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English Fiction & Prose Literature - General & Miscellaneous - Literary Criticism, General & Miscellaneous Irish Fiction & Prose Literature - Literary Criticism
While much attention has been devoted to performances of Shakespeare's plays today, little has been focused on modern productions of the plays of his contemporaries, such as Marlowe, Webster and Jonson. Performing Early Modern Drama Today offers an overview of early modern performance, featuring chapters by academics, teachers and practitioners, incorporating a variety of approaches. The book examines modern performances in both Britain and America and includes interviews with influential directors, close analysis of particular stage and screen adaptations and detailed appendices of professional and amateur productions. Chapters examine intellectual and practical opportunities to analyse what is at stake when the plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries are performed by ours. Whether experimenting with original performance practices or contemporary theatrical and cinematic ones, productions of early modern drama offer an inspiring, sometimes unusual, always interesting perspective on the plays they interpret for modern audiences.
About the Author, Pascale Aebischer
Pascale Aebischer is Senior Lecturer in Renaissance Studies at the University of Exeter. Her passion for teaching early modern drama has resulted in the publication of Jacobean Drama (2010), a book dedicated to her students, who voted her 'Lecturer of the Year 2009/10'. She is the co-editor of Remaking Shakespeare: Performance Across Media, Genre and Cultures (2003). Her book Shakespeare's Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance (2004) was followed by a wide range of articles in books and leading journals, including Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Bulletin and Shakespeare Survey. Her current interest in film adaptations of early modern plays, the subject of her next book, is evident in her recent contributions to The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama (2010), Middleton in Context (2011) and Marlowe in Context (2012).
Kathryn Prince is a theatre historian at the University of Ottawa. Her project 'Shakespeare and Theatrical Space', funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, will be published as a book and has generated the practice-based creative project 'Measured Space', which experiments with Measure for Measure in light of the contemporary theories and practices in disciplines ranging from architecture to zoo-keeping. Early modern plays performed out of their own period were also the focus of her first book, Shakespeare in the Victorian Periodicals (2008) as well as her second, a forthcoming performance history of Much Ado About Nothing, along with book chapters in Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (2012) and Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century (2012), The Working-Class Intellectual in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (2009) and two volumes of the Dictionary of Literary Biography.
