About the Book:

Author's Pen and Actor's Voice redefines the relationship between writing and performance, or "playing," in Shakespeare's theater. Through close reading and careful analysis Shakespearean scholar Robert Weimann offers a reconsideration and redefinition of Elizabethan performance and production practices. The study reviews the most recent methodologies of textual scholarship, the new history of the Elizabethan theater, performance theory, and film and video interpretation, and offers a new approach to understanding Shakespeare. Robert Weimann examines a range of plays as well as other contemporary works.

What people say:

"Robert Weimann's study is indispensable for an understanding of the complex play of authority and appropriation in the Elizabethan theatre. Any serious consideration of the relation between text and performance, any analysis of the struggle for the control of theatrical interpretation, any sustained reflection on the crossing of the threshold from reality to the play-world and back again would do well to begin here with this brilliant book." — Stephen Greenblatt

"Weimann provides a learned and complex historicized explanation of Elizabethan stage practices ...Weimann's historical argument is bolstered by rich and suggestive readings...." — Studies in English Literature

"In this book Weimann again charts new ground, by reading Shakespeare's searching interrogation of the two modes of production in which he worked: writing and acting. He challenges us to reimagine Shakespearean drama as an art that is inclusive as well as contestatory." — W. B. Worthen

"Robert Weimann has written an extraordinary book - bold and original in its conception, sophisticated and surprising in its execution. It is scrupulous in its research and rigorous in its argument, energetic in its prose and agile in its readings. Weimann leads us once again to rethink much of what we thought we knew about Elizabethan plays." — David Scott Kastan

About the Author:

Robert Weimann is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Drama, The University of California at Irvine. He is the author of many books, most notably Author's Pen and Actor's Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare's Theatre.