Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Shakespeare plays on Renaissance stages
- 2 Improving Shakespeare: from the Restoration to Garrick
- 3 Romantic Shakespeare
- 4 Pictorial Shakespeare
- 5 Reconstructive Shakespeare: reproducing Elizabethan and Jacobean stages
- 6 Twentieth-century performance: the Stratford and London companies
- 7 The tragic actor and Shakespeare
- 8 The comic actor and Shakespeare
- 9 Women and Shakespearean performance
- 10 International Shakespeare
- 11 Touring Shakespeare
- 12 Shakespeare on the political stage in the twentieth century
- 13 Shakespeare in North America
- 14 Shakespeare on the stages of Asia
- 15 Shakespeare and Africa
- Further reading
- Index
6 - Twentieth-century performance: the Stratford and London companies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- 1 Shakespeare plays on Renaissance stages
- 2 Improving Shakespeare: from the Restoration to Garrick
- 3 Romantic Shakespeare
- 4 Pictorial Shakespeare
- 5 Reconstructive Shakespeare: reproducing Elizabethan and Jacobean stages
- 6 Twentieth-century performance: the Stratford and London companies
- 7 The tragic actor and Shakespeare
- 8 The comic actor and Shakespeare
- 9 Women and Shakespearean performance
- 10 International Shakespeare
- 11 Touring Shakespeare
- 12 Shakespeare on the political stage in the twentieth century
- 13 Shakespeare in North America
- 14 Shakespeare on the stages of Asia
- 15 Shakespeare and Africa
- Further reading
- Index
Summary
In the early months of 2001 the Royal Shakespeare Company brought together productions of all eight of Shakespeare's Lancastrian history plays (with a rehearsed reading of Edward III thrown in for good measure). This ambitious endeavour, to which I shall return at the end of this chapter, long planned as the Millennium Project of a large and permanent theatre company, offering the plays in a variety of styles and periods, involving four directors and around 100 actors, and depending absolutely for its existence on subsidy, public and private, national and international, may usefully stand as the final milestone on the journey that Shakespeare theatre production has taken through the century with which this chapter is concerned. Many of its assumptions and characteristics are part of what we now take for granted in the performance of Shakespeare's plays; the evolutionary process that produced it is the subject of this chapter.
Stratford and London before the First World War
On 10 January 1900 Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s notorious production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with Oberon played (and sung) by Julia Neilson, and the rabbits of the wood near Athens played, inexorably (and, so far as theatre history records, unsung) by themselves, opened at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage , pp. 98 - 117Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002
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