An introductory guide to "King Lear" in performance offering a scene-by-scene theatrically aware commentary, contextual documents, a brief history of the text and first performances, case studies of key productions, a survey of film and TV adaptations, a sampling of critical opinion and annotated further reading.

John Russell Brown is arguably the most influential scholar in the field of Shakespeare in performance. This collection brings together and makes accessible his most important writings across the past half-century or so. Ranging across space, words, audiences, directors and themes, the book maps John Russell Brown's search for a fuller understanding of Shakespeare's plays in performance. New introductory notes for each chapter give a fascinating insight into his critical and scholarly journey. Together the essays provide an authoritative and engaging account of how to study Shakespeare's plays as texts for performance. Drawing readers into a wide variety of approaches and debates, this book will be important and provocative reading for anyone studying Shakespeare or staging one of his plays.

A former Associate Director for London's National Theatre invites readers to behold the fuller meaning of Shakespearean text as played, inviting them to seek their insights in Shakespeare's natural habitat: the stage. Includes considerations of recent productions at the Hartford Stage, Theatre for a New Audience, and the New York Shakespeare Festival.

35 scenes from Shakespeare are presented in newly-edited texts, with notes which clarify meanings, topical references, puns, ambiguities, etc. A brief description of characters and situation prefaces each scene, and is followed by a commentary which discusses its major acting challenges and opportunities. Each scene has been chosen for its independent life requiring only the simplest of stage properties and the barest of spaces.

The Routledge Companion to Actors? Shakespeare is a window onto how today's actors contribute to the continuing life and relevance of Shakespeare's plays.

The process of acting is notoriously hard to document, but this volume reaches behind famous performances to examine the actors? craft, their development and how they engage with playtexts. Each chapter relies upon privilieged access to its subject to offer an unparalleled insight into contemporary practice.

This volume explores the techniques, interpretive approaches and performance styles of the following actors:

Simon Russell Beale, Sinead Cusack, Judi Dench, Kate Duchene, Colm Feore, Mariah Gale, John Harrell, Greg Hicks, Rory Kinnear, Kevin Kline, Adrian Lester, Marcelo Magni, Ian McKellen, Patrice Naiambana, Vanessa Redgrave, Piotr Semak, Anthony Sher, Jonathan Slinger, Kate Valk, Harriet Walter

This twin volume to The Routledge Companion to Directors? Shakespeare is an essential work for both actors and students of Shakespeare.

This comprehensive and well-informed study is also a work of detection and reappraisal. Each tragedy is considered both as a text and as a play to experience in performance. Shakespeare's engagement with this form of drama is followed step-by-step until its concluding years of intense activity. No theory of tragedy emerges, but rather an increasing ability to maintain and communicate a clear-eyed perception of a changing and often violent society in which action is stronger than words or conscious intention.

First published in 1957. This edition reprints the second edition of 1962. The originality, vitality and variety of Shakespeare's comedies do not suggest a writer at ease with a formula which works to his own satisfaction and the pleasure of his audience; against first impressions they suggest an artist seeking to express an idea which is always eluding a completely developed presentation. The second edition of this book contains an extensive new chapter on Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest.

First published in 1982. Macbeth exercises a strange influence over readers and theatre audiences: the words of the text offer no easy clue to meaning or significance and in dramatic structure the play is very different from other Shakespearean tragedies. Many kinds of study are needed in order to understand the tragedy of Macbeth and this book provides a wide range of studies that respect the individuality of the text and examine it from different viewpoints. Contents include: Themes and Structure; Characterization and Narrative, Visual Effects, Performance in the Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries; Historical and Political Background; Role of Witchcraft; Game Theory. Contributors include: John Russell Brown, Derek Russell Davis, Gareth Lloyd Evans, R A Foakes, Michael Goldman, Robin Grove, Peter Hall, Michael Hawkins, Brian Morris, D J Palmer, Marvin Rosenberg and Peter Stallybrass.

