with a short biographical note about the speaker. Each recording begins with the speaker reading a passage that linguists constructed to contain every sound made in English, and then has the speaker talking a little bit about themselves or their life. Whenever I need to learn a new dialect for an audition or project, I always start here, and pick someone to sound like.
1. http://shakespeare.mit.edu/ - all of Shakespeare's plays are online here. The punctuation can be a little wonky, but the words are there.
2. http://web.ku.edu/~idea/ - the International Dialects of English Archive or IDEA is a resource for recordings of native and regional speakers. Just choose a continent, then a country, then a state or region, and you'll see a list of recordings with a short biographical note about the speaker. Each recording begins with the speaker reading a passage that linguists constructed to contain every sound made in English, and then has the speaker talking a little bit about themselves or their life. Whenever I need to learn a new dialect for an audition or project, I always start here, and pick someone to sound like.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)