$25.00 cloth, $16.00 paper. Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment.

$35.95 paper. What is the state of play in Shakespeare performance studies? As far back as Harley Granville-Barker’s Prefaces to Shakespeare (1946–1947), the pull of a specifically theatrical critique has worked — albeit unevenly — to revise and in some cases chal-lenge the notion that Shakespeare’s plays — and, by extension, dramatic writing more generally — can be fully, completely, most dynamically conceived as purely literary, textual objects. Ironically enough, the “author ” has launched a meticulous drive to discover the social, economic, architectural, and artistic prac-tices of theatrical performance in early modern England, a drive spilling back into the rich new work emerging on medieval per-formance and forward into the long 18th century as well. More specifically, Shakespeare studies has developed its own parochial discourse of performance, usu-ally called “performance criticism ” or “stage-oriented criticism, ” based in the most extrem