Pauline Kiernan - Editor

The works of William Shakespeare contain at least 400 puns on male and female genitals. Despite the richness and breathtaking scope of his sexual language, too little attention has been paid to the sheer salacious inventiveness of his indecent puns – until now. His plays and poems pulsate with puns on body parts and what they do. Filthy Shakespeare presents over 70 sizzling examples of the Bard at his raciest, arranged under different categories from Balls to Buggery, from Cunnilingus to the Clap, from Homosexual to Transvestite.

What have we learned from the first experiments at the reconstructed Globe on Bankside? Written by the Leverhulme scholar appointed to study actor use of the space, this is the first analytical account of the discoveries that have been made in its important first years. Kiernan relates her findings to what we know of original staging practices in Shakespeare’s time to show how actors, directors and playgoers have responded to the demands of ‘historical’ constraints – and unexpected freedoms – to offer valuable insights into the dynamics of Elizabethan theatre.

Why did Shakespeare write drama? Did he have specific reasons for his choice of this art form? Did he have clearly defined aesthetic aims in what he wanted drama to do – and why? Pauline Kiernan opens up a new area of debate for Shakespearean criticism in showing that a radical, complex defence of drama which challenged the Renaissance orthodox view of poetry, history and art can be traced in Shakespeare’s plays and poems. This study, first published in 1996, examines different stages in the canon to show that far from being restricted by the ‘limitations’ of drama, Shakespeare consciously exploits its capacity to accommodate temporality and change, and its reliance on the physical presence of the actor. This lively, readable book offers an original and scholarly insight into what Shakespeare wanted his drama to do and why.

At a time when mainstream and independent film producers are despairing at their slush piles of tent-pole scripts that are derivative, formulaic and forgettable, desperately searching for bold and original work, screenwriter and Shakespeare scholar Pauline Kiernan offers a radically new and provocative approach to screenwriting for writers who want to discover how to create screenplays that are daring, inventive and wholly original- and have a real chance of getting developed…

For anyone who has ever loved, longed to be loved, loved and won, loved and lost, loved in vain, or all of these, Shakespeare’s lovers will show you that you are not alone. They know just how you feel.

Distinguished Shakespeare scholar Pauline Kiernan offers a unique invitation to plunge deep into the power and passion of the world’s greatest poet of love who dared to portray love in all its complex, baffling, comic, tragic, absurd, messy glory.

Did you know that scientists have now discovered that there is such a thing as eternal love, proving that the lines extolling everlasting love in Shakespeare’s famous sonnet are true?

In LOVE and SHAKESPEARE: WORDS FROM THE GREATEST LOVERS IN LITERATURE you will find Shakespeare’s magnificent passionate, tender, witty, tortured, comic, violent, impulsive, charismatic, captivating, vulgar, hilarious, glamorous, touching and damaged lovers.

Whatever contact you have had with love poems or Shakespeare, this book on his words about love will be a revelation. Love will never seem the same again.

How do you create dialogue for the highest dramatic and emotional impact for your screenplay? Make it reveal the inner life of your characters in the most powerful yet subtle ways, drive the narrative thread forward without clunky exposition and compel great actors to want to speak it? Above all, how do you make your character unique?

The POWER UP YOUR SCREENWRITING DIALOGUE WORKOUTS for Screenwriting They Can’t Resist is a radically new and provocative approach for screenwriters who want to create powerful dynamic dialogue.

How you spell-bind an audience into an irresistible involvement with your characters and keep it entranced by that magic till the end of the film – and beyond – is to arouse, provoke, intrigue, disturb, unsettle, excite, exhilarate, frighten, gladden, mesmerize, and delight the audience’s emotions. And dialogue, as with all elements of a screenplay, plays a crucial role in how you achieve all this.

This book focuses on your screenwriting. It shows you how to power up your own screenplay as you’re writing it.

How do you orchestrate your story into a dynamic, unified whole, with intensely dramatic shaping of all the elements that create a screenplay the industry can’t resist? How do you write action lines that leap off the page and make your script ‘breathe’? How do you write the shots without using camera angle directions?

Follow the manuals, trying to squeeze your unique story into a rigid straitjacket called the ‘3-Act Structure’ designed to be universally applied to all scripts is not much help if you’re aiming to write outstanding screenplays that are wholly original and have market potential. Few of the great screenplays follow the so-called ‘rules’ about screenwriting structure. The secret of shaping your script into a story that keeps your audience spell-bound from beginning to end and beyond, is to find ways to keep everything in your story breathing. Treat your screenplay as though it is a beating heart, a dynamic movement of tension and release and the story starts to weave itself.

A radically new and provocative approach for screenwriters who want to create utterly compelling characters.

Everything in a screenplay is based on one overriding premise: Emotional Pull. Great screenwriting begins and ends with the emotional needs of the characters, not a tent-pole. Start off worrying about how to fit your story into a rigid structure designed to be universally applied to all scripts and you will more likely produce a script that’s formulaic and forgettable and won’t have a chance of being developed.

How you spell-bind an audience into an irresistible involvement with your characters and keep it entranced by that magic till the end of the film – and beyond – is to arouse, provoke, intrigue, disturb, unsettle, excite, exhilarate, frighten, gladden, mesmerize, and delight the audience’s emotions.

Emotional Pull is what powers the story. It’s what forces your characters to do what they do, when they do it and why. And when and why they try to resist it.
It determines how you tell the story, the narrative impetus, the dramatic journey, how it moves and breathes, how it rises and falls in tension, how it climaxes, and how it ends. It shapes the textures and contours of the story’s physical and visual world, the symbolic resonances, the nuances of meaning, the rhythm of the spoken words, subtext and silence. It is the beating heart of the story.

It pulls two ways. It exerts its power on the people of the story, and in turn, it pulls the audience into the story.

Emotional Pull is what gets audiences intrigued, you draw them into the world of your characters with such visceral force, connecting to their emotions at the deepest level so that they’re spell-stopped, unable and unwilling to cut the cord that holds them so tightly to the inner life of the characters.

It is then, the power of great cinematic story-telling. And that’s why creating character is the toughest challenge for a screenwriter.