Signs of Shakespeare: Alternative theory and postmodern practice (William Shakespeare, England)

At the beginning of the 21st century, the study of Shakespeare faces a problematic duality in theory and practice. One of the most recent major developments in dramatic theory, the resurgence of theatre and dramatic semiotics, contains a significant gap between the audience-focused, reception theory of theatre semiotics and the language-focused, literary emphasis of dramatic semiotics. In theatre practice, one acting technique has dominated actor training and rehearsal approaches to Shakespeare: Lee Strasberg's Method Acting. This acting technique, however, concentrates on the psychological and emotional development of Shakespeare's characters and denies the character clues contained within the structure of the language.; I seek to answer this problematic duality of approaching, interpreting, and realizing the texts of Shakespeare and the similar language-based postmodern works of Harold Pinter, David Mamet, and Caryl Churchill by looking past Strasbergian realism to discover a technique based on how the signs within the language communicate meaning to the actor. At the center of this study's methodology stands my own preception theory of acting and semiotics. Traditional theatre semiotics focuses on audience reception of meaningful signs within a performance. Preception enables the actor to recognize the signs of character behavior and emotion provided by the texts, to examine the actor's process of character discovery via semiotics before (pre) the reception of the audience takes place. To access these character signs and apply the resulting physical and emotional clues in performance, preception utilizes unique rehearsal techniques of mask work and Sanford Meisner's approach to acting. These techniques enable an actor to move past over-intellectualizing about ambiguities of meaning, trust the textual directions, and react to the character signs provided by the playwrights' actor-oriented language.; Through connecting and applying literary theory and contemporary theatre practice, preception offers a postmodern semiotic approach to texts and represents one of a very few academic and artistic practices that can also be applied to Shakespeare. Preception's primary goal is to maintain the structure and beauty of the verse while using rehearsal techniques like mask work to access the clues to characterization from the language and captivate the visually oriented 21st-century audience.