Restoration Plays and Players: An Introduction

Description

Introducing readers to the key texts, theatrical practice and context of late seventeenth-century drama, David Roberts combines literary and theatrical approaches to show how Restoration plays were written, performed, received and printed. Structured according to the 'life cycle' of the dramatic text, this book reproduces extracts from twenty-four of the most influential Restoration plays to provide readers with a comprehensive and colourful introduction to the period's drama. Roberts encourages readers to look beyond a limited canon of established plays and practice, and to see how Restoration Drama has been revived and adapted on the modern stage. Restoration Plays and Players is of great interest to undergraduate and non-specialist readers of seventeenth-century drama, Restoration literature and theatre studies.

David Roberts is Professor of English and Dean of the Arts at Birmingham City University. He is the author of Pinacotheca Bettertonaeana: The Library of a Seventeenth-Century Actor (2013) and Thomas Betterton: The Greatest Actor of the Restoration Stage (Cambridge, 2010), which was shortlisted for the Theatre Library Association's George Freedley Memorial Award in 2011. He has also written many journal articles, including in Shakespeare Quarterly.

'In addition to discussions of a generous selection of plays, Roberts provides students with succinct, informative and well-paced accounts of the personnel and material circumstances of Restoration Theatre, including the actors, the managers, the theatres and the growth of print culture. There is much to admire here.' Derek Hughes, University of Aberdeen '[Roberts'] theatrical primer will be a welcome addition to any bookshelf for teachers of later seventeenth-century drama. The book's successive chapters cover almost every imaginable topic. ... Roberts is particularly good at bridging his close readings of individual plays with the political, social, financial, commercial, managerial, and professional worlds these works circulated in, were shaped by, and shaped themselves.' Andrew Benjamin Bricker, Renaissance and Reformation