From Text to Performance in the Elizabethan Theatre

David Bradley sets out to discover how Elizabethan theatre companies prepared plays for performance: how playwrights understood the composition of the actor-companies they wrote for, how actors followed their directions for entrances and exits and what happened when plays were adapted for changes on personnel or for other companies. For his study, Bradley has evaluated documents which survived from the records of Stage Revisers (or Plotters as they were known). Bradley's evidence includes seven theatre plots and seventeen manuscript plays, come from theatre productions which took place at the Shakespearean playhouse, or Rose Theatre. The Stage Revisers worked from plots or lists which indicated the action taking place on stage, the props needed, costume changes and the actors who should appear. The book contains reproductions of the extant plots of the period, an appendix listing playwrights, plays, theatre companies and the number of actors needed for performance and an extensive bibliography.