Peter Thomson

This 2006 introduction aims to share with readers the author's enjoyment of the turbulent 240-year history of a theatre that tried, often against the odds, to be 'modern'. In each of its five parts, it deals successively with history and cultural context, with the plays and the actors who caught the imagination of their era. Peter Thomson's text, always approachable, is enriched by quotations and carefully selected illustrations that capture 'the spirit of the age' under consideration. Beginning with the reopening of the playhouses under licence from Charles II, Thomson introduces the modern English theatre by breaking off at key dates - 1700, 1737, 1789 and 1843 - in order to explore both continuity and innovation. Familiar names and well-known plays feature alongside the forgotten and neglected. This is a reading of dramatic history that keeps constantly in mind the material circumstances that produced, and sometimes oppressed, a supremely popular theatre.

A collection of essays on actors and acting. The first section centres on Elizabethan theatre practice, the second highlights themes, episodes and contemporary taste in the 18th and 19th centuries in England, and the third focuses on 20th-century performances of Shakespeare.

Concentrating on the links of Great Britain and Ireland, this book discusses St. Andrews, Ballybunion, Royal St. Georges, and others.

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 Yates, Thomas Weston, John Kemble, Edmund Kean, Frederick Robson, Henry Irving, Ian Richardson and Ben Kingsley.

Shakespeare’s career as actor and playwright reveals the extraordinary accommodation of his genius to the circumstances of his time. This unique account describes Shakespeare at work against a background of theatrical rivalry, opportunism, service to noble patrons, and political intrigue. Peter Thomson recreates Shakespeare’s writing career year by year, showing how the plays mirror their times. The story reveals the precarious nature of theatrical survival, the constant threat posed by the withdrawal of noble or royal patronage, the spread of disease, the anxieties of war and the climate of political uncertainty. This account of Elizabethan and Jacobean social and professional life offers a fascinating insight into the world in which Shakespeare produced his plays. There are numerous illustrations gleaned from museums, libraries and great houses to illustrate the theatrical and social context of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Formerly published within the Cambridge Canto imprint, this new paperback edition restores the format and illustrations of the original hardback.

This is the first comprehensive study of Brecht’s Mother Courage. Peter Thomson locates the sources of the play in Brecht’s own experience and heritage, and provides a detailed account of Brecht’s own production with the newly formed Berliner Ensemble in 1949. Thomson then explores how the play has been transmitted in the English-speaking theatre from Joan Littlewood’s production with the Theatre Workshop Company in 1956 to the Royal National Theatre, with Diana Rigg as Mother Courage, in 1995. The book also examines such influential interpretations as those by William Gaskill, Judi Dench, and Glenda Jackson in the English theatre, and by Herbert Balu and Richard Schechner in America. Seminal productions in France and the Germanies are also discussed. A final chapter highlights the new urgency of the text in light of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, and closes with an account of a triumphant staging in Uganda.

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 themselves rather than reconstructed on basis of one monolithic theory, and an essay on Hamlet that is a model of Critical intelligence and theatrical invention.' Yearbook of English Studies`Synthesizes the important facts and summarizes projects with a vigorous prose style, and expertly applies his experience in both practical drama and academic teaching to his discussion.' Review of English Studies