FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

“David Bevington, one of the most learned and devoted of Shakespeareans, has given us a highly useful study of the staging of the greater plays. The cognitive and imaginative interplay of language and action is conveyed with insight and joy.”
Harold Bloom

“Informed by a lifetime’s play going and reflection, and ranging from Elizabethan inn yards to a singing bus driver in modern-day Chicago, This Wide and Universal Theater offers a compact yet comprehensive account of Shakespeare in performance. David Bevington’s masterly new book will be an indispensable resource for spectators, stage historians, actors and directors, film critics, and Shakespearians of every description.”
David Riggs, author of The World of Christopher Marlowe

This Wide and Universal Theater
Shakespeare in Performance, Then and Now

David Bevington

A capstone to the career of a giant in Shakespearean scholarship, This Wide and Universal Theater is the first book of its kind: an utterly accessible history of how the works of Shakespeare have been performed, from the Renaissance right up to the present—and even on the silver screen by such directors as Orson Welles, Roman Polanski, and Kenneth Branagh. The world’s leading expert on the subject, Bevington moves from the sparse stage sets of Elizabethan playhouses to the spectacular visual effects of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century productions to the present, which has seen companies employ far more understated approaches, emphasizing character and language in a manner much closer to Shakespeare’s own aims. Bringing a lifetime of study to bear on a remarkably underappreciated aspect of Shakespeare’s art, Bevington has crafted a book that will enthrall newcomers and aficionados alike.

David Bevington is the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1967. The author of numerous books, he is also the editor of the twenty-nine volumes of The Bantam Shakespeare and The Complete Works of Shakespeare.

 

David Bevington is available for interviews. For more information, please contact Levi Stahl at (773) 702-0289 or lstahl@press.uchicago.edu