David Albert Mann

The Elizabethan Player 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.