Shakespeare's Staged Spaces and Playgoers' Perceptions

This lively and engaging study offers fresh readings of some of Shakespeare's most canonical plays, illuminating the ways stagecraft and language of movement create meaning for us as playgoers. Including discussions of other plays, the book carefully explores A Midsummer Night's Dream, Richard II, Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Tempest to develop a better understanding of how implicit stagecraft elements work in concert with explicit rhetorical patterns in the plays. The discussions engage with materials from Shakespeare's time, present revelatory close readings of Shakespeare's language, and demonstrate how these continually popular texts engage all of us in making meaning.

Darlene Farabee is Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Dakota, USA. She is co-editor (with Mark Netzloff and Bradley D. Ryner) of Early Modern Drama in Performance.

Acknowledgements
Note on Texts
Introduction
1. Perceptions and Possibility in A Midsummer Night's Dream: 'To leave the figure or disfigure it'
2. Grounded Action and Making Space in Richard II: 'How comest thou hither?'
3. Narrative and Spatial Movement in Hamlet: 'To find his way'
4. Place, Perception, and Disorientation in Macbeth: 'A walking shadow'
5. Direction and Space in The Tempest: 'Through forth-rights and meanders'
Conclusion: Movements of Genre and Other Directions: 'As strange a maze'
Notes
Bibliography
Index