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Elizabethan Popular Theatre surveys the Golden Age of English popular theatre: the 1590s, the age of Marlowe and the young Shakespeare. The book describes the staging practices, performance conditions and acting techniques of the period, focusing on five popular dramas: The Spanish Tragedy, Mucedorus, Edward II, Doctor Faustus and Titus Andronicus, as well as providing a comprehensive history of a variety of contemporary playhouse stages, performances, and players.
Elizabethan Popular Theatre surveys the Golden Age of English popular theatre: the 1590s, the age of Marlowe and the young Shakespeare. The book describes the staging practices, performance conditions and acting techniques of the period, focusing on five popular dramas: The Spanish Tragedy, Mucedorus, Edward II, Doctor Faustus and Titus Andronicus, as well as providing a comprehensive history of a variety of contemporary playhouse stages, performances, and players.
Discusses the development of the English theater during the Elizabethan era, including the origins of Elizabethan theater and dramas, the influence of the queen and the church, and the impact of various playwrights and actors.
While much has been written on Shakespeare's debt to the classical tradition, less has been said about his roots in the popular culture of his own time. This is the first book to explore the full range of his debts to Elizabethan popular culture. Topics covered include the mystery plays, festive custom, clowns, romance and popular fiction, folklore and superstition, everyday sayings, and popular songs. These essays show how Shakespeare, throughout his dramatic work, used popular culture. A final chapter, which considers ballads with Shakespearean connections in the seventeenth century, shows how popular culture immediately after his time used Shakespeare.
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
The manuscript of the Elizabethan play Sir Thomas More has intrigued scholars for over a century because three of its pages may have been written by Shakespeare. The Elizabethan Theatre and "The Book of Sir Thomas More" sets aside the timeworn question of authorship and considers the play in a new framework, one which by focusing on questions of the theatre attempts to free Elizabethan theatre history from the grip of its most famous author. Bringing to bear on the manuscript the perspective of a theatre historian and the resources of textual scholarship, Scott McMillin departs from most critical accounts, which have judged Sir Thomas More unfinished. Rather, McMillin addresses the manuscript as a coherent and finished work that achieves its intended purpose: to serve as a prompt book in the Elizabethan playhouse. His systematic analysis of the Sir Thomas More manuscript shows that the company for which it was written was unusually large, that it had a lead actor of outstanding capability, and that in its staging of the play it probably made use of visual repetition as an ironic device. He concludes that the theatre company of the period that most closely matched this description was Lord Strange's men, a company, incidentally, for which Shakespeare himself was known to have written in the early 1590s. Textual scholars, theatre historians, and students and scholars of Elizabethan drama will welcome The Elizabethan Theatre and "The Book of Sir Thomas More."
The scripts of the Admiral's Men (later Prince Henry's Men), the Chamberlain's Men (later the King's Men) boy actors and Worcester's/Queen Anne's Men are examined in detail to document the differing costume practices of these companies, especially the ways in which in their earlier days they reconciled visual splendor with the greatest possible economy.
Alan Dessen reconstructs the stage in the Elizabethan era from scrutinising four hundred manuscripts.
The theatres and how they were organised - Elizabethan plays - Actors - Stage, sets and costumes - Entertainment for the rich and the poor - Sports and outdoor activities - Timeline.