Shakespeare at the Globe, 1599-1609
Description:... "The construction of the Globe Theater on the Bankside of the Thames in 1599 initiated a glorious decade for the drama, during which the Chamberlain-Kings's company, the Globe's producing group of actors, achieved a level if stability and a quality of productivity rarely matched in the history of the theater. Fifteen of Shakespeare's greatest plays- among them Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Twelfth Night, and As You Like It- enjoyed their first performances on the Globe's stage between the years 1599 and 1609. So rich was its resident company's achievement that, in the centuries since it first attracted theater-goers across the Thames, the Globe has come to signify more than a physical structure for the presentation of plays; it has become the symbol of an entire art. The most enduring monument to that art- the canon of Shakespeare's plays to which it gave fist breath-cannot be appreciated fully without some detailed knowledge of the actual circumstances and specifications under which the plays were written and produced. Shakespeare at the Globe, based on the evidence of twenty-nine production scripts of plays known to have been produced at the Globe between 1599 and 1609, offers many fresh and challenging new perspectives on the Globe's repertory system, its dramaturgy, its stage and its staging, and the acting styles of its company, Concentrating upon the actual production values given the Globe's repertory, Bernard Beckerman here created an exciting new dimension to our understanding of Elizabethan drama. BERNARD BECKERMAN, chairman of the theater division at Columbia University, was formerly chairman of the department of drama and speech at Hofstra College, where there is a replica of the Globe stage."- Bernard Beckerman.
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