The Elizabethan Player

In this book, first published in 1991, David 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. The author suggests that the stage representation of players is in part 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. This title will be of interest to students of Drama and Performance.