Moving Shakespeare Indoors: Performance and Repertoire in the Jacobean Playhouse

Description

Shakespeare's company, the King's Men, played at the Globe, and also in an indoor theatre, the Blackfriars. The year 2014 witnessed the opening of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, based on seventeenth-century designs of an indoor London theatre and built within the precincts of the current Globe on Bankside. This volume, edited by Andrew Gurr and Farah Karim-Cooper, asks what prompted the move to indoor theatres, and considers the effects that more intimate staging, lighting and music had on performance and repertory. It discusses what knowledge is required when attempting to build an archetype of such a theatre, and looks at the effects of the theatre on audience behaviour and reception. Exploring the ways in which indoor theatre shaped the writing of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the late Jacobean and early Caroline periods, this book will find a substantial readership among scholars of Shakespeare and Jacobean theatre history.

Andrew Gurr has taught at universities in New Zealand, England, Kenya and the USA. He spent twenty years as Director of Research at the Shakespeare Globe Centre, London. His academic books include Playgoing in Shakespeare's London (Cambridge, 1987), The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642 (Cambridge, 1992), The Shakespearian Playing Companies (1996), The Shakespeare Company 1594-1642 (2004), and Shakespeare's Opposites (Cambridge, 2009). Farah Karim-Cooper is Head of Higher Education and Research at Shakespeare's Globe and Visiting Research Fellow of King's College London. At the Globe, she is leading the research into the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, the new indoor Jacobean theatre. She is the author of Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama (2006), Shakespeare's Globe: A Theatrical Experiment (co-edited with Christie Carson, Cambridge, 2008), Shakespeare's Theatres and the Effects of Performance (co-edited with Tiffany Stern, 2013); and The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage (2016).

'Definitely a must-read for anyone studying theatre history or working on Jacobean drama.' Susan Elkin, The Stage '... a comprehensive and nuanced study of the Blackfriars. ... this elegant collection of essays sheds new light on how the material conditions of the Blackfriars may have influenced the ways in which plays were performed there ...' Joel Benabu, Comparative Drama