{"product_id":"9781472576170","title":"Anecdotal Shakespeare: A New Performance History","description":"Shakespeare's four-hundred-year performance history is full of anecdotes – ribald, trivial, frequently funny, sometimes disturbing, and always but loosely allegiant to fact.  Such anecdotes are nevertheless a vital index to the ways that Shakespeare's plays have generated meaning across varied times and in varied places.  Furthermore, particular plays have produced particular anecdotes – stories of a real skull in \u003ci\u003eHamlet\u003c\/i\u003e, superstitions about the name \u003ci\u003eMacbeth\u003c\/i\u003e, toga troubles in \u003ci\u003eJulius Caesar\u003c\/i\u003e – and therefore express something embedded in the plays they attend.  Anecdotes constitute then not just a vital component of a play's performance history but a form of vernacular criticism by the personnel most intimately involved in their production: actors.  These anecdotes are therefore every bit as responsive to and expressive of a play's meanings across time as the equally rich history of Shakespearean criticism or indeed the very performances these anecdotes treat. \u003ci\u003eAnecdotal Shakespeare \u003c\/i\u003eprovides a history of post-Renaissance Shakespeare and performance, one not based in fact but no less full of truth.","brand":"Bloomsbury USA","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47176013447408,"sku":"9781472576170","price":23.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781472576170_p0.jpg?v=1763598469","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781472576170","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}