Shakespeare, Great Actors and the English Language: "Great Shakespeare Actors" by Stanley Wells Disclaimer: I received an advance reader's copy (ARC - Uncorrected Manuscript Proof) of this book from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. All opinions expressed are my own, and no monetary compensation was received for this review.
(The book is due to be published on June 23, 2015; review written 06/05/2015)
 

I’ve always wanted to read a book like the one I’ve just read. Why? Shakespeare, great Actors and the English Language. This is the preferred triumvirate of my liking.
 
Stanley Well’s aim is an attempt to define what great Shakespearean roles there are, thus inviting greatness of performance. What distinguishes a great performance from a merely competent one? 
 
I’ve written elsewhere, that in my book a great actor should be defined by the way she/he can stand still in the presence of an audience. (Great) Shakespeare acting needs stillness, i.e., the ability of the Actor to listen and to react in silence. This epitomizes what great acting is (e.g., Hermione’s motionless silence in “The Winter’s Tale” is a good example of this). The other characteristic an Actor needs is to be in full control of her/his acting voice/language. Why is this so? The western human behaves (I’m thinking Bloom here), thinks and speaks quite differently now from the days four hundred years ago when Shakespeare’s plays were contemporary. What’s the difference when I say the words "Take me for a sponge my lord?" now (Incidentally I use this line when someone is trying to sell me some bullshit…) and when someone, maybe Shakespeare, uttered it 400 years ago?
 
The rest of this review can be found elsewhere. ( )

It's good... enough... as far as it goes. But that's not far enough. Where are John Lowin? Joseph Taylor? Eyllaerdt Swanston? Charles Hart? Michael Mohun? Cave Underhill? And that's just through 1670.
Yes, it's meant to be a "popular" book so there's not room for everyone -- Wells even dedicates it to the "great Shakespeare actors not included". But the book is only 300 pages long, and 40 of those are references, bibliography and and index -- more appropriate for a scholarly book, unnecessary for a pop book like this -- and there is plenty of white space scattered around. Fix the layout, halve the refs, add 150 pages and you could almost double the number of actors covered. ( )

Stanley Wells’ Great Shakespeare Actors is a wonderful read for fans of theatre, literature, and history. Besides providing us with descriptions of some of history’s great actors at work, Wells gives readers a sense of the evolving understanding of Shakespeare’s works and of actors’ interpretations of them: “There is, we might say, no such thing as a play: there are only scripts which come to life in different ways each time they are performed.”

Wells is working with challenging material. We have very little documentary evidence regarding early performers of the plays, sometimes a single painting, sometimes not even that. He provides illustrations wherever possible, and the number of these increase as the book progresses.

Wells looks at the types of roles these early actors were known for and at first-person accounts of viewing plays in order to attempt a written portrait of their work. For example, given their differences as texts, it’s likely the roles of Falstaff and Macbeth’s porter were written for different actors: the first a clown (perhaps the era’s Will Ferrell); the second a much darker sort of comic (maybe a Lewis Black).

Wells also moves us from the era of men-only acting to today’s gender-inclusive theatre, and he pays attention to male roles mastered by women (Sarah Bernhardt’s Hamlet, for instance), as well as the historical use of boys to play female characters. Why do so many of Shakespeare’s female characters find themselves in situations that require cross-dressing? For the plot, yes, but also to get boy actors out of skirts whenever possible.

Given that Great Shakespeare Actors is a static text attempting to depict a highly plastic medium, at times the reader will have difficulty “seeing” what Wells sees as he writes. Nonetheless, the specificity of Wells’ writing brings to life performances that remain almost undocumented. ( )