Watching Shakespeare

Here is a book written primarily for playgoers. Looking closely at eighteen plays, Anthony Dawson examines key decisions that actors and directors have to make, and shows how different interpretations flow from these decisions. His aim is to make audiences more aware of the multiple possibilities that a Shakespearean text provides, and hence better able to assess particular productions. Using frequent and extensive illustration from the modern theatre, he argues that contradiction and creative inconsistency are marks of Shakespeare's plays and that productions usually work best when they embrace opposition and strive for balance, rather than when they adopt one-sided readings or suppress elements that don't fit a particular concept.

Autorentext

ANTHONY B. DAWSON is Associate Professor of English and Drama at the University of British Columbia. He received his PhD from Harvard where he also taught. He has been active in the theatre for most of his life and is the author of a previous book on Shakespeare called Indirections.