scholarly journals Shakespeare and Company Project

Author(s):  
Joshua Kotin ◽  
Rebecca Sutton Koeser
2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-58
Author(s):  
Wendy Michallat

In 1939 Madeleine Blaess, a languages graduate, left her home in England for Paris to begin doctoral research at the Sorbonne. Unable to escape Paris before the German invasion in spring 1940, she was trapped in France for the duration of the war. The letters she wrote to her parents during the Phoney War, and the diary she began in October 1940 and continued until after the Liberation, are a fascinating account of her life as a postgraduate scholar in wartime. Through these written traces we glimpse women-run social and intellectual communities and businesses to which many women students turned for scholarly and moral support and, occasionally, practical and financial succour. This article draws on Madeleine’s letters and diary to describe and evaluate the importance of these extra-curricular networks in supporting women students during wartime with a particular focus on the bookshop and library Shakespeare and Company, run by Sylvia Beach.


Author(s):  
Andrew Thacker

This paper explores the significance of Katherine Mansfield and Jean Rhys as colonial outsiders in the modernist metropolis of Paris. The paper draws upon a number of ideas from contemporary affect theory (such as work on the idea of shame) to present an original account of how, in texts such as ‘Je ne parle pas français’ and ‘Feuille d’Album’ (Mansfield) and Quartet (Rhys), both writers responded, in differing ways, to the moods of the modernist spaces of the city. It also discusses the importance of their engagement with the cultural institutions of modernism in Paris, such as that of Sylvia Beach’s bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, and explores their shared connections to the French writer Francis Carco.


2013 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-169
Author(s):  
Bella Merlin

An actor's training continues throughout his/her professional career, yet they rarely have the time or inclination to write in detail about their processes, when building a character, to provide documents for inquisitive peers. In this two-part article, Bella Merlin articulates the discoveries made playing Margaret in Richard III at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival in Summer 2012, directed by internationally acclaimed actor-director Tina Packer (co-founder of Shakespeare and Company with Kristin Linklater in 1978). Merlin highlights how the shift from teacher to actor reactivates the ‘willing vulnerability’ that she demands of her own students. She focuses on Stanislavsky's three avenues of research: on the playtext; on the world of the play and playwright; and on the self. There can be resistance by some theatre practitioners to the application of Stanislavsky's tools to Shakespeare's texts, often due to a perceived over-psychologizing. In these articles Merlin challenges some of these resistances. She demonstrates that Packer's insistence on connecting voice with thought to release the imagination implicitly harnesses Shakespeare's structure with Stanislavsky's underpinnings. Packer also lays emphasis on contemporary resonance, freeing the natural voice, and the significance of Shakespeare's female characters in Richard III for awakening an audience to the consequences of violence. The journey is unsettlingly personal and startlingly global. In Part I, in NTQ 113, Merlin addressed research on the text and research on the play, drawing upon history, biography, accounts of grief, and chilling footage of the Rwandan genocide. In Part II, which follows, she uses the immediacy of a rehearsal journal to address research on the self. Bella Merlin is an actor, writer, and actor-trainer. Acting includes seasons at the National Theatre with Max Stafford-Clark's Out of Joint Company. Publications include The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit (2007) and Acting: the Basics (2010). She is currently Professor of Acting at the University of California, Davis.


Books Abroad ◽  
1960 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl L. Anderson ◽  
Sylvia Beach

1985 ◽  
Vol XIV (1) ◽  
pp. 72-76
Author(s):  
David Seed

2006 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Rooney

Author(s):  
John Crawford

Sylvia Beach was an American expatriate best known as the owner of the iconic Parisian Shakespeare and Company bookstore, located at 8 rue Dupuytren until 1921, and then at 12 rue de l’Odéon the Left Bank area of the city. The popular bookstore and lending library was a point of convergence for many modernist writers and artists in Paris’ thriving arts community, including Ernest Hemingway, André Gide, André Maurois, Robert McAlmon, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Joyce. A supporter of James Joyce, Beach was the first publisher of Joyce’s Ulysses. Born Nancy Woodbridge Beach, Sylvia Beach spent much of her youth distancing herself from a household made uneasy by the tense marriage of her mother, Eleanor Thomazine Orbison, and father, Sylvester Beach, a Presbyterian minister who served several parishes in New England, including the prominent Princeton, New Jersey community. Beach’s early refusal of material wealth was often at odds with her father’s attempts to gain social status among affluent Princeton parishioners. However, Beach found some hope for her ambition of becoming an independent woman during a year spent in Paris in 1902, during which her father served as Associate Pastor of the American Church of Paris. This period helped develop Beach’s love for Paris, its artists, and its liberal atmosphere.


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