Introduction to the study of Shakespeare's dramatic craftsmanship.

This engaging study offers fresh readings of canonical Shakespeare plays, illuminating ways stagecraft and language of movement create meaning for playgoers. The discussions engage materials from the period, present revelatory readings of Shakespeare's language, and demonstrate how these continually popular texts engage all of us in making meaning.

This book argues that Shakespeare was permanently preoccupied with the brutality, corruption, and ultimate groundlessness of the political order of his state, and that the impact of original Tudor censorship, supplemented by the relatively depoliticizing aesthetic traditions of later centuries, have together obscured the consistent subversiveness of his work. Traditionally, Shakespeare’s political attitudes have been construed either as primarily conservative, or as essays in richly imaginative ambiguation, irreducible to settled viewpoints. Fitter contends that government censorship forced superficial acquiescence upon Shakespeare in establishment ideologies — monarchic, aristocratic and patriarchal — that were enunciated through rhetorical set pieces, but that Shakespeare the dramatist learned from Shakespeare the actor a variety of creative methods for sabotaging those perspectives in performance in the public theatres. Using historical contextualizations and recuperation of original performance values, the book argues that Shakespeare emerged as a radical writer not in middle age with King Lear and Coriolanus — plays whose radicalism is becoming widely recognized — but from his outset, with Henry VI and Taming of the Shrew. Recognizing Shakespeare’s allusiveness to 1590s controversies and dissident thought, and recovering the subtextual politics of Shakespeare’s distinctive stagecraft reveals populist, at times even radical meaning and a substantially new, and astonishingly interventionist, Shakespeare.

William Shakespeare not only influenced the theatre of his contemporary age, but his influence on theatre comes down to our own age. His stagecraft, theatre architecture, and theatrical effects leave an indelible influence on Greek, Roman, Indian, Kabuki, and Western Theatre. This stagecraft of Shakespearean theatre helped the smooth and spontaneous flow of the action. This encompassed the human emotions and feelings. It proved purgative for the human heart. Shakespeare enlivened the printed page of the drama. The present work describes the comparative study of various theatre forms of East and West. Shakespeare successfully established a deep emotional relationship between the actors and the audience. The theatre became a passionate urge for the people with Shakespeare.

In Lighting the Shakespearean Stage, 1567–1642,R. B. Graves examines the lighting of early modern English drama from both historical and aesthetic perspectives. He traces the contrasting traditions of sunlit amphitheaters and candlelit hall playhouses, describes the different lighting techniques, and estimates the effect of these techniques both indoors and outdoors. Graves discusses the importance of stage lighting in determining the dramatic effect, even in cases where the manipulation of light was not under the direct control of the theater artists. He devotes a chapter to the early modern lighting equipment available to English Renaissance actors and surveys theatrical lighting before the construction of permanent playhouses in London. Elizabethan stage lighting, he argues, drew on both classical and medieval precedents.

The book is a compilation of different erudite articles already published by the author in various scholarly journals and other edited volumes. The essays are a study and an enquiry into a variety of dramaturgical methods and processes that contribute to the theatrical dynamics of the Shakespeare plays. All the articles are concerned with the art of playmaking, with an examination of the tools and devices used by Shakespeare which contribute to the dramatic life of the play but also articulate the moral and sociocultural ideas of the time. There has not been much critical work in this area before and the book is one of the first of its kind. The book unravels the function and effect of many poetic, rhetorical, topological, visual and theatrical devices which Shakespeare exploits in his plays for a dramatic effect. Together, the essays present an idea of the multidimensional totality of theatre language and communication which Shakespeare achieves through a masterful orchestration of dramatic resources. The book will be of immense value to students, scholars and researchers in the fields of theatre techniques and art, literature in general and drama in particular.

Seventeen critics are represented in this collection of essays designed to illustrate the vitality and range of traditional and new approaches to Shakespeare studies.

Shakespeare's Blank Verse: An Alternative History is a study both of Shakespeare's versification and of its place in the history of early modern blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter). It ranges from the continental precursors of English blank verse in the early sixteenth century through the drama and poetry of Shakespeare's contemporaries to the editing of blank verse in the eighteenth century and beyond. Alternative in its argumentation as well as its arguments, Shakespeare's Blank Verse tries out fresh ways of thinking about meter—by shunning doctrinaire methods of apprehending a writer's versification, and by reconnecting meter to the fundamental literary, dramatic, historical, and social questions that animate Shakespeare's drama.

In this useful guide, Leah Scragg indicates some of the ways in which meaning is generated in Shakespearian drama and the kinds of approaches that might lead to a fuller understanding of the plays. Each chapter focuses on one aspect of the dramatic composition, such as verse and prose, imagery and spectacle, and the use of soliloquy, and explores how this contributes to the overall meaning. Written in a clear and helpful style, Discovering Shakespearian Meaning enables students to discover the meaning for themselves.

"The Shakespeare studied in this book is Shakespeare the playmaker, engaged in every step of the process from the first draft of the text to the performance before a live audience. This, the author contends, is the Shakespeare that is most essential, the Shakespeare who should be known as the foundation underlying any other treatment of the plays, and the Shakespeare most exciting and rewarding to pursue."--Jacket.