The Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet: A Frankly Annotated First Folio Edition
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The Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet: A Frankly Annotated First Folio Edition Details
About the Author Demitra Papadinis divides her time between New Hampshire and New York City. She is the founder and Producing Artistic Director of the New England Shakespeare Festival and a founding member of New York City's WildBard! An expert in Unrehearsed Shakespeare/First Folio Cue-Script Technique, she presents workshops and educational programs at schools, colleges, and theatres throughout the country. Read more
Reviews
For four hundred years, Shakespeare has been the province of scholars and academics who have sold a version of the Bard that appeals to high culture. Shakespeare is our literary heritage. His poetry is immortal. His plays are universal. So most people consider Shakespeare boring at best, or, at worst, simply incomprehensible.In her succinct fifteen-page introduction, Papadinis eviscerates the work of these anemic editors and critics, restoring Shakespeare to, well, us. For her, Shakespeare belongs as much to the groundlings as to the nobility, as much to the fans of World Wrestling Entertainment as to those of the opera. This was popular entertainment in Shakespeare's day, in direct competition with the bear-baiting and brothels which shared the neighborhood. Theaters were reviled by the Puritans as bawdy, lewd, sinful, low entertainment. In other words, fun.This book shows us why. After showing what we lose when we ignore original texts like the First Folio of 1623 in favor of edited, expurgated, tepidly annotated versions, Papadinis guides us through _Romeo and Juliet_ with painstaking attention. Her footnotes are exhaustive and (as promised) frank; fascinating and delightful.This is THE text to read if you would like to know what ordinary people ever saw in Shakespeare. And, hopefully, it is a wake-up call to scholars, to remind them that Shakespeare crafted his scripts for performance, not for fusty studies, for theater audiences, not for literary critics. That Romeo and Juliet, for instance, is not a work, but a PLAY.
