Alan Dessen focuses on the playtexts used for staging Shakespeare's plays, from almost three hundred productions of the last twenty five years. Dessen examines the process of rescripting--when directors make cuts to streamline the playscript, save running time, etc., and rewriting--when more extensive changes are made. He assesses what is lost and gained by rescripting, and the demands of presenting to contemporary audiences words targeted at players, playgoers, and playhouses that no longer exist. The results are of interest to theatrical professionals and historians.

In this rigorous investigation of the staging of Shakespeare's plays, Alan Dessen wrestlers with three linked questions: (1) what did a playgoer at the original production actually see? (2) how can we tell today? and (3) so what? His emphasis is upon images and onstage effects (e.g. the sick-chair, early entrances, tomb scenes) easily obscured or eclipsed today. The basis of his analysis is his survey of the stage directions in the approximately 600 English professional plays performed before 1642. From such widely scattered bits of evidence emerges a vocabulary of the theatre shared by Shakespeare, his theatrical colleagues, and his playgoers, in which the terms (e.g. vanish, as in ..., as from ..., "Romeo opens the tomb") often do not admit of neat dictionary definitions but can be glossed in terms of options and potential meanings. To explore such terms, along with various costumes and properties (keys, trees, coffins, books), is to challenge unexamined assumptions that underlie how Shakespeare is read, edited, and staged today.

Alan Dessen focuses on the playtexts used for staging Shakespeare's plays, from almost three hundred productions of the last twenty five years. Dessen examines the process of rescripting--when directors make cuts to streamline the playscript, save running time, etc., and rewriting--when more extensive changes are made. He assesses what is lost and gained by rescripting, and the demands of presenting to contemporary audiences words targeted at players, playgoers, and playhouses that no longer exist. The results are of interest to theatrical professionals and historians.

This dictionary, the first of its kind, defines and explains over 900 terms found in the stage directions of plays for the professional stage written by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The authors draw on a database of over 22,000 stage directions drawn from around 500 plays. Each entry defines a term, gives examples of how it is used, cites additional instances, and gives cross-references to other relevant entries. This will be an indispensable work of reference for scholars, historians, directors and actors.

This Dictionary, the first of its kind, defines and explains over 900 terms found in the stage directions of English professional plays from the 1580s to the early 1640s. The terms are drawn primarily from surviving printed and manuscript sources, and from the plays performed on the London stage, by both minor and major dramatists. The authors draw on a database of over 22,000 stage directions drawn from around 500 such plays. Each entry offers a definition, gives examples of how the term is used, cites additional instances, and gives cross-references to other relevant entries. Terms defined range from the obvious and common to the obscure and rare, including actions, places, objects, sounds and descriptions. The authors have also provided a user's guide and an introduction which describes the scope and rationale of the volume. This will be an indispensable work of reference for scholars, historians, directors and actors.

Alan Dessen draws on stage directions from hundreds of plays (from 1425 to 1642) to investigate what a playgoer may actually have seen when watching the original production of Hamlet or Macbeth. He argues for the presence of a shared vocabulary among playwrights, players and playgoers geared to a sense of theater that is easily obscured or eclipsed today. Chapters are devoted to such things as early entrances, the sick chair, vanish effects, tomb scenes, and to the staging of places such as a forest, a shop, a study or a house.

Alan Dessen samples about four hundred manuscripts and printed plays to record the original staging conventions of the age of Shakespeare. After studying the stage properties, movements and configurations implicit in recurrent phrases and stage directions, he concludes that Elizabethan spectators, less concerned with realism than later generations, were used to receiving a kind of theatrical shorthand transmitted by the actors from the playwright. Professor Dessen both describes this shorthand (e.g. the use of nightgowns, boots and dishevelled hair) and draws attention to the implications of his findings for modern interpreters, addressing not only critics and teachers but also editors, actors and directors.

With emphasis on the distinctive effects possible on the Elizabethan stage and the evidence concerning stagecraft found in the late morality plays, Dessen focuses on theatrical techniques not readily apparent to the eye of the modern reader. He stresses that, to appreciate the richness of Elizabethan drama, the modern reader must bring to the text the interpretive skills of the critic, the theatrical point of view of the director, and the contextual knowledge of the historian.
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