Secrets of Acting Shakespeare: The Original Approach (A Theatre Arts Book)

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 320 pages
• Published by: Theatre Arts Book
• Edition: 1st Edition November 1, 2001
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0878300953
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0878300952
• Book Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Weighs: 1 pounds

Product Review
Any theater human being or academic interested in understanding Shakespeare should read Tucker's remarkable bookthis volume is highly recommended at all levels..
–R. Sugarman Ihoice

The book is a quite original and didactic look at Shakespeare, especially intriguing to the serious Shakespearean who is looking for new ideas.
–Michael Lazan Back Stage, September 2002

Tucker's Secrets of Acting Shakespeare is an important new book that offers much to a wide audience; a wealth of practical advice for students and makers of theatre and a great deal worth reconsidering for schlars of Shakespearean text and performance. Theatre Journal October 2003.

Product Description
Brushing up on your Shakespeare isn't enough. Shakespeare's plays require particular skills, but they are skills every actor can learn. Patrick Tucker - founder of London's Original Shakespeare Company, stage and TV director, and author of Secrets of Screen Acting - finds the keys in a revolutionary (really four-hundred-year-old) method that he has used with great success in workshops and performances around the world.
Secrets of Acting Shakespeare isn't a book that gently instructs. It's a passionate, yes-you-can designed to prove that anybody can act Shakespeare. Beyond that, it argues for care and attention to the First Folio text of Shakespeare's plays in which Patrick Tucker uncovers verbal clues that help actors, amateur and professional, to better understand what lines mean and how to say them.
By explaining how Elizabethan actors had only their own lines and not entire playscripts, Patrick Tucker shows how much these plays work by ear. Secrets of Acting Shakespeare isa book for actors trained and amateur, as well as for anyone curious about how the Elizabethan theater worked.

Reader Reviews
This book explains how to "read" Shakespeare easily. (Actually, it's about how to act his plays, but the ideas can equally well be used to simply read the plays with greater appreciation.) The method presented is quite easy and it makes the plays come to life. I wish I had this book 25 years ago when I studied Shakespeare in school. I have just started this book, but already I want to read Shakespeare's plays again to see what I missed - and I missed plenty. You also begin to understand why Shakespeare was a great play-writer, why his works have stood the test of time while the other writers of his age have withered away. Some of the interesting observerations: Thee vs. You has real significance (the former is intimitate while the latter is formal), why he writes in prose sometimes, the significance of the iambic pentameter (di-dum, etc.). The author also dispels a myth that English spoken in Shakespeare's time was hard compared to today. Rather Shakespeare's words were always harder than the common speak of the day, yet his plays were able to be well understood because of the "clues" presented in the writing, which made the actors act the part correctly, thus making the language easier to understand. Don't worry if you did not fully this last paragraph. The book will explain all. And, soon you'll be able to turn the pages of a Shakespeare play faster than that of a John Grisham novel.