Moving Shakespeare Indoors: Performance and Repertoire in the Jacobean Playhouse

Cambridge University Press
Edition: Reprint, 11/16/2017
EAN 9781108438759, ISBN10: 110843875X

Paperback, 308 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm
Language: English

Shakespeare's company, the King's Men, played at the Globe, and also in an indoor theatre, the Blackfriars. The year 2014 witnessed the opening of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, based on seventeenth-century designs of an indoor London theatre and built within the precincts of the current Globe on Bankside. This volume, edited by Andrew Gurr and Farah Karim-Cooper, asks what prompted the move to indoor theatres, and considers the effects that more intimate staging, lighting and music had on performance and repertory. It discusses what knowledge is required when attempting to build an archetype of such a theatre, and looks at the effects of the theatre on audience behaviour and reception. Exploring the ways in which indoor theatre shaped the writing of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the late Jacobean and early Caroline periods, this book will find a substantial readership among scholars of Shakespeare and Jacobean theatre history.

Introduction Andrew Gurr and Farah Karim-Cooper
Part I. The Context of Hard Evidence
1. Why the theatres changed John H. Astington
2. Practical evidence for a re-imagined indoor Jacobean theatre Jon Greenfield and Peter McCurdy
3. Documentary evidence for an indoor Jacobean theatre Oliver Jones
4. Continuities and innovations in staging Mariko Ichikawa
Part II. Materiality Indoors
5. 'A ruinous monastery'
the Second Blackfriars playhouse as a place of nostalgia Tiffany Stern
6. 'When torchlight made an artificial noon'
light and darkness in the indoor Jacobean theatre Martin White
7. Acoustic and visual practices indoors Sarah Dustagheer
8. The audience of the indoor theatre Penelope Woods
9. In the event of fire Paul Menzer
10. To glisten in a playhouse
cosmetic beauty indoors Farah Karim-Cooper
Part III. The New Fashions for Indoors
11. The new fashion for indoor plays Andrew Gurr
12. Changing fashions
tragicomedy, romance and heroic women in the 1630s hall-playhouses Eleanor Collins
13. Reviving the legacy of indoor performance Bart van Es
Appendix
list of plays performed at indoor playhouses, 1575–1642 Sarah Dustagheer.