Shakespeare in Three Dimensions: The Dramaturgy of Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet

In Shakespeare in Three Dimensions, Robert Blacker asks us to set aside what we think we know about Shakespeare and rediscover his plays on the page, and as Shakespeare intended, in the rehearsal room and in performance. That process includes stripping away false traditions that have obscured his observations about people and social institutions that are still vital to our lives today. This book explores the verities of power and love in Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth, as an example of how to mine the extraordinary detail in all of Shakespeare’s plays, using the knowledge of both theatre practitioners and scholars to excavate and restore them.

Robert Blacker was the first dramaturg at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater in New York City, and Des McAnuff’s associate artistic director and dramaturg at the Tony-award-winning La Jolla Playhouse for twelve seasons, where he worked on The Who’s Tommy and Steppenwolf’s Grapes of Wrath. Over fifty projects from Blacker’s eight years as artistic director of the Sundance Theatre Labs went on to production, including I Am My Own Wife and The Laramie Project. He worked on 20 productions of Shakespeare at these theatres and the Stratford Shakespeare Festival of Canada, where he was insitutional dramaturg for five seasons. He has taught Shakespeare studies in graduate theatre programs at Columbia, Iowa, UCSD, and the Yale School of Drama, where he was interim chair of playwriting. His interview is the first of eighty-five articles in The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy (2015). He is a graduate of Cornell University.