Shaping Shakespeare for performance - Catherine Loomis

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.

Catherine Loomis is professor of English and women's studies at the University of New Orleans. She is the author of William Shakespeare: A Documentary Volume and The Death of Elizabeth I: Remembering and Reconstructing the Virgin Queen.

Sid Ray is professor of English and women's and gender studies at Pace University, New York campus. She is the author of Holy Estates: Marriage and Monarchy in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries and Mother Queens and Princely Sons: Rogue Madonnas in the Age of Shakespeare.