For those of you being introduced to the American Shakespeare Repertory for the first time with our production of William Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece in the 2011 Minnesota Fringe Festival, one of the distinguishing traits of the company is our “foundational” approach to Shakespeare. As part of the Complete Readings of William Shakespeare, we go [...]

In the original text for The Merchant of Venice there are, arguably, four different characters with similar names: Salanio, Solanio, Salarino, and Salerio. (Salarino is also spelled Salaryno, but that’s a fairly self-evident variant.) The Second Quarto in 1619 changed all the instances of “Solanio” to read “Salanio”, and since the Q2 text was preferred [...]

As with the other ASR scripts prepared for the Complete Readings of William Shakespeare, the full script presents the complete play. The conflated script, on the other hand, is what we use in actual performance. The conflated script is uncut, but does contain the role conflation which allows us to perform plays which have 30-50 [...]

The scene and act divisions in Hamlet pose a troubling scholastic problem. A little history: The First Quarto and Second Quarto contain no separation of scenes or acts at all. In fact, the traditional five act structure that we typically associate with Shakespeare didn’t actually become popular until the reign of King James. In other [...]

Hamlet is almost universally acknowledged as Shakespeare’s greatest masterpiece. Among his plays it is also, without doubt, the most complicated of texts. (One might even say convoluted.) Some of its mysteries may never be truly unraveled, but I think we can achieve a fair degree of certainty in a great many matters. Doing so, however, [...]

The original text for Much Ado About Nothing is the quarto of 1600. The play was also included in the First Folio of 1623, but the text there appears to have been typeset from the quarto itself. (It replicates virtually all of the quarto’s errors. For example, half of Balthasar’s lines in 2.1 are nonsensically [...]

The First Folio of 1623 is our only original source for Cymbeline, and so naturally the ASR script for the play is based upon it. CYMBELINE – FULL SCRIPT CYMBELINE – CONFLATED SCRIPT In working with the script, it quickly became apparent that a heavier hand than usual would need to be employed with emending [...]

ASR’s script for Richard II is based primarily on the first Quarto of the play as it was published in 1597 (Q1). The decision to use Q1 as the source text of the play is based primarily on the relationship between the original texts as described by A.W. Pollard in 1916. RICHARD II – FULL [...]

As described in The End of the Story, Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock is a play in need of an ending. For our reading as part of the Complete Readings of William Shakespeare, a new ending of the play was written by Justin Alexander. The ASR scripts of the play have been updated to include [...]

Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock only survives in a well-thumbed manuscript. Literally well-thumbed:The edges of its pages, worn thin by apparently decades of use as a playhouse prompt script, are disintegrating. But that’s not all: The manuscript’s cover sheet has been lost, taking with it the original name of the play and the author’s name. [...]