Although race rather than ethnicity has been the focus in American theatre of the second half of the 20th century, ethnicity continues to be an important element. It is, however, the ethnicity of characters rather than actors that has been significant. In this essay, I examine the ways in which dialect training manuals from the 1940s through the 1990s created integrated approaches to the construction of ethnicity and nationality through descriptions of national character, phonetic and grammar analyses, speech exercises and methods of classification. The socio-linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure, V.N. Voloshinov and William Labov, along with Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress's work on social semiotics, are used to shed light on the ways in which speech pedagogy has both promoted the perpetuation of cultural types and stereotypes and encouraged more discerning representations of cultural difference.
He used to come to the house and ask me to hear him recite. Each time he handed me a volume ofThe Complete Works of William Shakespeare.… He wanted me to sit in front of him, open the book, and follow him as he recited his lines. I did willingly.…And as his love for Shakespeare's plays grew with the years he did not want anything else in the world but to be a Shakespearean actor.Toshio Mori“Japanese Hamlet” (1939)
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