Languaging in Shakespeare’s theatre

Evelyn Tribble | University of Otago

The enshrinement of William Shakespeare’s plays in printed editions has led to the assumption that they were performed with an ideal of exact verbatim reproduction of the language. Evidence drawn from alternative versions of the plays circulating in Shakespeare’s lifetime and from our knowledge of the material practices of playing in early modern England presents us with a very different picture. Performing practices in this period were marked by a tension between improvisational here-and-now languaging practices, including the use of gesture in playing, and a new set of expectations based upon an emergent conception of plays as written documents.

Keywords: gesture, distributed language, theatre, Shakespeare, written language bias

Published online: 02 December 2009
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.17.3.06tri

Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Worgan, Simon F.

2011. Towards an artificial model of ‘languaging’: reviewing the distributed language hypothesis. Language Sciences 33:1 ► pp. 229 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 17 april 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.