The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre, an authoritative and lavishly illustrated new history, celebrates the stage's greatest achievements over 4,500 years, from festival performances in ancient Egypt to international, multicultural drama in the late twentieth century, and from Sophocles and Aristophanes to George Gershwin and Harold Pinter.
Here are the playwrights, plays, actors, directors, producers, songwriters, famous playhouses, dramatic movements, and more, accessibly and attractively arranged so that everyone with a passion for the stage can follow the glorious...

This introductory theatre text aims to help the reader develop an appreciation of all the aspects of theatre-acting, design, direction, theatre buildings and audiences. The main focus is on present-day theatre, with special emphasis given to actors and the plays they perform. In the second part, leading practitioners of different generations and races describe their own work, providing insights into what it is like to work in theatre today. The text is not tied to specific plays, but is designed to be effective whatever plays a student sees and reads.

This comprehensive and well-informed study is also a work of detection and reappraisal. Each tragedy is considered both as a text and as a play to experience in performance. Shakespeare's engagement with this form of drama is followed step-by-step until its concluding years of intense activity. No theory of tragedy emerges, but rather an increasing ability to maintain and communicate a clear-eyed perception of a changing and often violent society in which action is stronger than words or conscious intention.

In his latest book, John Russell Brown sets out the grounds for a new and revealing way of studying Shakespeare's plays. By considering the entire theatrical event and not only what happens on stage, he takes his readers back to the major texts with a fuller understanding of their language and an enhanced view of a play's theatrical potential. Chapters on theatre-going, playscripts, acting, parts to perform, interplay, stage space, off-stage space, and the use of time all bring recent developments in Theatre Studies together with Shakespeare Studies.

First published in 1957. This edition reprints the second edition of 1962. The second edition of this book contains an extensive new chapter on "Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale" and " The Tempest."

Many kinds of study are needed in order to understand the tragedy of Macbeth and this book provides a wide range of studies that respect the individuality of the text and examine it from different viewpoints.

The Dancing of the title was in Shakespeare's mind as he wrote: a physical and active imagination. This book explores the operation of the playwright's creative mind in his most frequently performed texts and encourages readers to seek out the performance possibilities of the works for themselves. Moving beyond the study of what has happened on stage in a number of specific productions, John Russell Brown examines the entire theatrical event in which performance occurs, as well as the meeting and interaction of actors and audience, and the social and cultural contexts of the plays'...

(Applause Books). 35 scenes from Shakespeare are presented in newly-edited texts, with notes which clarify meanings, topical references, puns, ambiguities, etc. A brief description of characters and situation prefaces each scene, and is followed by a commentary which discusses its major acting challenges and opportunities. Each scene has been chosen for its independent life requiring only the simplest of stage properties and the barest of spaces.

John Russell Brown demonstrates just how much is in Shakespeare's texts; how the language is awakened, colored, emphasized, sensualized and extended in performance. Shakespeare's intended readers were his collaborators, not his commentators. Brown invites all Shakespeare lovers to seek their insights in Shakespeare's natural habitat: the stage.

An introductory guide to King Lear in performance offering a scene-by-scene theatrically aware commentary, contextual documents, a brief history of the text and first performances, case studies of key productions, a survey of film and TV adaptations, a sampling of critical opinion and annotated further reading.