John Russell Brown

A former Associate Director for London's National Theatre invites readers to behold the fuller meaning of Shakespearean text as played, inviting them to seek their insights in Shakespeare's natural habitat: the stage. Includes considerations of recent productions at the Hartford Stage, Theatre for a New Audience, and the New York Shakespeare Festival.

Shakespeare's Plays in Performance

First published in 1957. This edition reprints the second edition of 1962. The second edition of this book contains an extensive new chapter on Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest.

Shakespeare and His Comedies

Focus on Macbeth

Selection of critical essays University undergraduate level.

Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra

The Routledge Companion to Actors' Shakespeare is a window onto how today's actors contribute to the continuing life and relevance of Shakespeare's plays. The process of acting is notoriously hard to document, but this volume reaches behind famous performances to examine the actors' craft, their development and how they engage with playtexts. Each chapter relies upon privilieged access to its subject to offer an unparalleled insight into contemporary practice. This volume explores the techniques, interpretive approaches and performance styles of the following actors: Simon Russell Beale, Sinead Cusack, Judi Dench, Kate Duchene, Colm Feore, Mariah Gale, John Harrell, Greg Hicks, Rory Kinnear, Kevin Kline, Adrian Lester, Marcelo Magni, Ian McKellen, Patrice Naiambana, Vanessa Redgrave, Piotr Semak, Anthony Sher, Jonathan Slinger, Kate Valk, Harriet Walter This twin volume to The Routledge Companion to Directors' Shakespeare is an essential work for both actors and students of Shakespeare.

The Routledge Companion to Actors' Shakespeare

The commentary at the centre of this groundbreaking introduction alerts the reader to what happens on stage during a performance by showing what the text requires from actors and the choices they are offered. By this means, the Handbook demonstrates how an audience responds to plot and dramatic structure, what conflicts and issues are involved as the action unfolds, and the effects of developing expectation and variations of tension and pace. Chapters complementing this core feature provide an account of the three original texts, the theatrical conditions of early performances, and the play's social, political and cultural contexts. Generous quotations are given from books that influenced the writing of the play, and notable productions and performances are described to illustrate a wide range of interpretations. A concluding chapter quotes from recent critics and offers a number of different ways in which to understand the significance of this tragedy which has proved its enduring appeal.

Hamlet

Shakespeare Antony and Cleopatra

Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night, Macbeth

Shakespeare's Dramatic Style

This comprehensive and well-informed study is also a work of detection and reappraisal. Each tragedy is considered both as a text and as a play to experience in performance. Shakespeare's engagement with this form of drama is followed step-by-step until its concluding years of intense activity. No theory of tragedy emerges, but rather an increasing ability to maintain and communicate a clear-eyed perception of a changing and often violent society in which action is stronger than words or conscious intention.

Shakespeare: The Tragedies

Shakespeare: 'The Tempest'.

First published in 1982. Macbeth exercises a strange influence over readers and theatre audiences: the words of the text offer no easy clue to meaning or significance and in dramatic structure the play is very different from other Shakespearean tragedies. Many kinds of study are needed in order to understand the tragedy of Macbeth and this book provides a wide range of studies that respect the individuality of the text and examine it from different viewpoints. Contents include: Themes and Structure; Characterization and Narrative, Visual Effects, Performance in the Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries; Historical and Political Background; Role of Witchcraft; Game Theory. Contributors include: John Russell Brown, Derek Russell Davis, Gareth Lloyd Evans, R A Foakes, Michael Goldman, Robin Grove, Peter Hall, Michael Hawkins, Brian Morris, D J Palmer, Marvin Rosenberg and Peter Stallybrass.

More widely studied and more frequently performed than ever before, John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi is here presented in an improved, accessible and throughly up-to-date edition. Starting with the authoritative Revels Plays edition of 1964, John Russell Brown has augmented the notes and collations, and casts new light on Webster's dramatic dialogue and on the stage action. An entirely new introduction encompasses a stage history from its well-documented early performances right through to recent productions in the twenty first century. The bibliography has also been expanded. Students, actors, directors, academics and theatre-goers will find here a reappraisal of Webster's artistry in the greatest age of English theatre.

By John Webster, 2nd Edition

The Duchess of Malfi

The Routledge Companion to Actors’ Shakespeare is a window onto how today’s actors contribute to the continuing life and relevance of Shakespeare’s plays. The process of acting is notoriously hard to document, but this volume reaches behind famous performances to examine the actors’ craft, their development and how they engage with playtexts. Each chapter relies upon privilieged access to its subject to offer an unparalleled insight into contemporary practice. This volume explores the techniques, interpretive approaches and performance styles of the following actors: Simon Russell Beale, Sinead Cusack, Judi Dench, Kate Duchene, Colm Feore, Mariah Gale, John Harrell, Greg Hicks, Rory Kinnear, Kevin Kline, Adrian Lester, Marcelo Magni, Ian McKellen, Patrice Naiambana, Vanessa Redgrave, Piotr Semak, Anthony Sher, Jonathan Slinger, Kate Valk, Harriet Walter This twin volume to The Routledge Companion to Directors’ Shakespeare is an essential work for both actors and students of Shakespeare.

The commentary leads the reader through the text, showing how the dialogue can come alive in performance and what needs to happen on stage. This central feature is preceded by an account of the play's first publication, early performances and the probable additions to an original version. It is followed by an introduction to the social and cultural context for the play's composition, which uses quotations from contemporary works and extracts from Shakespeare's sources. Studies of landmark productions and films, together with a wide sampling of critical writings, complete an innovative and instructive guide to this truly awesome tragedy.

Macbeth

A Casebook

Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing and As You Like it

A survey of 4,500 years of international performance history covers the significant movements, writers, performers, and events from traditional and avant-garde theater

The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre

King Lear is widely considered to be Shakespeare's greatest and most challenging play. This unique volume features: • a scene-by-scene commentary that traces the play's on-stage life and an audience's progressive experience of performance • a close reading of the text that leads to a re-assessment of the tragedy's achievement • discussion of the play's sources, and its cultural and political context • accounts of major performances on stage and screen, and of notable critical assessments. Inspiring and stimulating, this essential study of King Lear in both text and performance offers a path to a fuller knowledge of Shakespeare's verbal, theatrical and imaginative art.

King Lear

Many kinds of study are needed in order to understand the tragedy of Macbeth and this book provides a wide range of studies that respect the individuality of the text and examine it from different viewpoints.

John Russell Brown

About

Books

Join the club