Unlocking potential with the best learning and research solutions

Look Inside Shakespeare's Workplace

Shakespeare's Workplace
Essays on Shakespearean Theatre

Author: Andrew Gurr, University of Reading

Date Published: June 2022
availability: Available
format: Paperback
isbn: 9781316618271

Rate & review

Paperback

Add to wishlist

Other available formats:
Hardback, eBook

Looking for an examination copy?

This title is not currently available for examination. However, if you are interested in the title for your course we can consider offering an examination copy. To register your interest please contact [email protected] providing details of the course you are teaching.

Description

Contents

Resources

Courses

About the Authors

Shakespeare was easily the most inventive writer using the English language. His plays give us intricacies of vocabulary and usage that have enriched us immeasurably. This book provides a series of analytical essays on the marginalia relating to the plays. Each of them is a searching and authoritative account, packed with details, of some of the more peculiar conditions under which Shakespeare and his peers composed their playbooks. Among the essays are two completely new contributions. Altogether they reveal fresh details about the input of the playing companies, playhouses, individual players and even their controller, the Revels Office, to the complex fragments that we now have of the Shakespearean world. Gurr examines Shakespeare's own choice between playwriting and poetry, the requirements of working in a playhouse that wraps itself around the stage, and its impact on the creation of such figures as Henry V, Shylock, Isabella, King Lear and Coriolanus.
- Presents a collection of work that focuses on some of the more peculiar theatre conditions in which Shakespeare worked
- Features wide ranging subject matter, from Shakespearean audiences to theatre building practices
- Contains two previously unpublished essays from Andrew Gurr, 'Accommodating the Revels Office' and 'Headless Coriolanus'
Read more
Reviews & endorsements
'Andrew Gurr has spent his career illuminating what he calls the 'dark penumbra' around every early modern play … Gurr’s approach, which has influenced so much of the field, moves from specific pragmatic or historical questions (‘were there three doors for players to enter the stage, or only two? What might the first players have done to cope with the Globe’s two large structural pillars on the stage?') to the much broader 'whether the ear or the eye had priority in early modern theatre?' Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, The Times Literary Supplement

Customer reviews

Not yet reviewed
Be the first to review

Log in to review

Review was not posted due to profanity
×

, create a review

(If you're not , sign out)

Please enter the right captcha value

Please enter a star rating.

Your review must be a minimum of 12 words.

How do you rate this item?

Reviews must contain at least 12 words about the product.

×

Product details
- Date Published: June 2022
- format: Paperback
- isbn: 9781316618271
- length: 294 pages
- dimensions: 228 x 151 x 16 mm
- weight: 0.443kg
- availability: Available
Table of Contents
List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Note on the text
1. Introduction
2. Henry Carey's peculiar letter
3. Venues on the verges: London's theatre government between 1594 and 1614
4. Three reluctant patrons and early Shakespeare
5. The great divide of 1594
6. The choice between plays and poems
7. Accommodating the Revels Office
8. The war of 1614–18: Jacobean absolutism, local authority, and a crisis of overproduction
9. Metatheatre and the fear of playing
10. Why was the Globe round?
11. The general and the caviar: learned audiences in the early theatre
12. Headless Coriolanus
13. Rethinking Shylock
14. Measure for Measure's hoods and masks: the Duke, Isabella, and liberty
15. The transforming of Henry V
16. Headgear as a paralinguistic signifier in King Lear
'The cause is in my will': a bibliography.
Look Inside
Author
Andrew Gurr, University of Reading
Andrew Gurr is Professor Emeritus at the University of Reading, and for the past thirty years has been Director of Research in London for the Globe Theatre. His books on the subject of theatre history include The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642 (Cambridge, 1992), now in its fourth edition, The Shakespearean Playing Companies (1996), Staging in Shakespeare's Theatres (with Mariko Ichikawa, 2000), Playgoing in Shakespeare's London (Cambridge, 2004), The Shakespeare Company 1594–1642 (Cambridge, 2010), and Shakespeare's Opposites: The Admiral's Company, 1594-1625 (Cambridge, 2012). He has also edited the New Cambridge Shakespeare editions of King Richard II (1984) and King Henry V (1992).