Shakespeare's Double Plays

Brett Gamboa is Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University, Massachusetts. His teaching and research focus on Shakespeare's plays in performance, although he teaches courses that explore a range of artistic media, from lyric poetry to contemporary television. His essays and reviews on Shakespeare and other dramatists appear in several journals and books, and he has published performance-oriented introductions and commentaries for the forty plays collected in The Norton Shakespeare. Gamboa's scholarship is informed by his work as a theatre director, having mounted productions for professional companies and on campuses, including ten plays by Shakespeare.

• Introduction; 1. 'Improbable fictions': Shakespeare's plays without the plays; 2. Versatility and verisimilitude on sixteenth-century stages; 3. Doubling in The Winter's Tale; 4. Dramaturgical directives and Shakespeare's cast size; 5. Doubling in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet; 6. 'What, are they children?': Reconsidering Shakespeare's boy actors; 7. Doubling in Twelfth Night and Othello; Epilogue: ragozine and Shakespearean substitution; Appendix: doubling roles in Shakespeare's plays.

'With its entirely new sense of Shakespeare's combined poetic and practical craft, this bold and elegant book has far-reaching consequences for the worlds of performance, editing and interpretation.' Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham