Spaces of Performance: Shakespeare's Playhouse Inside Out

This lively and engaging study offers fresh readings of some of Shakespeare's most canonical plays, illuminating the ways stagecraft and language of movement create meaning for us as playgoers. Including discussions of other plays, the book carefully explores A Midsummer Night's Dream, Richard II, Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Tempest to develop a better understanding of how implicit stagecraft elements work in concert with explicit rhetorical patterns in the plays. The discussions engage with materials from Shakespeare's time, present revelatory close readings of Shakespeare's language, and demonstrate how these continually popular texts engage all of us in making meaning.

Cahiers Élisabéthains, 2014

Literature Compass, 2004

Recent research on patronage, performance and playing spaces in early modern England allows us to reconfigure our understanding of its drama: not only that of the commercial metropolitan theatres, but performances at court, in the universities, in the provinces, and in great houses. This article explores how play-texts were informed by their intended playing spaces and highlights the wealth of texts, particularly by women, available outside the early modern commercial arena. 5 Robert Weimann,

Shakespeare Quarterly, 2015

This reads well not only as a collection of essays, which is how many will probably encounter it, focusing on select chapters of specific interest, but also as a book, which is how I encountered it as a reviewer. Several of the contributors reference each other' s essays in a way that gives a unified feel to this diverse collection. The only fault I find with reading it as a book is the way that it slams shut after the final essay. The editors could have asked Andrew Gurr to provide an afterword instead of a preface, but I can understand the desire to front-load the benediction of such an important scholar. The collection consists of eleven essays divided into three sections. Much of the "cross-talk" that occurs in the volume happens across sections, which should give a sense of how well this group of essays hangs together. The first section is comprised of three essays on "The Fabric of Early Modern Theatres." Tiffany Stern leads off by investigating how Shakespeare uses the theater itself as a kind of prop. Her argument is that Shakespeare sees the physical environs of the theater not as something to be transcended but rather as something to be knowingly and enthusiastically incorporated into the experience of the work. Names of physical spaces in the theater refer not only to the immediate physical object but also to that object' s wider symbolic meaning in the culture at large. Heaven and Hell are the names of supernatural locations as well as of specific sites in the theater, and a reference to one site (say, Heaven: supernatural) will conjure up the associations of the other (Heaven: theater). For example, the posts that support this theatrical Heaven are not just an architectural feature-they also connect with the audience' s extratheatrical experience of public punishments. Stern reminds us that for early modern audiences the Heavens are the heavens, a post is a post, the tiring-house is a house, the balcony is a balcony. These references are accretive, not substitutive in nature. It is a new way of reading early modern metatheater, and a strong opening to a strong collection of essays. Next, Gwilym Jones walks us through storm scenes in Julius Caesar and The Tempest, showing how the language of these scenes interacts with and reinforces sound and lighting effects in the very different environments of the Globe and Blackfriars theaters. In the final essay of the section, Nathalie Rivere de Carles canvases the many semantic properties of the curtains deployed throughout Elizabethan and Jacobean theaters, from framing effects to their role in discovery. A highlight of the essay is her reading of the arras in Hamlet, a prop that undergoes a metamorphosis from static

Playing and Playgoing ed. Simon Smith and Emma Whipday (Cambridge: CUP), 186-204, 2022

‘Theatre’ and ‘playhouse’ are two words often used interchangeably nowadays. In the early modern period, however, each word was known to be different in meaning, intent, and reach. While ‘theatre’ signified a classical space with a visual focus (it had its origins in the Greek verb θεᾶσθαι, ‘to see’), ‘playhouse’ signified a locus of all-purpose entertainment (it can be roughly translated ‘storeplace of fun’). This chapter consequently has two parts: ‘theatre’ and ‘playhouse’. It first considers the elevated, classical, and highly visual credentials of ‘theatre’, asking how that word is used in early modern drama and why the spectators might also be known, collectively, as a ‘theatre’. It then investigates ‘house’+‘play’, exploring how many internal ‘houses’ – tiring house, domestic house, music house, tap house, and house of office – made up the single playhouse space; and asking why the audience there was – and still is – known as ‘the house’. It turns finally to the way ‘play’ stands for a variety of onstage ‘fun’ – swordfights, puppet shows, acrobatic displays, wit-battles – as well as offstage sales of food, drink, books, and ballads, in addition to text. Given that neither ‘theatre’ nor ‘playhouse’ are words that focus on staged ‘drama’, its question, throughout, is what they reveal about the priorities of early modern performance spaces.

Shakespeare’s complexity, and his profoundest ‘metatheatre’, this chapter suggests, is angled to the ways in which the physical reality of the stage met the fictions enacted upon it. Exploring the meaning of stage space as location and prop, this chapter argues that Shakespeare used his theatre’s construction itself as a prime locus of imaginative power. As few structural features beyond that of the stage itself have been written about, the argument looks at what surrounded the stage from below (the ‘hell’ with its ‘trap’), from above (the ‘heaven[s]’), on the stage level itself (‘earth’ and its ‘pillars’), and from behind (the ‘scene’ with its ‘balcony’ and ‘ladders’; and the ‘tiring-house’ with its stage ‘bell’). In doing so, it investigates the various statements, metaphors and analogies the stage made for and about itself, and their interpretative ramifications for Shakespeare.

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.

Comparative Drama, 2015

Reviewed by LEEDS BARROLL Both of these works concern the early modern London stage, Moving Shakespeare Indoors being a collection of articles on the Blackfriars theaters, and Griffith' s study dealing extensively with the fortunes of one company and its play

Actors, theatres, playgoers and court vs playhouse in the time of Shakespeare

2007