Shaping Shakespeare for Performance: The Bear Stage (The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series on Shakespeare and the Stage)

Shaping Shakespeare for Performance: The Bear Stage collects significant work from the 2013 Blackfriars Conference. The conference, sponsored by the American Shakespeare Center, brings together scholars, actors, directors, dramaturges, and students to share important new work on the staging practices used by William Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The volume’s contributors range from renowned scholars and editors to acclaimed directors, highly-trained actors, and budding researchers. The topics cover a similarly wide range: a close reading of an often-cut scene from Henry V meets an account of staging pregnancy; a meticulous review of early modern contract law collides with an analysis of an actor in a bear costume; an account of printed punctuation from the 1600s encounters a study of audience interaction and empowerment in King Lear; the identification of candid doubling in A Comedy of Errors meets the troubling of gender categories in The Roaring Girl. The essays focus on the practical applications of theory, scholarship, and editing to performance of early modern plays.

Russ McDonald is Professor of English Literature at Goldsmiths College, University of London and a past President of the Shakespeare Association of America. He is a successful author having written the best-selling Bedford Companion to Shakespeare as well as the influential Shakespeare's Late Style. He has also edited four plays for the New Pelican Shakespeare

Paige Martin Reynolds is Associate Professor of English at the University of Central Arkansas, teaching Shakespeare and Drama. She also performs both on stage and on film.

Michael M. Wagoner is Assistant Professor of English at the United States Naval Academy, USA.