Product Description: The Theatre of Drottningholm—Then and Now tells the story of the Drottningholm Court Theatre, an opera house located at Drottningholm Palace near Stockholm. The theater was rarely used after the death of King Gustav III in 1792 until it was rediscovered in 1921, which has left not only the auditorium but also the stage machinery, painted flats, and backdrops almost perfectly preserved...read more

Product Description: George Washington Zombie Slayer is a comical parody and historical satire of America's Greatest Founding Father. As an eleven year old boy in Colonial Virginia, young George Washington first encounters the wild, ferocious zombies that would cause his father's death and shape his own destiny...read more

Product Description: Why did Greek actors in the age of Sophocles always wear masks? In this book, first published in 2007, David Wiles provided the first book-length study of this question. He surveys the evidence of vases and other monuments, arguing that they portray masks as part of a process of transformation, and that masks were never seen in the fifth century as autonomous objects...read more

This book argues that a professional Elizabethan theatre company always contained one actor known as 'the clown'. Its focus is Will Kemp, clown to the Chamberlain's Men from 1594 to 1599 and famed for his solo dance from London to Norwich in 1600. David Wiles combines textual, theatrical and biographical lines of research in order to map out Kemp's career. He shows how Shakespeare and other dramatists made use of Kemp's talents and wrote specific roles as vehicles for him. He discerns a perpetual and productive tension between the ambitions of a progressive writer and the aspirations of a traditional actor whose art was rooted in improvisation. The book also describes the clown tradition in general, dealing with Kemp's inheritance from medieval theatre, with the work of Richard Tarlton, the great comic actor of the 1570s and 1580s, and with Kemp's successor, Robert Armin, who created the 'fool' parts in Shakespeare.

This book provides a detailed analysis of the conventions and techniques of performance characteristic of the Greek theatre of Menander and the subsequent Roman theatre of Plautus and Terence. Drawing on literary and archaeological sources, and on scientific treatises, David Wiles identifies the mask as crucial to the actor's art, and shows how sophisticated the art of the mask-maker became. He also examines the other main elements which the audience learned to decode: costume, voice, movement, etc. In order to identify features that were unique to Hellenistic theatre he contrasts Greek New Comedy with other traditions of masked comedy, and shows how different Roman conventions of performance rest upon different underlying assumptions about religion, marriage and class. David Wiles offers theatre historians and classicists a radical new approach to reading play texts. His book will also be useful to archaeologists seeking to understand what masks mean and how Greek and Roman theatres were used. (view table of contents)

Product Description: David Wiles considers theatrical activity "happening" in churches, streets, pubs and galleries, as well as in buildings explicitly designed to be "theaters", in this historical account. Surveying performance space usage within the traditions of Western Europe, Wiles traces a diverse set of continuities, from Greece and Rome to the present, including many areas not included in standard accounts of theater history...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

In this book, David Wiles introduces ancient Greek theater to students and enthusiasts interested in knowing how the plays were performed. Theater was a ceremony bound up with fundamental activities in ancient Athenian life and Wiles explores those elements that created the theater of the time. Actors rather than writers are the book's main concern and Wiles examines how the actor used the resources of story-telling, dance, mask, song and visual action to create a large-scale event that would shape the life of the citizen community. (view table of contents)

Product Description: David Wiles explores the performance of tragedy as a spatial practice specific to Athenian culture, at once religious and political. After reviewing controversies and archaeological data regarding the fifth-century performance space, Wiles turns to the chorus and shows how dance mapped out the space for the purposes of any given play...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: For a century, scholars have debated whether "A Midsummer Night's Dream" was written as an occasional play for a court wedding or whether it was conceived in the first instance as a play for the professional theatre. The question is fundamental to our understanding of Shakespeare's position within the Elizabethan world...read more

Product Description: Robin Hood was the subject of many fifteenth and sixteenth century folk-plays, of which only traces remain. As a result, the ballads, many of which have survived, have usually been regarded as the main-spring of traditions about the famous outlaw...read more