This book is a compact guide to reading plays, and to the art and techniques of drama. Ranging from classical Greece to modern Drama and performance, but with particular emphasis on the playwrights (including Shakespeare) who are most widely taught and performed, the Handbook covers the whole
range of literary, aesthetic, and political questions attending drama, from theatre designs and acting styles to audience composition and editing printed texts. Looking closely at both text and performance, successive sections give clear and detailed information about the conventions of playtexts,
the histories of genre, performance spaces, and theatre personnel, as well as current theatre practices. Each chapter also provides an appropriate technical and critical vocabulary, conveniently gathered in a full, indexed glossary. A final section, dealing with drama essays and exams, includes
sample student essays, and the bibliography includes targeted further reading as well as extensive guides to playwrights in print and plays on film. Lucid, practical, and thorough, this book is an invaluable resource for anyone who reads plays.
Introduction
I. Performance, notation, text
1. Performance: process and the ephemeral
2. Notation: documentation, layout, and the preserved
3. Text I: editing and reception
4. Text II: the process of reading
II. Reading Structures
5. What is genre?
6.
Classical genres: tragedy, comedy, satyr-playes, epic
7. Religious genres: the liturgy, Mysteries, Moralities
8. Renaissance genres: Commedia dell'arte, tragicomedy, masque, opera
9. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century genres: burlesque, sentimental & gothic drama, pantomime, melodrama,
music-hall, farce, well-made plays
10. Social genres: political theatre, agit-prop, documentary and epic drama
11. The impact of technology: light, sound, radio- & television-plays, film-genres
III. Defining architectures
12. The study
13. Rehearsal and administrative
space
14. The stage and auditorium
15. The scriptorium, printshop, publishing house, bookshop, and library
IV. Personnel in process
16. Playwrights
17. Directors
18. Actors
19. Dramaturgs and literary managers
20. Designers
21. Production staff, stage-crew,
and front-of-house
22. Censors
23. Audiences
24. Critics
25. Editors
26. Teachers and readers
V. Theatre today
27. The playtext since the 1950s
28. Challenges to the playtext
29. Alternatives to the playtext
VI. Exam conditions
30. Practical
criticism
31. Period and special papers
32. Sample answers
Glossary
Index of persons
Index of plays
Bibliography and further reading
There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.
John Lennard teaches at the Universities of Cambridge and Notre Dame, and for the British American Drama Academy in London. He is the author of 'But I Digress' (1991), the best-selling 'The Poetry Handbook' (1996), and an on-line guide, 'Reading Contemporary Poetry' (2001). Mary Luckhurst is
Lecturer in Modern Drama at the University of York. She is an award-winning playwright, and has worked as a director. She has edited 'The Creative Writing Handbook', 'On Directing' (2001), and 'On Acting' (forthcoming 2002) for Faber and Faber.
