The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642

by Andrew Gurr

The Shakespearean Stage is the only authoritative book that describes all the main features of the original staging of Shakespearean drama in one volume: the acting companies and their acting styles, the playhouses, the staging and the audiences. For twenty years it has been hailed as not only the most reliable but the liveliest and most entertaining overview of Shakespearean theater available to students. For this third edition Professor Gurr has substantially revised the book, bringing it right up to date and incorporating many new discoveries, including those of the archaeologists at the sites of the Rose and Globe theaters. The invaluable appendix, which lists all the plays performed at a particular playhouse, the playing company and date of performance, has also been revised and rearranged.

Genres: Shakespeare, Nonfiction, History, Theatre, Drama, Reference, Criticism

296 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

Reviews

[Julie Bozza · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very thorough consideration of what we know, surmise, or can't know about how plays were staged across this period. Inevitably some chapters will interest a reader more than others, but I can highly recommend the Introduction to all, for a fascinating overview.

[Brian Willis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite simply, the best book on original practices for Shakespeare's theatrical era. If you have ever asked the question, "What would it be like to be in the theatre as these original Renaissance plays were performed?", short of a time machine, this book will place you there. Andrew Gurr is the foremost expert on these matters, and he has updated to a 4th edition with all of the latest research and speculation on the theatrical world of Bankside. He covers the companies, the actors, the acting styles, the playwrights, the issue of "directing", managing a company, finances, the physical structure of the playhouses, the personalities involved, the audiences, the theatrical culture, censorship and authorization to perform, and the staging of performances within those physical spaces. Essential to anybody interested in English Renaissance theatrical performance and destined to remain the benchmark in the field for years to come.

[Sahani Perera, The Book Sherpa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review in brief: An instrumental writing which explicate Shakespeare’s origin as an individual with belief, values, and personal experiences. It offers the reader a scholarly approach to view this 16th century author through the social customs, economics, politics, or religion that prevailed during that era. This book is much applicable for the intelligentsia, and scholars with a keen interest in specializing Shakespeare and the 16th century.

[Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

I managed to put this into a comment space and not a review so I moved it--not new, just in the right spot.

A lot could go wrong for an impresario who owned a building where plays were performed, including the one owned by Richard Burbage and grandly named the Theatre after a Latin term for a world atlas (all the world's a theatrum). The building could burn and most of them, constructed of wood and thatch and lit by candles, did burn. The neighbors might complain and if they were wealthy gentry and lower nobility they would be listened to. They might complain about prostitutes and cut-purses loitering, about rowdy crowds of idle apprentices who got in for a penny or even about the crush of carriages when dandies and their ladies were dropped off and picked up. The landlord might not renew your lease and decided that he would seize the timbers that made up your building. Riots could bread out in the audience; the plague could cause all public gatherings to halt for a year; moral scolds could denounce you from the pulpit.

So it wasn't easy but there was enough money to be made--and some made a lot--to keep scores of poets working to provide verses for the various stages in and just outside of London. The authors--Shakespeare, Marlowe, Steele, Fletcher, Decker, the whole lot of them--wanted to be know as poets and not playwrights. If you supported yourself by writing plays you might be a cut above Snug the Joiner while if you wrote verse that could be read silently or proclaimed from the stage you might be on your way to being a gentleman. Successful poets might earn as much in a year as a member of the gentry did from his landholdings, a pretty penny indeed. Unsuccessful ones looked for another line of work. Owners bought plays from poets and had them done by their hired companies. One dud was a problem, a second on in a season might be a disaster for everyone involved.

Gurr knows Elizabethan and Stuart London as well as anyone. His prose in sometime quirky but always readable and informative.

Highly recommended.

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a textbook. Although I’ve spent years studying theater (and Shakespeare more specifically), I had never been assigned anything as comprehensive and essential as this. I wish I had read it before I had become familiar with the Elizabethan era and its principal dramatists.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that this is the kind of book students at Ivy League universities read as a matter of course; diligent, professional surveys that are rooted in the best historiographic evidence at hand. Most of my education consisted of teachers assigning me to do my own research and, well, figure it out. There’s the library. Go.

Gurr has written a long, dense, detail-rich book on the Shakespearean stage that pretty much covers everything most people would ever need (or want) to know. There’s no end to Shakespeare scholarship, of course, but this book provides a foundation that is more than adequate—particularly for anyone interested in working in the field (either as an academic or as an artist). It’s not a book about the textual business of the plays themselves, or about the larger world within which the plays were first produced. It’s a book about stage practices; what we know and what we don’t.

[Nishtha Sachdeva · Rating 4 out of 5]

marvellous book to be read over

[Jiang Yuqi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading was such a joyful journey

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

It seems to me that the phrase "casual brilliance" is a bit of a misnomer. After all, we now know that mastery takes roughly 10,000 hours of repetition to achieve, and that nothing is casual that is laborious. That said, I cannot think of a more apt word to describe Andy Gurr's writing. It is profound. It is brilliant. It is trenchant. It is funny. And yes, it is casual. Gurr's book is the perfect example of what scholarship should be - thorough and correct, yet free of the pretense and bombast to which most scholarship is heir. It is not only that this book contains a behemoth amount of important information; it contains a standard against which all scholarship should try (and likely fail) to measure itself. I cannot find adequate praise for the beauty of this book. The Shakespearean Stage may be a work of scholarship, but it reads like a thoughtful, beautiful story.

[Vincent D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thorough, insightful, and an entertaining dive into an important period for English theatre. Gurr makes the topic of Renaissance playhouses and audiences a more tangible topic. My only complaint is that he has a tendency to spiral a bit too far down the Shakespearean Stage rabbit hole. Pedantic during the chapter devoted to company politics and period economics, but re-captures interest when he discusses stage practices and print culture. This study makes for an excellent companion to plays like The Knight of the Burning Pestle and The Spanish Tragedy, along with most other plays from the time period.

[Albie]

The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642 by Andrew Gurr (1992)