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Performing Shakespeare: Voice Training and the Feminist Actor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Sarah Werner
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Abstract

Although voice work presents itself as a neutral set of tools that can help actors in performing a text, an analysis of the cultural biases behind voice training reveals that both the underlying ideology and the methods of reading and acting it produces limit the possibilities for feminist performances of Shakespeare. By naturalizing the language and rhythms of the text, by focusing attention on the characters' need for the words as opposed to the dramatist's, voice training denies actors ways of questioning the politics of the playscripts. Sarah Werner has just received her PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania for her dissertation entitled ‘Acting Shakespeare's Women: Toward a Feminist Methodology’. She has presented papers at a number of conferences, including the Shakespeare Association of America and the International Conference on Medieval Studies, and is currently a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 12 , Issue 47 , August 1996 , pp. 249 - 258
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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