On Shakespeare’s World & Theater
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Written by Joseph Papp & Elizabeth Kirkland
Discover the London of Shakespeare's time, a fascinating place to be—full of mayhem and magic, exploration and exploitation, courtiers and foreigners. Stroll through narrow, winding streets crowded with merchants and minstrels, hoist a pint in a rowdy alehouse, and hurry across the river to the open-air Globe Theater to see that latest play written by a young man named Will Shakespeare.
Shakespeare Alive! spirits you back to the very years of that London—as everyday people might have experienced it. Find out how young people fell in love, how workers and artists made ends meet, what people found funny and what they feared most. Go on location with an Elizabethan theater company to learn how plays were produced, where Shakespeare’s plots came from and how he transformed them. Hear the music of Shakespeare’s language and words we still use today that were first spoken in his time. Open the book and elbow your way into the Globe with the groundlings. You’ll be joining one of the most democratic audiences the theater has ever known—alewives, apprentices, shoemakers and nobles—in applauding the dazzling wordplay and swordplay brought to you by William Shakespeare.
Written by Frances Yates
The ancient Greeks, to whom a trained memory was of vital importance—as it was to everyone before the invention of printing—created an elaborate memory system, based on a technique of impressing "places" and "images" on the mind. Inherited and recorded by the Romans, this art of memory passed into the European tradition, to be revived, in occult form, at the Renaissance, and particularly by the strange and remarkable genius, Giordano Bruno. Such is the main theme of Frances Yates's unique and distinctive book, in the course of which she sheds light on such diverse subjects as Dante's Divine Comedy, the form of the Shakespearian theater, and the history of ancient architecture. Aside from its intrinsic fascination, this book is an invaluable contribution to aesthetics and psychology, and to the history of philosophy, of science, and of literature.
Staging in Shakespeare’s Theatres
Written by Andrew Gurr & Mariko Ichikawa
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.
Written by Margorie Garber
A brilliant and companionable tour through all thirty-eight plays, Shakespeare After All is the perfect introduction to the bard by one of the country’s foremost authorities on his life and work.
Drawing on her hugely popular lecture courses at Yale and Harvard over the past thirty years, Marjorie Garber offers passionate and revealing readings of the plays in chronological sequence, from The Two Gentlemen of Verona to The Two Noble Kinsmen. Supremely readable and engaging, and complete with a comprehensive introduction to Shakespeare’s life and times and an extensive bibliography, this magisterial work is an ever-replenishing fount of insight on the most celebrated writer of all time.
Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London
Written by Andrew Gurr
Andrew Gurr's classic account of Shakespeare's historical audience assembles evidence from the writings of the time to describe the physical, social and mental conditions of playgoing. In addition to revising and adding new material which has emerged since the second edition, Gurr develops new sections about points of special interest. Fifty new entries have been added to the list of playgoers and a dozen new quotations about the experience of playgoing.
How Shakespeare Changed Everything
Written by Stephen Marche
Esquire columnist Stephen Marche gives an expansive and exciting look at WilliamShakespeare’s pervasive influence on every aspect of modern culture—showing ushow we can find Shakespeare even where we least expect him. In the spirit ofAlain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life,Marche reveals how Shakespeare’s influence is everywhere—from politics topsychotherapy, broadway to botany, emo teenagers to outrageous baby names, even zoology (didyou know it’s the Bard who is responsible for the starlings terrorizing NewYork City’s Central Park?). Fans of literary trivia and readers of Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World and Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare: The World as Stage will be captivated by Marche’s artful reading of how everyday can bring a fresh reading of the Immortal Bard of Avon.
Written by E. M. W. Tillyard
This brief and illuminating account of the ideas of world order prevalent in the Elizabethan age and later is an indispensable companion for readers of the great writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dramatists, Donne and Milton, among many others. The basic medieval idea of an ordered Chain of Being is studied by Professor Tillyard in the process of its various transformations by the dynamic spirit of the Renaissance. Among his topics are: Angels; the Stars and Fortunes; the Analogy between Macrocosm and Microcosm; the Four Elements; the Four Humours; Sympathies; Correspondences; and the Cosmic Dance—ideas and symbols which inspirited the minds and imaginations not only of the Elizabethans but of all men of the Renaissance.
The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642
Written by Andrew Gurr
For almost forty years The Shakespearean Stage has been considered the liveliest, most reliable and most entertaining overview of Shakespearean theatre in its own time. It is the only authoritative book that describes all the main features of the original staging of Shakespearean drama in one volume: the acting companies and their practices, the playhouses, the staging and the audiences. Thoroughly revised and updated, this fourth edition contains fresh materials about how specific plays by Shakespeare were first staged, and provides new information about the companies that staged them and their playhouses. The book incorporates everything that has been discovered in recent years about the early modern stage, including the archaeology of the Rose and the Globe. Also included is an invaluable appendix, listing all the plays known to have been performed at particular playhouses and by specific companies.
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