Shakespeare's Workplace: Essays on Shakespearean Theatre
Cambridge University Press, 10/19/2017
EAN 9781107167841, ISBN10: 1107167841
Hardcover, 292 pages, 23.5 x 15.8 x 2 cm
Language: English
Shakespeare was easily the most inventive writer using the English language. His plays give us intricacies of vocabulary and usage that have enriched us immeasurably. This book provides a series of analytical essays on the marginalia relating to the plays. Each of them is a searching and authoritative account, packed with details, of some of the more peculiar conditions under which Shakespeare and his peers composed their playbooks. Among the essays are two completely new contributions. Altogether they reveal fresh details about the input of the playing companies, playhouses, individual players and even their controller, the Revels Office, to the complex fragments that we now have of the Shakespearean world. Gurr examines Shakespeare's own choice between playwriting and poetry, the requirements of working in a playhouse that wraps itself around the stage, and its impact on the creation of such figures as Henry V, Shylock, Isabella, King Lear and Coriolanus.
List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Note on the text
1. Introduction
2. Henry Carey's peculiar letter
3. Venues on the verges
London's theatre government between 1594 and 1614
4. Three reluctant patrons and early Shakespeare
5. The great divide of 1594
6. The choice between plays and poems
7. Accommodating the Revels Office
8. The war of 1614–18
Jacobean absolutism, local authority, and a crisis of overproduction
9. Metatheatre and the fear of playing
10. Why was the Globe round?
11. The general and the caviar
learned audiences in the early theatre
12. Headless Coriolanus
13. Rethinking Shylock
14. Measure for Measure's hoods and masks
the Duke, Isabella, and liberty
15. The transforming of Henry V
16. Headgear as a paralinguistic signifier in King Lear
'The cause is in my will'
a bibliography.