The Players' Advice to Hamlet

The Rhetorical Acting Method from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

Bibliographic Data

ID23769080
AuthorsDavid Wiles (0000-0003-2226-7622, University of Exeter, corresponding author)
Year2020
Publication date2020-01-31
Open AccessYes
TypeBOOK
VenuePlayers' Advice to Hamlet (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherCambridge University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1017/9781108689502
OpenAlexW3189865210
ISBN9781108689502
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited124

Hamlet is a characteristic intellectual more inclined to lecture actors about their craft than listen to them, and is a precursor of Enlightenment figures like Diderot and Lessing. This book is a quest for the voice of early professional actors, drawing on English, French and other European sources to distinguish the methods of professionals from the theories of intellectual amateurs. David Wiles challenges the orthodoxy that all serious discussion of acting began with Stanislavski, and outlines the comprehensive but fluid classical system of acting which was for some three hundred years its predecessor. He reveals premodern acting as a branch of rhetoric, which took from antiquity a vocabulary for conversations about the relationship of mind and body, inside and outside, voice and movement. Wiles demonstrates that Roman rhetoric provided the bones of both a resilient theatrical system and a physical art that retains its relevance for the post-Stanislavskian performer.

Advice (programming) · Art · HAMLET (protein complex) · Computer Science · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

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