Shakespeare's Theatres and the Effects of Performance

Arden Shakespeare Library

by Farah Karim-Cooper (editor), Tiffany Stern (Editor)

How did Elizabethan and Jacobean acting companies create their visual and aural effects? What materials were available to them and how did they influence staging and writing? What impact did the sensations of theatre have on early modern audiences? How did the construction of the playhouses contribute to technological innovations in the theatre? What effect might these innovations have had on the writing of plays?

Shakespeare's Theatres and The Effects of Performance is a landmark collection of essays by leading international scholars addressing these and other questions to create a unique and comprehensive overview of the practicalities and realities of the theatre in the early modern period.

Genres: Shakespeare, Nonfiction, Essays, Academic

320 pages, Paperback

First published February 28, 2013

Reviews

[Michael P. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fresh and fascinating study of the interactions of early modern English plays and the stages for which they were written. There is too much fresh material here to enumerate. You must read this book.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant book, especially for someone like me who tends to encounter Shakespeare on the page, or maybe on screen.

What Karim-Cooper, Stern and their colleagues do is remind us of the physicality of the theatre of 1600 or so: the sights, the smells, the props, the auditory experience, the physical spaces, and how that fitted into the reality-tunnel that Shakespeare and his near-contemporaries experienced.

Particularly interesting for me were Bruce Smith's exploration of the inward, the outward and the toward, and Holly Dugan's explorations of the smells of renaissance theatre, but I suspect anyone wanting to understand Shakespearean "context" would get something fascinating from this book.

[Jiang Yuqi · Rating 5 out of 5]

80% of the chapters are ace.
Highly recommended.

[Julie Bozza · Rating 4 out of 5]

Awesome Christmas present from my awesome sis.