The Cambridge Companion To Theatre History

A wide-ranging set of essays that explain what theatre history is and why we need to engage with it.

The first ever companion to theatre and science brings together research on key topics, performances, and new areas of interest.

The definitive guide to post-war British theatre's huge variety and expansion, exploring the diverse contexts that shaped it.

This series of essays by prominent academics and practitioners investigates in detail the history of performance in the classical Greek and Roman world. Beginning with the earliest examples of 'dramatic' presentation in the epic cycles and reaching through to the latter days of the Roman Empire and beyond, this 2007 Companion covers many aspects of these broad presentational societies. Dramatic performances that are text-based form only one part of cultures where presentation is a major element of all social and political life. Individual chapters range across a two thousand year timescale, and include specific chapters on acting traditions, masks, properties, playing places, festivals, religion and drama, comedy and society, and commodity, concluding with the dramatic legacy of myth and the modern media. The book addresses the needs of students of drama and classics, as well as anyone with an interest in the theatre's history and practice.

Provides information on the history and present practice of theater in the world.

Fourteen specially commissioned essays provide essential information about staging, playwrights, themes and genres in the drama of the Restoration.

Since the turn of the century, Performance Studies has emerged as an increasingly vibrant discipline. Its concerns - embodiment, ethical research and social change - are held in common with many other fields, however a unique combination of methods and applications is used in exploration of the discipline. Bridging live art practices - theatre, performance art and dance - with technological media, and social sciences with humanities, it is truly hybrid and experimental in its techniques. This Companion brings together specially commissioned essays from leading scholars who reflect on their own experiences in Performance Studies and the possibilities this offers to representations of identity, self-and-other, and communities. Theories which have been absorbed into the field are applied to compelling topics in current academic, artistic and community settings. The collection is designed to reflect the diversity of outlooks and provide a guide for students as well as scholars seeking a perspective on research trends.

This Companion offers students and general readers a lively set of essays on the why, when, where, what and how of writing theatre history. It considers how history is told, from whose point of view in our globalised world and what boundaries we might place around the notion of theatre.