On actors and acting

"An interest in actors and acting has been a common theme in Peter Thomson's published work on Shakespeare, Brecht and British theatre from the middle ages to the present. This collection of his essays on that theme are divided into three sections. The first centres on Elizabethan theatre practice; acting styles, the art of making an entrance on the open stage, rehearsal practices, the impact of the jig, and the peculiar histories of William Knell, Augustine Phillips and Will Kemp. The second section highlights themes, episodes and the contemporary taste that determined the 'greatness' of David Garrick, Frederick Robson, John Philip Kemble, Edmund Kean and Henry Irving during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in England. The conspicuous concern with marriage in the eighteenth-century drama is placed in the context of Hardwicke's 1753 Marriage Act and the consequences of the 1603 legislation on bigamy, and the ambitious experiment of Arthur Murphy and Samuel Foote at Drury Lane in 1761 is scrutinised. The third section focuses on twentieth-century performances of Shakespeare - at Stratford in the 1970s and in the New Globe as the new century begins."—Jacket.