The English Stage
A History of Drama and Performance

This wide-ranging study follows the history of drama through its many changes in style and convention from medieval times to the present day.

John L. Styan (Author)

9780521556361, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 13 July 1996

452 pages, 20 b/w illus.
21.6 x 14 x 2.6 cm, 0.57 kg

"...very informative....provides extremely helpful accounts of the various nonverbal aspects of dramatic performance in the early modern theater." Studies in English Literature

The English Stage tells the story of drama through its many changes in style and convention from medieval times to the present day. With a wide sweep of coverage, John Styan analyses the key features of staging, including early street theatre and public performance, the evolution of the playhouse and the private space, and the pairing of theory and stagecraft in the works of modern dramatists. He focuses on the conventions by which a playwright, actors and their audience create the phenomenon of theatre and the way such conventions have changed over time. Styan can be considered among a small number of influential scholars who have helped to develop theatre history from its origins in literary studies into an independent and respected field. From the vantage point of a lifetime's study he examines and illustrates the multitude of factors which have brought and continue to bring plays to life.

1. Medieval drama, secular and religious
2. The early morality play
3. The Tudor interlude
4. The Elizabethan theatre
5. Marlowe's stagecraft
6. Shakespeare's practice
7. Ben Jonson's comic stagecraft
8. The court masque
9. Jacobean experiment: exploring the form
10. The Restoration stage
11. The Georgian theatre
12. The Victorian theatre
13. Bernard Shaw and his stage practice
14. Twentieth-century developments and variations.

Subject Areas: Theatre studies [AN]