Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2015 - Humanities — Performing Arts — Theater & Dance

Contemporary scholarship on Shakespeare, Elizabethan theater, and early modern culture can seem overwhelming in scope, esoteric in content, and impenetrable in presentation.  Keenans accessible, concise volume is not in that mold.  Building on the scholarship of Andrew Gurr, Scott McMillin, and Sally-Beth MacLean, Keenan (De Montfort Univ., UK) examines the dynamics of theatrical groups during the time of Shakespeare.  In the introduction, she succinctly outlines the various scholarly assumptions and debates regarding the role of acting companies within the periods creation of theater.  She argues that how writers wrote their plays was shaped (but not wholly determined) by the theatrical world and the companies for which they catered, as well as their artistic wishes.  The five chapters that follow examine structures of companies, roles of playwrights, processes of staging, dynamics of audiences, and positions of patrons.  Each chapter also offers a specific case study in which Keenan meticulously applies the concepts of the chapter to a specific play.  Keenan impresses on readers the vitality and significance of acting companies in relation to this celebrated period of theater.  This book will be indispensable for those exploring Shakespeare and his contemporaries.Summing Up: Essential. Academic readers at all levels, professionals, general readers.

First published in German in 1995 and now available in English translation for the first time, this is a groundbreaking book.  Brandstetter (Institute for Theater Studies, Free Univ. of Berlin, Germany) probes the idea of the interdisciplinary; situates the dancing body as a form of discourse, thus expanding the concept of dance literacy; and includes references to many little-known texts.  She concentrates on the period from 1892 (Loïe Fullers arrival in Paris) to the early 1930s, a boom period for dance because it was a critical part of the modernist movement.  The first of the book's two sections, Pathos Formulas. Body-Image and Danced Figuration, explores the changing perception and representation of body imagery around 1900: the emergence of a freer form of theatrical dance and expression and the portrayal of body imagery through photography and film.  The other section, "Topos Formulas. Dance Movement and Figuration of Space," addresses how abstraction led to increased attention to elements of composition and multidimensionality.  Artists discussed include Léon Bakst, Charlie Chaplin, Isadora Duncan, Michel Fokine, and Oskar Schlemmer.  Dense with meaning, this book provokes thoughtful reflection on the nature and scope of modernity.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

In this groundbreaking book, Ritchie (drama and theater, McGill Univ.) explores the role of 18th-century women in establishing Shakespeare as Britains national playwright.  She focuses on women as critics, actors, and audience.  Margaret Cavendish, who published the first critical essay on Shakespeare, was among several women who analyzed Shakespeare's works, not only from the expected focus on his morality but from the more interesting focus on performance theory, something her male contemporaries were not doing.  The first woman on the British stage portrayed Desdemona.  Others soon followed, finding Shakespeares female roles, especially those involving cross-dressing, particularly liberating.  Womennotably the women of the Shakespeare Ladies Clubalso constituted an important part of the audience, ensuring not only production of Shakespeares plays but the revival of plays not performed in decades, some not since the Elizabethan period.  This interest stemmed partly from classifying Shakespeare a "natural genius," someone with no university education, a figure that women could easily identify with.  Elizabeth Montagu was the first critic to formally identify history plays as a separate genre, and one that particularly interested 18th-century women.  This volume is a fine addition to the scholarship on Shakespeare, theater history, and women's intellectual history.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.