Bøger af David Albert Mann

In this book, first published in 1991, David Albert Mann argues for more attention to the performer in the study of Elizabethan plays and less concern for their supposed meanings and morals. He concentrates on a collection of extracts from plays which show the Elizabethan actor as a character onstage. He draws from the texts a range of issues concerning performance practice; the nature of itinerance; doubling and its implications for presentational acting; the importance of clowning and improvisation; and the effects of audience and venue on the dynamics of performance.The author suggests that the stage representation of players is part of a nostalgic farewell to the passing of an impure but perhaps more vital theatre, and in part an acknowledgement of the threat the adult theatre's growing sophistication offered to its institutional and adolescent rivals.

How were female characters dragged on by the hair, men beheaded or subject to the strappado, ? How did magic trees rise from a stage trap only five feet high, and banquets disappear? And how could characters set themselves on fire?This is the first full-length study to concentrate on the practical issues of property construction and stage business in Elizabethan Theatre and offers both a guide to students imagining how the plays were performed and a reference work for scholars and practitioners alike.Alongside the extravagant effects popular at The Rose, David Albert Mann shows how the commonplace hand property was one of the few performance aids needed as the Elizabethan player emerged from the itinerant tradition, and how Shakespeare transformed it into a pivot of character interaction, presenting in concrete terms what had hitherto been purely verbal. Mann stresses the centrality of the actor in the newly-built theatres, modelled on the simple demands of the earlier playing places in which he had developed his art. The concept of 'scenic units', he suggests, is inimical to the fast-moving production process of Elizabethan theatre which argues instead for the simplest solutions to staging cruces; often relying on the suggestive possibilities of the theatre structures themselves to suggest locale, or on poetic description to engage the audience's imagination and give greater flexibility to its staging.Unlike most previous scholars, this study finds much that is useful in Henslowe's Inventory, with an annotated index revealing hitherto undiscovered property-costumes for miraculous transformations, together with a complete armoury with which to mount their simulated combat.

The Elevation of Audley Masterton Summer 1914. Determined to restore his career and regain the offer of a knighthood after an unfortunate mishap in London, Shakespearian actor-manager Audley Masterton embarks on a tour of the Empire, only to be wrecked on the Skeleton Coast of South-West Africa with a mere handful of survivors. Escaping German internment on a rusty train, he sets about welding them into a new troupe; whilst the endless permutations of young love and jealousy find their echoes in the plays themselves. And as they advance further into the interior, the tragic outcome of his own youthful amour many years ago in Zanzibar comes back to haunt him with ever greater intensity. Rescued from slave traders by an apparent chance encounter with an acquaintance from the past, they are led through the jungle to an Arab fortress and an engagement which is not at all what it seems. Masterton gets his elevation certainly, but not quite in the way he expects. *** Witty, compelling and humane, the novel explores the effects on the lives of the fifteen companions as they are drawn into a rich, complex and frightening confrontation between the Bard and Africa. *****

Most Scots are not descended from the Gaels, but of mixed Anglian, Celtic, Viking and Norman blood like the rest of us. Much of the Border Raiding was south for cattle and extortion, whilst the English only went north to try to stop it; sometimes by forcing formal submission. Scottish academics claim a centuries-old policy of genocide, but the reality is that most cruelty and oppression has been Scot-on-Scot. Sensible and humane Scots chose Union in order to put an end to slavery, the burning alive of women as witches, legal torture, feudal oppression, and the endemic poverty that annually brought famine to large parts of the country; it led to the flowering Scotland in science and thought, and vast improvements in agriculture and industry; to a British Empire largely powered by Scots; and to regular subsidies from the English that continue to this day. This study reveals how primary-school textbooks misrepresent all of this in order to inculcate a hatred of the English, prompted by university historians who ought to know better, encouraging a fatalism and despair, particularly among the young, that contribute to disproportionately high levels of physical and mental ill-health. The English do not reciprocate this hatred; hence the free passage of Scots into England and the opportunity to prosper there. The Scots, it argues, owe it to their children to snap out of it and put their educational house in order.

A pastiche of a provincial Newspaper, encouraging you to read between the lines, and so follow, as it were surreptitiously, the lives and loves, hates and crimes, of many of the characters, both subjects and journalists, that appear in its pages, and sometimes only in its margins. It is a good read, said to be very funny, and ideal as a stocking-filler, or for airport or holiday reading