Marketing the Bard: Shakespeare in Performance and Print, by Don-John Dugas

By Don-John Dugas

To posterity, William Shakespeare could be the Bard of Avon, yet to mid-seventeenth-century theatergoers he was once simply one other dramatist. but slightly a century later, he was once England’s most well liked playwright and a loved ones identify. during this interesting examine, Don-John Dugas explains how those adjustments took place and sealed Shakespeare’s attractiveness even earlier than David Garrick played his paintings at the London stage.

Marketing the Bard considers the ways in which functionality and booklet affected Shakespeare’s reputation. Dugas takes readers within London’s theaters and print retailers to teach how the practices of those intersecting corporations helped rework Shakespeare from a run-of-the-mill writer into the main played playwright of all time—persuasively demonstrating that by way of the 1730s trade, now not feedback, used to be the vital strength riding Shakespeare’s cultural dominance.

exhibiting a powerful command of theater and publishing historical past, Dugas explains why variations of Shakespeare’s performs succeeded or failed at the level and exhibits that theatrical and publishing issues exerted a better impact than aesthetics at the playwright’s attractiveness. He tells how revivals and diversifications of Shakespeare’s performs whereas he was once really unknown fueled an curiosity in publication—exploited by way of the Tonson publishing enterprise with dear accumulated versions advertised to prosperous readers—which ultimately ended in festival among expensive collections and inexpensive single-play variants. The ensuing price cutting war flooded the marketplace with Shakespeare, which in flip motivated level revivals of even his so much vague plays.

In tracing this curious reemergence of Shakespeare, Dugas considers why the Tonsons received the copyright to the performs, how the well-known variation of 1709 differed from past ones, and what impact its e-book had on Shakespeare’s recognition. He documents all recognized performances of Shakespeare among 1660 and 1705 to record productions by means of a number of businesses and to teach how their performances formed the public’s style for Shakespeare. He additionally discloses a formerly missed eighteenth-century engraving that sheds new mild at the price battle and Shakespeare’s reputation.

Marketing the Bard is a completely enticing ebook that levels greatly over the recovery panorama, containing a wealth of knowledge and perception for an individual attracted to theater background, the heritage of the ebook, the origins of copyright, and naturally Shakespeare himself. Dugas’s research of the advanced elements that reworked a prolific playwright into the inimitable Bard basically indicates how company produces and programs nice artwork so one can promote it.

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Marketing the Bard: Shakespeare in Performance and Print, 1660-1740

To posterity, William Shakespeare could be the Bard of Avon, yet to mid-seventeenth-century theatergoers he was once simply one other dramatist. but slightly a century later, he used to be England’s hottest playwright and a family identify. during this interesting research, Don-John Dugas explains how those alterations took place and sealed Shakespeare’s acceptance even ahead of David Garrick played his paintings at the London level.

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Guffey, Matthew H. Wikander, Eckhard Auberlen, and Heidi Hutner have offered important new political, sexual, and postcolonial interpretations that reveal the intellectual and cultural complexities of this extremely popular play. ”51 Pepys saw The Tempest eight times, but the references he makes to specific features of the production all pertain to additions made by Davenant and Dryden, not to the actresses: “a curious piece of Musique repeating in an Echo of half-sentences,” “the seamen’s part,” “the Seaman’s dance,” and “the Actors in their several dresses, espe51.

Three of five contemporary comments on the production voice opin40. John Harrington Smith, The Gay Couple in Restoration Comedy, 3, 7–9. Shakespeare as Performance Commodity 35 ions regarding its quality. Two indicate that it was good. On February 15, 1662, two Dutch students, Jacques Thierry and Will Shellinks, attended a performance and agreed that it was the best play they saw during their visit to England. As they also saw Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, The Alchemist, Philaster, and Hamlet, their remark suggests that The Law against Lovers had considerable merit, even if we account for the vagaries of personal taste and uneven performances.

6. Although we can determine only about 7 percent of the performances held between 1660 and 1700, our knowledge of the performances by Rich’s Company by 1704 is virtually complete, and we know exactly half of Betterton’s. 7, the ratio of the recorded performances of Shakespeare to the total number of recorded performances of each company for each of these years. 3. 1–3 reveal a pattern first recognized by theater historian George C. D. Odell but largely overlooked by literary critics: adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays were produced in three distinct periods.

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