Shakespeare's Double Plays
Dramatic Economy on the Early Modern Stage

The first comprehensive study of how Shakespeare designed his plays to suit his playing company.

Brett Gamboa (Author)

9781108405010, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 23 June 2022

301 pages, 10 b/w illus. 40 tables
22.8 x 15 x 1.5 cm, 0.45 kg

'Shakespeare's Double Plays is essential reading for scholars and students of theater history and early modern performance … Gamboa has written an important book for theater historians, students of theater, actors, and directors.' Farah Karim-Cooper, Renaissance Quarterly

In the first comprehensive study of how Shakespeare designed his plays to suit his playing company, Brett Gamboa demonstrates how Shakespeare turned his limitations to creative advantage, and how doubling roles suited his unique sense of the dramatic. By attending closely to their dramaturgical structures, Gamboa analyses casting requirements for the plays Shakespeare wrote for the company between 1594 and 1610, and describes how using the embedded casting patterns can enhance their thematic and theatrical potential. Drawing on historical records, dramatic theory, and contemporary performance this innovative work questions received ideas about early modern staging and provides scholars and contemporary theatre practitioners with a valuable guide to understanding how casting can help facilitate audience engagement. Supported by an appendix of speculative doubling charts for plays, illustrations, and online resources, this is a major contribution to the understanding of Shakespeare's dramatic craft.

Introduction
1. 'Improbable fictions': Shakespeare's plays without the plays
2. Versatility and verisimilitude on sixteenth-century stages
3. Doubling in The Winter's Tale
4. Dramaturgical directives and Shakespeare's cast size
5. Doubling in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet
6. 'What, are they children?': Reconsidering Shakespeare's boy actors
7. Doubling in Twelfth Night and Othello
Epilogue: ragozine and Shakespearean substitution
Appendix: doubling roles in Shakespeare's plays.

Subject Areas: Shakespeare studies & criticism [DSGS], Literary studies: plays & playwrights [DSG], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Theatre direction & production [ANF]