Shakespeare's Workplace
Essays on Shakespearean Theatre

Andrew Gurr's work offers the best access to the original Shakespearean theatre. This is a selection of his key essays.

Andrew Gurr (Author)

9781316618271, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 23 June 2022

294 pages
22.8 x 15.1 x 1.6 cm, 0.443 kg

'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

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Shakespeare studies & criticism [DSGS], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Literary essays [DNF]