Acting and action in Shakespearean tragedy /

Goldman (Princeton) has clearly written an excellently reasoned study that attempts to explain the way acting and action are related in Shakespeare's major tragic figures: Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Anthony, and Coriolanus. He starts with the premise that acting is the major source of any audience's experience of action-thus the title ``acting and action.'' Our sense of action, he states, ``... rises almost entirely from the performance of the actors {{so}} ... the playwright, then, makes action out of acting....'' Goldman focuses on what the text does to the actor, if the acting is good, and how the actor then determines the character's dramatic life, revealed through Goldman's scrutiny of Shakespeare's language. No serious director or actor should ignore this study. Upper-division undergraduate level and above.-C.C. Harbour, University of Montevallo