The Merchant of Venice Director's Playbook - Softcover

Shakespeare, William; Burke, Rachel

9780942208641: The Merchant of Venice Director's Playbook

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0942208641 ISBN 13: 9780942208641

Publisher: Bandanna Books, 2012

This Director's Playbook contains the play itself, and many resources that a high school or college director or drama coach, or even a commercial director, would find useful. There's a skeleton outline for entrances and exits of all actors, a section for audition candidates, tips on organizing a team, stage manager responsibilities, list of scenes, how to create a program, sell advertising, duties of a producer, sample budget. Scenes are broken up into dramatic dialogues, with fifty square inches of space for drawings, notes, sketches of how to present a scene. No details on costuming or set design, as each director will expand on his/her own vision for the play. That's the point of this playbook. Even the script can be (has been) cut by directors. How to maximize the impact of this play for a modern audience, that's up to the ingenuity of the director. The Merchant of Venice is one of Shakespeare's most popular plays, with juicy roles even for the bit players, but outstanding roles for Portia and Shylock. This play is a lot of fun, a bit sexy, it's got a moral lesson, and it may reflect on our own times, depending on how the director interprets it.

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About the Author:

William Shakespeare, the third of eight children, was born on April 23, 1564 in the English market town of Stratford-upon-Avon. His father became the mayor of Stratford in 1568 and worked as a glovemaker and a moneylender. Four years after leaving school at approximately the age of fourteen, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway in November of 1582; their first child Susan-nah was born in May of the following year. Two years later, Anne gave birth to twins, Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, a period called “the lost years,” there is almost no evidence about Shakespeare’s life, nor is there any solid evidence about how or why he made his way to London to become a dramatist. By 1592, however, Shake-speare’s reputation as a playwright and poet had begun to grow. In 1594, he helped found a new theater company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and be-came the company’s dramatist. Shakespeare’s success increased, and by 1598, the year he registered The Merchant of Venice, he had already purchased one of the biggest residences in Stratford. Some of Shakespeare’s richest dramatic work was written after the founding of the Globe Theater by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1599, including Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. After 1611, Shakespeare largely retired from the theater to spend more time in Stratford. He died in 1616 on his birthday, April 23, when he was fifty-two years old.

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