Shakespeare's company, the King's Men, played at the Globe, and also in an indoor theatre, the Blackfriars. The year 2014 witnessed the opening of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, based on ...seventeenth-century designs of an indoor London theatre and built within the precincts of the current Globe on Bankside. This volume, edited by Andrew Gurr and Farah Karim-Cooper, asks what prompted the move to indoor theatres, and considers the effects that more intimate staging, lighting and music had on performance and repertory. It discusses what knowledge is required when attempting to build an archetype of such a theatre, and looks at the effects of the theatre on audience behaviour and reception. Exploring the ways in which indoor theatre shaped the writing of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the late Jacobean and early Caroline periods, this book will find a substantial readership among scholars of Shakespeare and Jacobean theatre history.
From the Hamlet acted on a galleon off Africa to the countless outdoor productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream that now defy each English summer, Shakespeare and Amateur Performance explores the ...unsung achievements of those outside the theatrical profession who have been determined to do Shakespeare themselves. Based on extensive research in previously unexplored archives, this generously illustrated and lively work of theatre history enriches our understanding of how and why Shakespeare's plays have mattered to generations of rude mechanicals and aristocratic dilettantes alike: from the days of the Theatres Royal to those of the Little Theatre Movement, from the pioneering Winter's Tale performed in eighteenth-century Salisbury to the Merchant of Venice performed by Allied prisoners for their Nazi captors, and from the how-to book which transforms Mercutio into Yankee Doodle to the Napoleonic counterspy who used Richard III as a tool of surveillance.
Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance asks a central theoretical question in the study of drama: what is the relationship between the dramatic text and the meanings of performance? ...Developing the notion of 'performativity' explored by J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, and others, Worthen argues that the text cannot govern the force of its performance. Instead the text becomes significant only as embodied in the changing conventions of its performance. Worthen explores this understanding of dramatic performativity by interrogating several contemporary sites of Shakespeare production. He analyses how Shakespeare is recreated in historical performance, exemplified by the Globe Theatre on Bankside; by international and intercultural performance; by film; and by the appearance of Shakespeare on the Internet. The book includes detailed discussions of recent film and stage productions, and sets Shakespeare performance alongside other works of contemporary drama and theatre.
We know Shakespeare's writings only from imperfectly-made early editions, from which editors struggle to remove errors. The New Bibliography of the early twentieth century, refined with technological ...enhancements in the 1950s and 1960s, taught generations of editors how to make sense of the early editions of Shakespeare and use them to make modern editions. This book is the first complete history of the ideas that gave this movement its intellectual authority, and of the challenges to that authority that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. Working chronologically, Egan traces the struggle to wring from the early editions evidence of precisely what Shakespeare wrote. The story of another struggle, between competing interpretations of the evidence from early editions, is told in detail and the consequences for editorial practice are comprehensively surveyed, allowing readers to discover just what is at stake when scholars argue about how to edit Shakespeare.
Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare argues for editing Shakespeare's plays in a new way, without pretending to distinguish authorial from theatrical versions. Drawing on ...the work of the influential scholars A. W. Pollard and W. W. Greg, Werstine tackles the difficult issues surrounding 'foul papers' and 'promptbooks' to redefine these fundamental categories of current Shakespeare editing. In an extensive and detailed analysis, this book offers insight into the methods of theatrical personnel and a reconstruction of backstage practices in playhouses of Shakespeare's time. The book also includes a detailed analysis of nineteen manuscripts and three quartos marked up for performance - documents that together provide precious insight into how plays were put into production. Using these surviving manuscripts as a framework, Werstine goes on to explore editorial choices about what to give today's readers as 'Shakespeare'.
Ranging widely across law, aesthetics, religion, and philosophy, this book offers the first account of the place of judgment in Shakespearean drama.Shakespeare and Judgment gathers together an ...international group of scholars to address for the first time the place of judgment in Shakespearean drama. Contributors approach the topic from a variety of cultural and theoretical perspectives, covering plays from across Shakespeare's career and from each of the genres in which he wrote. Anchoring the volume are two critical contentions: first, that attending to Shakespeare's treatment of judgment leads to fresh insights about the imaginative relationship between law, theater, and aesthetics in early modern England; and second, that it offers new ways of putting the plays' historical and philosophical contexts into conversation. Taken together, the essays in Shakespeare and Judgment offer a genuinely new account of the historical and intellectual coordinates of Shakespeare's plays. Building on current work in legal studies, religious studies, theater history, and critical theory, the volume will be of interest to a wide range of scholars working on Shakespeare and early modern drama. Key FeaturesProvides the first account of the place of judgment in Shakespearean dramaOffers a fresh perspective on the imaginative relationship between law, religion, and aesthetics in Shakespeare's playsModels new ways of putting the plays' historical and philosophical contexts into conversation
England's land borders with Scotland and Wales, together with the narrow channels separating the British mainland from Ireland and the Continent, were the focus of acute, if intermittent, unease ...during the early modern period. This book analyses works by not only Shakespeare but also his contemporaries to argue that many of the plays of Shakespeare's central period, from the second tetralogy to Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Othello, engage with the idea of England's borders.
This ground-breaking new book uncovers the way Shakespeare draws upon the available literature and visual representations of the hand to inform his drama. Providing an analysis of gesture, touch, ...skill and dismemberment in a range of Shakespeare's works, it shows how the hand was perceived in Shakespeare's time as an indicator of human agency, emotion, social and personal identity. It demonstrates how the hand and its activities are described and embedded in Shakespeare's texts and about its role on the Shakespearean stage: as part of the actor's body, in the language as metaphor, and as a morbid stage-prop. Understanding the cultural signifiers that lie behind the early modern understanding of the hand and gesture, opens up new and sometimes disturbing ways of reading and seeing Shakespeare's plays.
Shakespeare's rise to prominence was by no means inevitable. While he was popular in his lifetime, the number of new editions and revivals of his plays declined over the following decades. Emma ...Depledge uses the methodologies of book and theatre history to provide a re-assessment of the reputation and dissemination of Shakespeare during the Interregnum and Restoration. She demonstrates the crucial role of the Exclusion Crisis (1678–1682), a political crisis over the royal succession, as a foundational moment in Shakespeare's canonisation. The period saw a sudden surge of theatrical alterations and a significantly increased rate of new editions and stage revivals. In the wake of the Exclusion Crisis, Shakespeare's plays were made available on a scale not witnessed since the early seventeenth century, thus reversing what might otherwise have been a permanent disappearance of his drama from canonical familiarity and firmly establishing Shakespeare's work in the national cultural imagination.
Shakespeare's plays have never had a larger audience than they do in our time. This wide viewing is complemented by modern scholarship, which has verified and elucidated the plays' texts. ...Nevertheless, Shakespeare's plays continue to be revised. In order to find out how and why he has been rewritten, Ruby Cohn examines modern dramatic offshoots in English, French, and German.
Surveying drama intended for the serious theater, the author discusses modern versions of Shakespeare's plays, especiallyMacbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, andThe Tempest. Although the focus is always on drama, contrast is supplied by fiction stemming fromHamletand essays inspired byKing Lear. The book concludes with an assessment of the influence of Shakespeare on the creative work of Shaw, Brecht, and Beckett.
Originally published in 1976.
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