In his latest book, John Russell Brown sets out the grounds for a new and revealing way of studying Shakespeare's plays. By considering the entire theatrical event and not only what happens on stage, he takes his readers back to the major texts with a fuller understanding of their language and an enhanced view of a play's theatrical potential. Chapters on theatre-going, playscripts, acting, parts to perform, interplay, stage space, off-stage space, and the use of time all bring recent developments in Theatre Studies together with Shakespeare Studies.

First published in 1971, Drama and the Theatre with Radio, Film and Television is concerned with the nature of theatre as a subject for study and the ways of studying it. All its contributors have practical experience of staging plays for professional or student companies, or for both. Necessarily, attention is chiefly focused on the main elements of plays in performance in theatres, now and in the past. The chosen topics place more specialized studies in a wider context, because such a book as this needs, above all, to give an impression of general scope. It is intended for those aiming for a theatre career and for young students interested in theatre.

First published in 1957. This edition reprints the second edition of 1962. The originality, vitality and variety of Shakespeare's comedies do not suggest a writer at ease with a formula which works to his own satisfaction and the pleasure of his audience; against first impressions they suggest an artist seeking to express an idea which is always eluding a completely developed presentation. The second edition of this book contains an extensive new chapter on Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest.

The Routledge Companion to Directors' Shakespeare is a major collaborative book about plays in performance. Thirty authoritative accounts describe in illuminating detail how some of theatre's most talented directors have brought Shakespeare's texts to the stage. Each chapter has a revealing story to tell as it explores a new and revitalising approach to the most familiar works in the English language. A must-have work of reference for students of both Shakespeare and theatre, this book presents some of the most acclaimed productions of the last hundred years in a variety of cultural and political contexts. Each entry describes a director's own theatrical vision, and methods of rehearsal and production. These studies chart the extraordinary feats of interpretation and innovation that have given Shakespeare's plays enduring life in the theatre. Notable entries include: Ingmar Bergman * Peter Brook * Declan Donnellan * Tyrone Guthrie * Peter Hall * Fritz Kortner * Robert Lepage * Joan Littlewood * Ninagawa Yukio * Joseph Papp * Roger Planchon * Max Reinhardt * Giorgio Strehler * Deborah Warner * Orson Welles * Franco Zeffirelli

First published in 1982.
Macbeth exercises a strange influence over readers and theatre audiences: the words of the text offer no easy clue to meaning or significance and in dramatic structure the play is very different from other Shakespearean tragedies. Many kinds of study are needed in order to understand the tragedy of Macbeth and this book provides a wide range of studies that respect the individuality of the text and examine it from different viewpoints.
Contents include: Themes and Structure; Characterization and Narrative, Visual Effects, Performance in the Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries; Historical and Political Background; Role of Witchcraft; Game Theory.
Contributors include: John Russell Brown, Derek Russell Davis, Gareth Lloyd Evans, R A Foakes, Michael Goldman, Robin Grove, Peter Hall, Michael Hawkins, Brian Morris, D J Palmer, Marvin Rosenberg and Peter Stallybrass.

In the course of exploring the theatrical cultures of South and East Asia, eminent Shakespeareanist John Russell Brown developed some remarkable theories about the nature of performance, the state of Western 'Theatre' today, and the future potential of Shakespeare's plays.
In New Sites for Shakespeare he outlines his passionate belief in the power of theatre to reach mass audiences, based on his experiences of popular Asian performances. It is a personal polemic, but it is also a carefully argued and brilliantly persuasive study of the kind of theatrical experience Shakespeare's own contemporaries enjoyed.
This is a book which cannot be ignored by anyone who cares about the live performing arts today. Separate chapters consider staging, acting, improvisation, ceremonies and ritual, and an analysis of the experience of the audience is paramount throughout.

