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Article: Amphitheater staging: in-the-round or to the front (and what about asides)?(staging Elizabethan theater)
- Article from:
- Comparative Drama
- Article date:
- June 22, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 www.wmich.edu/compdr. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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When the existence in Utrecht of the DeWitt/Van Buchel drawing the Swan Theater became known in 1888, William Poel was already seven years into his inquiries into the best means of staging the public amphitheater and great hall plays of the English Renaissance. (1) I mention this to emphasize that the discourse came before the fact: the belief that Shakespeare's plays are best staged as it was then imprecisely imagined they had once been staged--simply, without elaborate settings or time-consuming scene changes, with direct actor-audience address, "in-the-round"--had as much to do with reactions against the late nineteenth-century stage's pictorialism, with ...