BOYDELL & BREWER

Reimagining Shakespeare’s Playhouse

Early Modern Staging Conventions in the Twentieth Century

Joe Falocco

Juli 2010 · 200 S. · Geb. · 9781843842411 · GBP £ 50,00

Numerous attempts have been made in the modern and postmodern era to recreate the staging conventions of Shakespeare’s theatre, by directors from William Poel and Harley Granville Barker to Tyrone Guthrie, and, most recently, the founders of the New Globe. The work of these directors is examined within this volume, analysing their practical successes and failures; it also engages with the ideological critiques of early modern staging advanced by scholars such as W.B. Worthen and Ric Knowles. The author argues that rather than indulging in archaism for its own sake, the movement looked backward in a progressive attempt to address the challenges of the twentieth century. Such staging therefore provides, as George Bernard Shaw noted in connection to the work of William Poel over a century ago, a `picture of the past’ which is `really a picture of the future’. A conclusion to the book discusses the ongoing potential of early modern staging in the new millennium.
 

Dr Joe Falocco is Lecturer in English, Communication and Integrative Arts, Penn State Erie, The Behrend College.

`Provocative, very readable, and extremely widely researched; it will be an important intervention in many ongoing debates.’ Lucy Munro, Senior Lecturer in English, Keele University

Textual Cultures: Cultural Texts

Edited by Orietta Da Rold & Elaine Treharne

 Juli 2010 · 236 S. · Geb. · 9781843842392 · GBP £ 30,00

The dynamic fields of the history of the book and the sociology of the text are the areas this volume investigates, bringing together ten specially commissioned essays that between them demonstrate a range of critical and material approaches to medieval,early modern, and digital books and texts. They scrutinize individual medieval manuscripts to illustrate how careful re-reading of evidence permits a more nuanced apprehension of production, and reception across time; analyse metaphor for our understanding of the Byzantine book; examine the materiality of textuality from Beowulf to Pepys and the digital work in the twenty-first century; place manuscripts back into specific historical context; and re-appraise scholarly interpretation of significantperiods of manuscript and print production in the later medieval and early modern periods. All of these essays call for a new assessment of the ways in which we read books and texts, making a major contribution to book history, and illustrating how detailed focus on individual cases can yield important new findings.

Contributors: Elaine Treharne, Erika Corradini, Julia Crick, Orietta Da Rold, A.S.G. Edwards, Martin K. Foys, Whitney Anne Trettien, David L. Gants, Ralph Hanna, Robert Romanchuk, Margaret M. Smith, Liberty Stanavage.