Theatre Design involves everything seen on stage: not only scenery but costumes, wigs, makeup, properties, lighting, sound, even the shape and material of the stage itself. Designers' Shakespeare presents and analyses the work of a half-dozen leading practitioners of this specialist art. By focusing specifically on their Shakespearean work, it also offers a fresh, exciting perspective on some of the best-known drama of all time. Shakespeare's plays offer an unusual range of opportunities to designers. As they were written for a theatre which gave no opportunity for scenic support or embellishment, designers are freed from any compulsion to imitate original practices. This has resulted in the extraordinarily diverse range of works presented in this volume, which considers among others the work of Josef Svoboda, Karl-Ernst Herrmann, Ming Cho Lee, Alison Chitty, Robert Wilson, Societas Raffaello Sanzio, Filter Theatre, Catherine Zuber, John Bury , Christopher Morley, Ralph Koltai and Sean Kenny. Designers' Shakespeare joins Actors' Shakespeare and Directors' Shakespeare as essential reading for lovers of Shakespeare from theatre-goers and students to directors and theatre designers.

Theatre Design involves everything seen on stage: not only scenery but costumes, wigs, makeup, properties, lighting, sound, even the shape and material of the stage itself. Designers' Shakespeare presents and analyses the work of a half-dozen leading practitioners of this specialist art. By focusing specifically on their Shakespearean work, it also offers a fresh, exciting perspective on some of the best-known drama of all time. Shakespeare's plays offer an unusual range of opportunities to designers. As they were written for a theatre which gave no opportunity for scenic support or embellishment, designers are freed from any compulsion to imitate original practices. This has resulted in the extraordinarily diverse range of works presented in this volume, which considers among others the work of Josef Svoboda, Karl-Ernst Herrmann, Ming Cho Lee, Alison Chitty, Robert Wilson, Societas Raffaello Sanzio, Filter Theatre, Catherine Zuber, John Bury , Christopher Morley, Ralph Koltai and Sean Kenny. Designers' Shakespeare joins Actors' Shakespeare and Directors' Shakespeare as essential reading for lovers of Shakespeare from theatre-goers and students to directors and theatre designers.

The evils of greed and ambition overwhelm love, innocence, and the bonds of kinship in this dark tragedy concerning the secret marriage of a noblewoman and a commoner. John Webster's great Jacobean drama detailing the fiendish schemes of two brothers who desire their wealthy sister's title and estates ends with a bloody and horrifying climax. A dynamic plot brimming with poetic lyricism, this provocative and profoundly original work will appeal to general readers, students, and teachers of drama and literature.

This is an authoritative and comprehensive guide to the history of theatre, ranging from Ancient Egyptian festivals to contemporary performance arts. Lavishly illustrated in black and white and colour throughout, this is the perfect book for theatre goer and student alike

Contributing Authors Include R. A. Foakes, Norman Sanders, Harold Brooks And Others.

Includes The Jacobean Shakespeare, Some Observations On The Construction Of The Tragedies By Maynard Mack; Ben Jonson And Jacobean Stagecraft By William A. Armstrong; Citizen Comedy And Domestic Drama By Arthur Brown; English Folly And Italian Vice, The Moral Landscape Of John Marston By G. K. Hunter; The World's Proportion, Jonson's Dramatic Poetry In Sejanus And Catiline By Geoffrey Hill; The Tempest On The Stage By David William; The Danger Not The Death, The Art Of John Fletcher By Philip Edwards; Middleton's Experiments With Comedy And Judgment By R. B. Mulryne; The White Devil And The Duchess Of Malfi By J. R. Mulryne; Chapman's Tragedies By Peter Ure.

This guide helps students navigate their reading of A.C. Bradley's classic text, while providing an important commentary on the value of Bradley's approach and how it can be adapted to present-day interests. John Russell Brown highlights the advantages of understanding Bradley's methods and major insights for any student of Shakespeare. The collection also gives students access, for the first time, to important passages from Bradley's "Oxford Lecturers on Poetry," alongside selections from "Shakespearean Tragedy."