Performing Restoration Shakespeare (original) (raw)
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A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance
A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance, 2021
This short history of Shakespeare in global performance – from the reopening of London theatres upon the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 to our present multicultural day – provides a comprehensive overview of Shakespeare’s theatrical afterlife and introduces categories of analysis and understanding to make that afterlife intellectually meaningful. Written for both the advanced student and the practicing scholar, this work enables readers to situate themselves historically in the broad field of Shakespeare performance studies and equips them with analytical tools and conceptual frameworks for making their own contributions to the field.
Performing Restoration Shakespeare "Then" and "Now": A Case Study of Davenant's Macbeth
Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies , 2022
This article examines the enduring appeal and performance potential of Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare's plays, focusing on William Davenant's Macbeth (c.1664) as a case study. Drawing upon theatre history, literary criticism, and practice-based performance scholarship, the analysis explores: * The Necessity of Adaptation: How and why adaptations were crucial for the survival of Shakespeare's plays after the English Civil War, examining the impact of shifting theatrical tastes and the rise of musical and visual spectacle. * The Reception of Restoration Shakespeare: How seventeenth-century audiences responded to the revised texts, the emphasis on spectacle, and the innovations introduced by Restoration playwrights. * Modern Performance Practices: The challenges and triumphs of a professional production of Davenant's Macbeth at the Folger Theatre in Washington, D.C. (2018), and the resulting insights into the potential and pitfalls of staging Restoration Shakespeare today. The article advocates for a selective and adaptive approach to performing Restoration Shakespeare, emphasising the exploitation of musical and visual spectacle while carefully considering the revisions made to Shakespeare's original text. Keywords: Shakespeare, Restoration drama, Davenant, Macbeth, adaptation, performance history, theatre history, theatrical spectacle, early modern theatre, modern theatre practice, performance criticism, cultural history.
Shakespeare Association of America, New Orleans, 2016
Early modern drama studies tends to privilege first performances and publications, but reprints and revivals are essential to how we understand plays by Shakespeare and other dramatists as theatre historians and literary critics. Reprints and revivals might include new material, sometimes by new authors, which can vastly alter the way a play works, such as the painter scene in The Spanish Tragedy. The cultural climate of reprints and revivals might affect the way in which a play was received and understood. What might it have meant, for example, to see a performance of Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta in the 1620s, Marston’s The Malcontent in the 1630s, or even to read the 1655 edition of Beaumont and Fletcher’s A King and No King during the Interregnum? Revivals might involve a change of playhouse, theatre company, and repertory, and reprints a change of printing-house, publisher and printer, all of which were targeting new audiences and new readers. When Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle was first performed at Blackfriars by the Children of the Queen’s Revels, it was reputed to be a failure. In the 1613 first Quarto the publisher, Walter Burre, famously quipped that the audience failed to grasp its ‘priuy marke of Ironie’. However, when the play was next printed in 1635 by a different publisher, it bore the mark of an ostensibly successful revival by Queen Henrietta’s Men at the Phoenix on Drury Lane. What had changed? This seminar will explore the ways in which playwrights, acting companies and stationers renewed plays in early modern England, inviting papers on reprints, revivals and/or the relationship between them. The seminar will address a variety of questions. How do printed paratexts (e.g. commendatory verses, prefatory epistles, dedications) and theatrical paratexts (e.g. inductions, prologues, epilogues) represent and conceptualise new publications and new performances? How do we know when a play is revived? Do reprints and revivals of certain plays coincide, and if so, how is this significant? How do revivals complicate our understanding of repertory? How is the relationship between first and later performances/publications influenced by cultural and social shifts?
Early Modern Digital Review, 2021
The MIT Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive was created by the tireless work and personal collection of the Archive’s co-founder and co-director, Alexa Alice Joubin. It is a collaborative project that presents information about more than three hundred productions, shorter or longer videos (e.g., trailers) of over two hundred productions, and full-length videos of more than one hundred productions. It is a work in progress. :::: https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/emdr/article/view/37580
Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000)
Attention is often given to the performance of a text, but not to the shaping process behind that performance. The question of rehearsal is seldom confronted directly, though important textual moments - like revision - are often attributed to it. Whatismore, up until now, facts about theatrical rehearsal have been considered irrecoverable. In this groundbreaking new study, Tiffany Stern gathers together two centuries' worth of historical material which shows how actors received and responded to their parts, and how rehearsal affected the creation and revision of plays. This is the first history of the subject, from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth. It examines the nature and changing content of rehearsal, drawing on a mass of autobiographical, textual, and journalistic sources, and in so doing throws new light on textual revision and transforms accepted notions of Renaissance, Restoration, and eighteenth-century theatrical practice. Plotting theatrical change over time, this book will revolutionize the fields of textual and theatre history alike.
Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance for Arden Shakespeare, (London: Methuen, 2013)
How did Elizabethan and Jacobean acting companies create their visual and aural effects? What materials were available to them and how did they influence staging and writing? What impact did the sensations of theatre have on early modern audiences? How did the construction of the playhouses contribute to technological innovations in the theatre? What effect might these innovations have had on the writing of plays? Shakespeare's Theatres and The Effects of Performance is a landmark collection of essays by leading international scholars addressing these and other questions to create a unique and comprehensive overview of the practicalities and realities of the theatre in the early modern period.