This Wide and Universal Theater(English, Paperback, Bevington David)

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This Wide and Universal Theater(English, Paperback, Bevington David) is written by Bevington David and published by The University of Chicago Press. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 0226044793 (ISBN 10) and 9780226044798 (ISBN 13).

Many readers first encounter Shakespeare's plays in a book rather than a theater. Yet Shakespeare was through and through a man of the stage. So what do we lose when we leave Shakespeare the practitioner behind, and what do we learn when we think about his plays as dramas to be performed? David Bevington answers these questions with "This Wide and Universal Theater", which explores how Shakespeare's plays were produced both in his own time and in succeeding centuries. Making use of historical documents and the play scripts themselves, Bevington brings Shakespeare's original stagings to life. He explains how the Elizabethan playhouse conveyed a sense of place using minimal scenery, from the Forest of Arden in "As You Like It" to the tavern in "Henry IV, Part I". Moving beyond Shakespeare's lifetime, Bevington shows the prodigious lengths to which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century companies went to produce spectacular effects, from flying witches in "Macbeth" to terrifying storms punctuating "King Lear". To bring the book into the present, Bevington considers recent productions on both stage and screen, when character and language have taken precedence over spectacle.This volume brings a lifetime of study to bear on a remarkably underappreciated aspect of Shakespeare's art.