Still Shakespeare and the photography of performance

Abstract

"'When Shakespeare said it, it was true: 'These our actors ... are melted into air.' True no longer.' So claims the back cover of a book of stage photographs by John Haynes, published in 1986. The publication of a book of theatrical photographs, some of them - though by no means all - representing performances of Shakespeare's plays, is here positioned as a solution to the tendency of performance to disappear when the curtain falls. Photography, it is suggested, can at last prove Shakespeare wrong: the actors will not be allowed to melt into thin air, but instead will be retained in the form of their photographic images, caught in the attitudes of stage performance. Photography and Shakespeare are here pitted against one another"--

Contents

Introduction : 'Leave not a rack behind' -- Liveness, documentation, and the RSC's Dreams, 1954-77 -- Photographing the past in the theatre of Charles Kean -- Julia Margaret Cameron, sympathetic Shakespeare and photographic afterlives -- 'Too much of water' : Ophelia, photography, dissolution -- Poor Yorick : the photograph as memento mori.