This 1998 book is the fourth volume of essays by twelve actors with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Playing Shakespeare is the premier guide to understanding and appreciating the mastery of the world’s greatest playwright. Together with Royal Shakespeare Company actors–among them Patrick Stewart, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Ben Kingsley, and David Suchet–John Barton demonstrates how to adapt Elizabethan theater for the modern stage. The director begins by explicating Shakespeare’s verse and prose, speeches and soliloquies, and naturalistic and heightened language to discover the essence of his characters. In the second section, Barton and the actors explore nuance in Shakespearean theater, from evoking irony and ambiguity and striking the delicate balance of passion and profound intellectual thought, to finding new approaches to playing Shakespeare’s most controversial creation, Shylock, from The Merchant of Venice. A practical and essential guide, Playing Shakespeare will stand for years as the authoritative favorite among actors, scholars, teachers, and students.

This 1998 book is the fourth volume of essays by twelve actors with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Shakespeare's plays departed completely from the rules of classical drama. They spanned too much time, had too many settings, and combined humor with tragedy.

It's never too early to introduce children to the greatness that is Shakespeare's theatre. "Shakespeare with Children: Six Scripts for Young Players" is a collection of six scripts adapted and abridged for children between the ages of eight and thirteen; each can be executed in roughly forty minutes of stage time, while retaining the heart and soul of the stories as well as the bard's original poetic language. "Shakespeare with Children" is a must for any drama teacher looking to impart something special. Midwest Book Review - Literary Shelf, August 2008

Man of the Millennium' he may be but William Shakespeare is a shadowy historical figures. His writings have been analysed exhaustively but much of his life remains a mystery. This controversial biography aims to redress the balance. To his contemporaries, Shakespeare was known not as a playwright but as an actor, yet this has been largely ignored or marginalised by most modern writers. here John Southworth overturns traditional images of the Bard and his work, arguing that Shakespeare cannot be separated from his profession as a player any more than he can be separated from his works. Only by approaching Shakespeare's life from this new angle can we hope to learn or understand anything new about him. Following Shakespeare's life as an actor as he learns his craft and begins work on his own plays, Southworth presents the Bard and his plays in their proper context for the first time. Groundbreaking, contentious and a work of deep scholarship and understanding, 'Shakespeare the Player' should change the way we think about the English language's greatest artist.