This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare in Performance, Then and Now - Couverture rigide

Bevington, David

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0226044785 ISBN 13 : 9780226044781

Editeur : University of Chicago Press, 2007

Synopsis

Many readers first encounter Shakespeare's plays in a book rather than a theater. Yet Shakespeare was through and through a man of the stage. So what do we lose when we leave Shakespeare the practitioner behind, and what do we learn when we think about his plays as dramas to be performed?

David Bevington answers these questions with This Wide and Universal Theater, which explores how Shakespeare's plays were produced both in his own time and in succeeding centuries. Making use of historical documents and the play scripts themselves, Bevington brings Shakespeare's original stagings to life. He explains how the Elizabethan playhouse conveyed a sense of place using minimal scenery, from the Forest of Arden in As You Like It to the tavern in Henry IV, Part I. Moving beyond Shakespeare's lifetime, Bevington shows the prodigious lengths to which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century companies went to produce spectacular effects, from flying witches in Macbeth to terrifying storms punctuating King Lear. To bring the book into the present, Bevington considers recent productions on both stage and screen, when character and language have taken precedence over spectacle. This volume brings a lifetime of study to bear on a remarkably underappreciated aspect of Shakespeare's art.

"An eminent Shakespeare scholar and author, Bevington offers a concise, lucid, and unique overview of the history of Shakespeare in various modes of performance, from stage to film to television."--Choice

"Even veteran Shakespeareans will profit from the varied reminders of how important performance and staging have always been to the interpretation of the plays."--Renaissance Quarterly

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

David Bevington (1931-2019) was the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where he taught since 1967. He was an influential scholar of Renaisance drama, through such books as From Mankind to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in the Popular Drama of Tudor England, Tudor Drama and Politics: A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning, and Action Is Eloquence: Shakespeare's Language of Gesture. He was also the editor of the twenty-nine volumes of The Bantam Shakespeare and The Complete Works of Shakespeare, as well as of The Cambridge Edition of The Works of Ben Jonson.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University of Chicago Press
• Date d'édition: 2007
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0226044785
• ISBN 13: 9780226044781
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 256
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible