Performing Early Modern Drama Today

Recent performances of early modern plays are analysed in essays by practitioners and academics, featuring critical, pedagogical and practical approaches.

Pascale Aebischer (Edited by), Kathryn Prince (Edited by)

9780521193351, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 11 October 2012

262 pages, 5 b/w illus.
23.1 x 15 x 2.3 cm, 0.52 kg

"This is an important and long-overdue book. As the contributors make clear, performance of non-Shakespearean early modern drama has been going on steadily for more than a century, yet every production is considered new and every work 'rediscovered.' This is due in large measure to the lack of consistent archiving and scholarly response....This collection goes a long way toward addressing these problems, not only with uniformly excellent essays, which cover a wide range of approaches, but also amazingly robust appendixes listing performances.....Summing up: Essential."
--Choice

While much attention has been devoted to performances of Shakespeare's plays today, little has been focused on modern productions of the plays of his contemporaries, such as Marlowe, Webster and Jonson. Performing Early Modern Drama Today offers an overview of early modern performance, featuring chapters by academics, teachers and practitioners, incorporating a variety of approaches. The book examines modern performances in both Britain and America and includes interviews with influential directors, close analysis of particular stage and screen adaptations and detailed appendices of professional and amateur productions. Chapters examine intellectual and practical opportunities to analyse what is at stake when the plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries are performed by ours. Whether experimenting with original performance practices or contemporary theatrical and cinematic ones, productions of early modern drama offer an inspiring, sometimes unusual, always interesting perspective on the plays they interpret for modern audiences.

1. Introduction Pascale Aebischer and Kathryn Prince
2. The early modern repertory and the performance of Shakespeare's contemporaries Lucy Munro
3. The seeds of time: student theatre and the drama of Shakespeare's contemporaries Jeremy Lopez
4. The performance of early modern drama at Shakespeare's Globe Farah Karim-Cooper
5. Shakespeare's contemporaries at the Royal Shakespeare Company Coen Heijes
6. The actors' renaissance season at the Blackfriars Playhouse Jacquelyn Bessell
7. Dido, Queen of Carthage: site-specific Marlowe Rebecca McCutcheon and Sarah Thom
8. 'A freshly creepy reality': Jacobean tragedy and realist acting on the contemporary stage Roberta Barker
9. Early modern drama on screen Pascale Aebischer
10. Letting the dead come out to dance: an embodied and spatial approach to teaching early modern drama Jonathan Heron, Nicholas Monk and Paul Prescott
11. Professional productions of early modern drama, 1960–2010 Karin Brown
12. Performances of early modern drama at academic institutions since 1909 Jeremy Lopez
13. Performances of early modern plays by amateur and student groups since 1887 Jeremy Lopez.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]