Shakespeare's Blackfriars Playhouse

1964 • 616 sayfa • EN

Yazan Irwin Smith

"Shakespeare's Blackfriars Playhouse Its History and Its Design IRWIN SMITH Foreword by James G. McManaway THE FIRST BOOK to tell the story of the Blackfriars as a continuing history, this handsome volume re- constructs the theater for which Shakespeare's later plays were written and explores one of the few areas of Shakespearean research as yet virtually untouched. The story is that of a community of London friars, of a great hall within their friary where the parliament sometimes sat, and of two successive playhouses within the precinct walls. The buildings have long disappeared; but Mr. Smith, drawing upon a thorough grounding in architecture and archaeological research, upon a broad knowledge of Elizabethan and Jacobean theaters, and upon clues in the contemporary stage directions, has made a complete reconstruction of the second Playhouse. In it, he shows, Shakespeare's own company of actors, the King's Men, reenacted the historic trial that had taken place in the same room eighty-four years earlier-the trial that preceded the divorce of Henry VIII and Katharine of Aragon. Mr. Smith describes, too, the theatrical practices of the companies of child actors that preceded The King's Men, and he analyzes in vivid detail the influence of their dramatic traditions on Shakespeare's final plays and other plays of the period. Above all, both in text and in meticulously executed drawings, he establishes the design and equipment of the second Playhouse, England's greatest theater during a great theatrical age. Each step in the evolution of the theater from priory to playhouse is richly documented with maps, photographs, and drawings; and an Appendix reproduces some forty documents, nearly all now difficult of access, relevant to the history of the area. The volume as a whole provides not only a full account of the Blackfriars precinct, but also an invaluable sourcebook for the study of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. IRWIN SMITH, an artist by profession and a Shakespearean by avocation, is the author of Shakespeare's Globe Play- house and a contributor to the Shakespeare Quarterly. His special interest, during a life-long study of Shakespeare, has been the original staging of Shakespeare's plays. Together with Dr. John Cranford Adams, he built the model of the Globe Playhouse now on display at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D. C."-Publisher