Reviews of the First Edition
...valuable and enjoyable reading for all studying Shakespeare's plays.'
Following in the patternestablished by John Russell Brown for the excellent series (Theatre and Production Studies), he provides first an account of Shakespeare's company, then a study of three individual plays Twelfth Night, Hamlet and Macbeth as performed by the company. Peter Thomson writes in a crisp, sharp, enlivening style.' TLS
'...the best analysis yet of Elizabethan acting practices, excavated form the texts...

This is the first comprehensive study in English of Brecht's Mother Courage in production. Peter Thomson provides a detailed account of Brecht's own production in 1949 and then explores how the play has been transmitted--from Joan Littlewood's production in 1956 to the Royal National Theatre in 1995. The book also examines interpretations by Judi Dench, Glenda Jackson, and Richard Schechner, among others. Seminal productions from the continent are also analyzed and a final chapter examines the play's influence on among others, Peter Brook, and highlights the new urgency of the text in light...

This is a book for theatre-lovers, written for anyone who shares the author's curiosity about the art of acting and about theatre past and present. The first section centres on Elizabethan theatre practice, the second highlights themes, episodes and contemporary taste in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in England, and the third focuses on twentieth-century performances of Shakespeare at Stratford in the 1970s and in the New Globe as the new century begins. The extensive cast of actors discussed includes Richard Tarlton, Will Kemp, David Garrick, Samuel Foote, Richard and Mary Ann...

Dion Boucicault, the most popular dramatist of the second half of the nineteenth century, was also one of the most prolific and representative.