Reviews of the First Edition `...valuable and enjoyable reading for all studying Shakespeare's plays.' Following in the patternestablished by John Russell Brown for the excellent series (Theatre and Production Studies), he provides first an account of Shakespeare's company, then a study of three individual plays Twelfth Night, Hamlet and Macbeth as performed by the company. Peter Thomson writes in a crisp, sharp, enlivening style.' TLS '`...the best analysis yet of Elizabethan acting practices, excavated form the texts themselves rather than reconstructed on basis of one monolithic theory, and an essay on Hamlet that is a model of Critical intelligence and theatrical invention.' Yearbook of English Studies `Synthesizes the important facts and summarizes projects with a vigorous prose style, and expertly applies his experience in both practical drama and academic teaching to his discussion.' Review of English Studies

Shakespeare’s Theatre: A History examines the theatre spaces used by William Shakespeare, and explores these spaces in relation to the social and political framework of the Elizabethan era. The text journeys from the performing spaces of the provincial inns, guild halls and houses of the gentry of the Bard’s early career, to the purpose-built outdoor playhouses of London, including the Globe, the Theatre, and the Curtain, and the royal courts of Elizabeth and James I. The author also discusses the players for whom Shakespeare wrote, and the positioning—or dispositioning—of audience members in relation to the stage. Widely and deeply researched, this fascinating volume is the first to draw on the most recent archaeological work on the remains of the Rose and the Globe, as well as continuing publications from the Records of Early English Drama project. The book also explores the contentious view that the ‘plot’ of The Seven Deadly Sins (part II), provides unprecedented insight into the working practices of Shakespeare’s company and includes a complete and modernized version of the ‘plot’. Throughout, the author relates the practicalities of early modern playing to the evolving systems of aristocratic patronage and royal licensing within which they developed Insightful and engaging, Shakespeare’s Theatre is ideal reading for undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars of literature and theatre studies.

In the present tense, tells of the times during which the Globe Theatre was built and gives its history; includes a pop-up theater, punch-out characters to use in it, and two booklets of scenes from Shakespeare's plays.

By bringing together evidence from different sources--documentary, archaeological, and the play-texts themselves--Staging Shakespeare's Theatres reconstructs the ways in which the plays were originally staged in the theaters of Shakespeare's own time, and shows how the physical possibilities and limitations of these theaters affected both the writing and the performances. The book explains the conditions under which the early playwrights and players worked, their preparation of the plays for the stage, and their rehearsal practices. It looks at the quality of evidence supplied by the surviving play-texts, and the extant to which audiences of the time differed from modern audiences; and it gives vivid examples of how Elizabethan actors made use of gestures, costumes, props, and the theater's specific design features. Stage movement is analyzed through a careful study of how exits and entrances worked on such stages. The final chapter offers a thorough examination of Hamlet as a text for performance, excitingly returning the play to its original staging at the Globe.

The rebuilding of the Globe theatre (1599-1613) on London's Bankside, a few yards from the site of the playhouse in which many of Shakespeare's plays were first performed, must rank as one of the most imaginative enterprises of recent decades. It has aroused intense interest among scholars and the general public worldwide. This book offers a fully illustrated account of the research that has gone into the Globe reconstruction, drawing on the work of leading scholars, theatre people and craftsmen to provide an authoritative view of the twenty years of research and the hundreds of practical decisions entailed. Documents of the period are explored afresh; the techniques of timber-framed building and the decorative practices of Elizabethan craftsmen explained; and all of this reconciled with the requirements of the actors and restrictions of modern architectural design. The result is a book that will fascinate scholarly readers and laymen alike.

Under an alphabetical list of relevant terms, names and concepts, the book reviews current knowledge of the character and operation of theatres in Shakespeare's time, with an explanation of their origins>

How did Elizabethan and Jacobean acting companies create their visual and aural effects? What materials were available to them and how did they influence staging and writing? What impact did the sensations of theatre have on early modern audiences? How did the construction of the playhouses contribute to technological innovations in the theatre? What effect might these innovations have had on the writing of plays? Shakespeare's Theatres and The Effects of Performance is a landmark collection of essays by leading international scholars addressing these and other questions to create a unique and comprehensive overview of the practicalities and realities of the theatre in the early modern period.

This remarkable study shows how prologues ushered audience and actors through a rite of passage and how they can be seen to offer rich insight into what the early modern theatre was thought capable of achieving.

(Book). Shakespeare was a man of the theatre to his core, so it is no surprise that he repeatedly contemplated the nuts and bolts of his craft in his plays and poems. Shakespeare scholar Nick de Somogyi here draws together all the cherishable set pieces including "All the world's a stage," Hamlet's encounters with the Players, and Bottom's amateur theatricals along with many other oblique but no less revealing glances, and further insights into theatre practice by Shakespeare's contemporaries and rivals. De Somogyi's commentary takes us through the entire process of Shakespeare's theatrical production, from its casting and auditions, via rehearsals, costumes, and props, to its premiere and audience reception. Shakespeare on Theatre eavesdrops on the urgently whispered noises-off in the "tiring-house" and inhales the heady aroma of the Globe's first audiences.

This collection considers issues that have emerged in Early Modern Studies in the past fifteen years relating to understandings of mind and body in Shakespeare’s world. Informed by The Body in Parts, the essays in this book respond also to the notion of an early modern ‘body-mind’ in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries are understood in terms of bodily parts and cognitive processes. What might the impact of such understandings be on our picture of Shakespeare’s theatre or on our histories of the early modern period, broadly speaking? This book provides a wide range of approaches to this challenge, covering histories of cognition, studies of early modern stage practices, textual studies, and historical phenomenology, as well as new cultural histories by some of the key proponents of this approach at the present time. Because of the breadth of material covered, full weight is given to issues that are hotly debated at the present time within Shakespeare Studies: presentist scholarship is presented alongside more historically-focused studies, for example, and phenomenological studies of material culture are included along with close readings of texts. What the contributors have in common is a refusal to read the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries either psychologically or materially; instead, these essays address a willingness to study early modern phenomena (like the Elizabethan stage) as manifesting an early modern belief in the embodiment of cognition.