What do 'stage directions' do in early modern drama? Who or what are they directing: action on the stage, or imagination via the page? Is the label 'stage direction' helpful or misleading? Do these 'directions' provide evidence of Renaissance playhouse practice? What happens when we put them at the centre of literary close readings of early modern plays? Stage Directions and Shakespearean Theatre investigates these problems through innovative research by a range of international experts. This collection of essays examines the creative possibilities of stage directions and and their implications for actors and audiences, readers and editors, historians and contemporary critics. Looking at the different ways stage directions make meaning, this volume provides new insights into a range of Renaissance plays.

The Shakespearean Stage Space explores the original staging of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries in Renaissance playhouses.

What do 'stage directions' do in early modern drama? Who or what are they directing: action on the stage, or imagination via the page? Is the label 'stage direction' helpful or misleading? Do these 'directions' provide evidence of Renaissance playhouse practice? What happens when we put them at the centre of literary close readings of early modern plays? Stage Directions and Shakespearean Theatre investigates these problems through innovative research by a range of international experts. This collection of essays examines the creative possibilities of stage directions and and their implications for actors and audiences, readers and editors, historians and contemporary critics. Looking at the different ways stage directions make meaning, this volume provides new insights into a range of Renaissance plays.

The subject of stage directions in 'Hamlet', those brief semiotic codes that are embellished by historical, theatrical, and cultural considerations, produces a rigorous examination in the fifteen essays contained in this collection. This volume encompasses essays that are guardedly inductive in their critical approaches, as well as those that critique modern productions that attempt to achieve Shakespearean effect through a modern aesthetic. The volume also includes essays that enunciate the production of stage business as a cultural interplay between productions and social agencies outside the theater.

The Stage Directions Guide to Shakespeare offers sane, sensible advice on reasons to do (or not to do) Shakespeare, assessing your theatre group abilities, selecting a play, casting, making costume and set decisions, the special demands of directing and playing Shakespeare and publicity.

(Book). Shakespeare was a man of the theatre to his core, so it is no surprise that he repeatedly contemplated the nuts and bolts of his craft in his plays and poems. Shakespeare scholar Nick de Somogyi here draws together all the cherishable set pieces including "All the world's a stage," Hamlet's encounters with the Players, and Bottom's amateur theatricals along with many other oblique but no less revealing glances, and further insights into theatre practice by Shakespeare's contemporaries and rivals. De Somogyi's commentary takes us through the entire process of Shakespeare's theatrical production, from its casting and auditions, via rehearsals, costumes, and props, to its premiere and audience reception. Shakespeare on Theatre eavesdrops on the urgently whispered noises-off in the "tiring-house" and inhales the heady aroma of the Globe's first audiences.

Under an alphabetical list of relevant terms, names and concepts, the book reviews current knowledge of the character and operation of theatres in Shakespeare's time, with an explanation of their origins>