Thursday, July 7, 2011

"Clowns": Chapter Two — The Clown to the Stage

[post 161]

When I started this blog more than two years ago, I thought one thing I would definitely do would be to get my book Clowns, long since out of print, up on the blog so all of you could access it for free. The problem is that doing so involves a lot of tedious work (scanning; optical character recognition; proofreading; layout; etc.), plus I wanted to provide supplementary material for each chapter. Ideally I would rewrite it to improve it (hey, I was 26 at the time!) and bring it up to date, but that possibility will have to wait until I retire, at which point I'll probably prefer to do something that's more fun.

Still, even I am amazed that it's been two years and I've only posted chapter five (the one most related to physical comedy) and chapter one. So here goes chapter two.  At this rate, I'll have the whole book up there by 2020! If you're impatient, you can usually find a used copy on Amazon, with prices ranging from $15 to $200. If I were you, I'd hold out for a cheaper copy.

So here's chapter two, a long one, which covers the clown character in various dramatic traditions, including of course commedia dell'arte. It could have been broken up into more than one chapter, but I had deadlines to meet and had to limit it somehow.

I'll follow up with some related material, including some complete books, more than you will ever have time to read. Or me either, for that matter...

Clicking on the bottom-left button shows it full screen, and you can of course download it, print it, etc.

ch02

No comments: