Is William Shakespeare of Stratford-Upon-Avon the true author of the poems and plays attributed to him? This book once and for all silences those critics who say he isn't. It takes particular aim at those who champion Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, whose crest was a wild blue boar.

Who are these heretics who would strip Shakespeare of his laurels and drape them on a "nobler" brow? Foremost are John Thomas Looney, the Charlton Ogburn family and the latter-day anti-Stratfordians Richard Whalen, John Michell, David McCullough, Lewis H. Lapham, Mark Anderson and others.

Using their own words against them, this book meticulously examines the claims of these Naysayers and destroys them.

In addition, you'll learn about Shakespeare's early decline and fall as a literary giant; why so little is known of Shakespeare's life; and why his closest colleagues, Ben Jonson and the Shakespeare Folio editors, Heminges and Condell, have been branded fools or liars.

Whether you are a teacher, student or simply someone interested in one of the foremost literary questions of the day, it's important to read "Spearing the Wild Blue Boar."

This edited volume explores the role of arts and meditation within educational settings, and looks in particular at the preventive and developmental function of the arts in educational contexts through different theoretical perspectives. Encompassing research from an array of disciplines including theatre, psychology, neuroscience, music, psychiatry, and mindfulness, the book draws insights relevant to a broad spectrum of interdisciplinary fields. Chapters are divided into thematic sections, each outlining praxes and emphasising how educating within and through the arts can provide tools for critical thinking, creativity and a sense of agency, consequently fulfilling the need of well-being and contributing towards human flourishing. Ultimately, the book focuses on the role the arts have played in our understanding of physical and mental health, and demonstrates the new-found significance of the discipline in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. With its interdisciplinary and timely nature, this book will be essential reading for scholars, academics, and post-graduate researchers in the field of arts education, creative therapies, neuroscience, psychology, and mindfulness.

In this dynamic collection a team of experts map the development of Live Art culturally, thematically and historically. Supported with examples from around the world, the text engages with a number of key practices, asking what these practices do and how they can be contextualized and understood.

What do you do if you find yourself weeping in the stalls? How should you react to Jude Law's trousers or David Tennant's hair? Are you prepared to receive toilet paper in the post? What if the show you just damned turns out to be a classic? If you gave it a five-star rave will anyone believe you? Drawing on his long years of experience as a national newspaper critic, Mark Fisher answers such questions with candour, wit and insight. Learning lessons from history's leading critics and taking examples from around the world, he gives practical advice about how to celebrate, analyse and discuss this most ephemeral of art forms - and how to make your writing come alive as you do so. Today, more people than ever are writing about theatre, but whether you're blogging, tweeting or writing an academic essay, your challenges as a critic remain the same: how to capture a performance in words, how to express your opinions and how to keep the reader entertained. This inspirational book shows you the way to do it. Foreword by Chris Jones, Chief theater critic, Chicago Tribune

Modern theater is a field marked by competing, and often contradictory, impulses and developments. A critique of certain types of theatre is a productive force within modernism and a force that led to the most successful reforms of modern theatre and drama. This exciting collection of essays in Palgrave's "Performance Interventions" series rethinks the historical formations and functions of antitheatricality within modern drama, opera, literature, film, and art.

Using the tools of performance studies, gender theory, and cultural history, Brenda Foley explores the striking similarities between beauty pageantry and striptease. For example, women in both project a 'normal' femininity and adhere to a strict hierarchy (Miss America contestants look down upon Miss Universe contestants, while theatrical 'burlesque artists' saw themselves as far above mere carnival strippers). Undressed for Success collects extensive primary source research - newspapers, journals, trade publications, photography collections, press releases, memoirs, and interviews with both strippers and pageant contestants - and employs a wide array of gender, feminist, and performance theory to analyze them.

Theatre has often found itself at the centre of recent debates over censorship and the arts, as a result of coverage of events such as the protests against the play "Behzti" and the controversy over "Jerry Springer: The Opera." This book offers the first sustained study of censorship of the British stage from 1968 into the twenty-first century.

For the potential, as well as the professional, producer and for writers, actors, directors, and investors, this book is for anyone wanting or needing to understand the process of producing Off Broadway plays from start to finish. Written in crisp, clear, nonlegal language that the layman can easily understand, every page reflects the experience and expertise of Farber, a well-known and highly respected theatrical attorney. The book contains detailed information on how to: option a property, raise money, obtain a theater, deal with the cast and other personnel, the art of negotiation, partnerships and co-production agreements, and much more. Especially useful are the updated and expanded appendixes, which include all new budgets and actual examples of today's commonly used legal forms and contracts.

This book examines sexuality, gender and race in Australia's vibrant independent theatre and performance culture. It analyses selected feminist and queer performances that interrogate the cultural construction of sexuality and gender, challenge the normative trends of mainstream Australian society and culture and open up spaces for alternative representations of gender identity and sexual expression. Offering the first full-length study on sexuality and gender in Australian theatre since 2005, this book reveals a resurgence of feminist themes in independent performance and explores the intersection of feminist and queer politics. Ranging across drag, burlesque, cabaret, theatre and performance art, the book provides an accessible and engaging account of some of the most innovative, entertaining and politically subversive Australian theatrical works from the past decade.

The Group Theatre, a groundbreaking ensemble collective based in New York that operated from 1931 to 1941, started the careers of many top American theatre artists of the twentieth century and founded what became known as Method Acting. This book is the definitive history of the group, based on more than thirty years of research and interviews by the foremost theatre scholar of the time period, Helen Chinoy. She begins the story of the Group's remarkable ten years at the end of the experiment, then resets the narrative against the Depression years and introduces the cast of youthful characters and their issues with the American theatre of their day. Tracing the careers of Group Theatre actors and directors including Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Harry Morgan, Chinoy follows with their collective vision for a new theatre developed around their grand idea for a new approach to an acting process based on an ordered training of the actor's imagination and emotions in exercises and in plays that confront social issues important to the Group.

Marking the 100-year anniversary of women's suffrage, Leslie Hill provides a fascinating survey of the history of first wave feminism in British theatre, from the London premiere of Ibsen's A Doll's House in 1889 through the militant suffrage movement. Hill's approachable overview explores some of the pivotal ways in which theatre makers both engaged with and influenced feminist discourse on topics such as sexual agency, reproductive rights, marriage equality, financial independence and suffrage. Clear and concise, this is an ideal resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of Theatre and Performance Studies taking courses on Women in Theatre and Performance, Staging Feminism, Early Feminist Theatre, Theatre and Suffrage, Gender and Theatre, Political Theatre and Performance Historiography. This text will also appeal to scholars, lecturers, and Literature students.

This book examines the surge of queer performance produced across Ireland since the first stirrings of the Celtic Tiger in the mid-1990s, up to the passing of the Marriage Equality referendum in the Republic in 2015.

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.

This book analyses Black Consciousness poetry and theatre from the 1970s through to the present. South Africa's literature, like its history, has been beset by disagreement and contradiction, and has been consistently difficult to pin down as one, united entity. Much existing criticism on South Africa's national literature has attempted to overcome these divisions by discussing material written from a variety of different subject positions together. This book argues that Black Consciousness desired a new South Africa where African and European cultures were valued equally, and writers could represent both as they wished. Thus, a body of literature was created that addressed a range of audiences and imagined the South African nation in different ways. This book explores Black Consciousness in order to demonstrate how South African writers have responded in various ways to the changing history and politics of their country.

This book investigates the shifting relationship between performance and subjectivity over the course of the Modern era. Each chapter details a different set of performance strategies designed to grant the subject a stable sense of self-identity, and each explores the fallout from the ultimate failure of these strategies to offer the subject a fixed and enduring image of itself. The conclusion examines the implications of this failure for new Postmodern conceptions of subjectivity and poses questions about the use of performance in the self-fashioning of future generations.

Between the 1890s and the 1930s, advancements in communication and travel encouraged widespread international cultural exchange, and Americans increasingly came into contact with Russian culture and theatrical performance. A number of factors, including emigration from Russia, world war, revolutionary activities in both Russia and the United States, and developments in modernism in the American theatre influenced the way those performances were received by American artists and audiences. Examining the work of impresarios, financiers, and the press as well as the artists themselves, Hohman demonstrates how a variety of Russian theatrical styles were introduced and incorporated into American theatre and dance.

