From Text to Performance in the Elizabethan Theatre: Preparing the Play for the Stage

by David Bradley

Overview

David Bradley sets out to discover how Elizabethan theatre companies prepared plays for performance: how playwrights understood the composition of the actor-companies they wrote for, how actors followed their directions for entrances and exits and what happened when plays were adapted for changes on personnel or for other companies. For his study, Bradley has evaluated documents which survived from the records of Stage Revisers (or Plotters as they were known). Bradley's evidence includes seven theatre plots and seventeen manuscript plays, come from theatre productions which took place at the Shakespearean playhouse, or Rose Theatre. The Stage Revisers worked from plots or lists which indicated the action taking place on stage, the props needed, costume changes and the actors who should appear. The book contains reproductions of the extant plots of the period, an appendix listing playwrights, plays, theatre companies and the number of actors needed for performance and an extensive bibliography.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521109444
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	06/18/2009
Pages:	284
Product dimensions:	6.69(w) x 9.61(h) x 0.59(d)

Table of Contents

Introduction; 1. The logic of entrances; 2. Plotting from the texts; 3. The travelling companies; 4. The Plotter at work; 5. Interpreting the Plots; 6. Alcazar: the text and the sources; 7. The Plotter under pressure; 8. Reconstructing the second column; 9. The dumb-shows; Appendix: cast-lists of public theatre plays 1497–1625; Notes; Select bibliography; Indexes.