Throughout her fiction, Willa Cather mentioned forty-three operas. References to opera appear in all but three of her twelve novels and in roughly half of her short stories. Despite a dearth of musical education, Cather produced astute writing about the genre beginning in her earliest criticism and continuing throughout her career. She counted opera stars among her close friends, and according to Edith Lewis, her companion throughout adulthood, the two women frequently visited the theater, even in the early days, when purchasing tickets to attend performances proved a financial sacrifice. Melding cultural history with thoughtful readings of her works and discussions of opera's complex place in turn-of-the-century America, David McKay Powell's Cather and Opera offers the first book-length study of what drew the writer so powerfully and repeatedly to the art form. With close attention to Cather's fiction and criticism, Powell posits that at the heart of both her work and the operatic corpus dwells an innate tension between high artistic ideals and popular acceptance, often figured as a clash between compositional integrity and raw, personal emotion. Considering her connection to opera in both historical and intertextual terms, Cather and Opera investigates what operatic references mean in Cather's writing, along with what the opera represented to her throughout her life.

This book examines Field Day's cultural intervention into the Northern Irish 'Troubles' through individual readings of the fourteen plays produced by the enterprise. It argues that at the heart of this project were performances, in a variety of different forms and registers, of an ethics of translation that disrupted notions of Irish identity.

Because of its contemporary coverage, this volume is particularly interesting and useful. . . . Reference collections that deal with theater questions could find it a good source even without its two predecessor volumes, but the set as a whole is recommended. "Choice"

An outstanding reference collection is completed with the publication of DurhaM's "American Theatre Companies, 1931-1986," an indispensable guide to an aspect of American theatre not covered elsewhere. The American theatre has undergone a process of decentralization and the focus has shifted from Broadway, once the proving ground for all nationally known theatre talent, to fine regional theatres across the nation. This volume surveys the fifty-year period in which this transformation occurred. The work consists of seventy-eight entries that profile a wide range of types of theatre companies including art theatres, units of the Federal Theatre project, workers' theatre, experimental theatre groups, ethnic theatre groups, children's theatre companies, and regional repertory companies, large and small. The Profiles section contains information-packed narratives from both published and unpublished sources that describe, analyze, and evaluate management policies, facilities, personnel, and repertories of these organizations. Each entry contains an extensive list of key personnel, including managers, designers, actors, and actresses, as well as plays that company produced. A bibliography of sources and a guide to archival resources for further study follows each entry. Two additional appendices are devoted to chronological and state-by-state listings of theatre companies. The volume concludes with an index of personal names and play titles.

This important resource should be a part of every university's reference collection. It will be consulted by students and scholars of theatre and drama, American history, American popular culture, and American social and cultural history, as will its companion volumes "American Theatre Companies, 1749-1887" (Greenwood Press, 1986) and "American Theatre Companies, 1888-1930" (Greenwood Press, 1987).

David Garrick played over 90 roles on the British stage as well as writing plays, songs, and innumerable letters. As a theatrical manager he watched over the Drury Lane theater for 29 seasons.

"Drama and the Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century England" is the first book-length study of the relationship between early modern drama and sacramental ritual and theology. The book examines a range of dramatic forms, including morality plays, Tudor interludes and the Elizabethan professional stage. Offering new insights into the religious practices on which early modern subjectivity is founded, David Coleman both uncovers neglected texts and documents, and offers radical new ways of reading canonical Renaissance plays.

Comedy has undergone a seismic shift over the past quarter century: from star powered stand-up comics to an ensemble-fueled style marked by support, trust, and collaborative creativity. This shift is mainly due to the long form improvisational theatre structure known as the Harold. The form's philosophies serve as the bedrock for the majority of the most significant comedic performers, writers, and directors of the past quarter-century who are transforming the way peformers and audiences make, view, and interpret comedy. This book examines the development of the Harold and the ways in which it has helped transform American comedy, examining the tensions and evolutions that led to the Harold's creation at ImprovOlympic (now iO) and following it through its use in contemporary comedic filmmaking.