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William Poel (22 July 1852-13 December 1934) was an English actor, theatrical manager and dramatist best known for his presentations of Shakespeare.
A son of William Pole, he grew up among Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood painters and reportedly sat for William Holman Hunt in his painting The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple. He took on the name Poel following a misspelling of his own name on a theatre billing. At St. George's Hall, London, in 1881 he revived Hamlet, using the text of the first quarto and doing without scenery. From 1881 to 1883 he was manager of Royal Victoria Hall, London, and then for a year manager of F. R. Benson's company.
In 1895 he founded the Elizabethan Stage Society and spent much of his career researching and lecturing on Elizabethan performance. He put his studies to work on stage, as he tried to recreate performances using an open stage, a unified acting ensemble, an uncut text, very little scenery and a swift pace of performance. For incidental music he worked initially with Arnold Dolmetsch, then later with Rosabel Watson. His work affected many theatre practitioners, most of all Harley Granville Barker. His presentations included Shakespeare's Measure for Measure (1893) and Two Gentlemen of Verona (1910), plays by Marlowe and Ben Jonson, Milton's Samson Agonistes (1900) and Swinburne's Locrine (1900).
Poel also dramatized W. D. Howells's A Foregone Conclusion under the title Priest and Painter (produced 1884) and Baring-Gould's novel Mehala (produced 1886). He wrote several comediettas and a book, Shakespeare in the Theatre. The National Portrait Gallery contains a number of pictures by Henry Tonks of Poel in the role as Father Keegan in G. B. Shaw's play John Bull's Other Island. His great-nephew Rupert Pole (1919-2006) was married to Anaïs Nin.
The Poel Workshops, run and promoted by The Society for Theatre Research since 1952, emphasize Poel's approach to text in the delivery of which he desired speed, lightness, musicality and the effect of true speech. The Society for Theatre Research's project has constantly evolved and is now known as the Poel Workshops, but still keeps to its aims of the text-centric and verse-faithful to the plays of Shakespeare.
The English Renaissance theatre or Elizabethan theatre was the theatre of England from 1558 to 1642. Its most prominent playwrights were William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson.
Measure for Measure is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1603 or 1604 and first performed in 1604. It was published in the First Folio of 1623.
The Folger Shakespeare Library is an independent research library on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., United States. It has the world's largest collection of the printed works of William Shakespeare, and is a primary repository for rare materials from the early modern period (1500–1750) in Britain and Europe. The library was established by Henry Clay Folger in association with his wife, Emily Jordan Folger. It opened in 1932, two years after his death.
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) is a regional repertory theatre in Ashland, Oregon, United States, founded in 1935 by Angus L. Bowmer. The Festival now offers matinee and evening performances of a wide range of classic and contemporary plays not limited to Shakespeare. During the Festival, between five and eleven plays are offered in daily rotation six days a week in its three theatres. It welcomed its millionth visitor in 1971, its 10-millionth in 2001, and its 20-millionth visitor in 2015.
Ben Iden Payne, also known as B. Iden Payne, was an English actor, director and teacher. Active in professional theatre for seventy years, he helped the first modern repertory theatre in the United Kingdom, was an early and effective advocate for Elizabethan staging of Shakespeare plays, and served as an inspiration for Shakespeare Companies and university theatre programmes throughout North America and the British Isles. A theatre at the University of Texas is named after him, as well as annual theatre awards presented in Austin, Texas.
Harley Granville-Barker was an English actor, director, playwright, manager, critic, and theorist. After early success as an actor in the plays of George Bernard Shaw, he increasingly turned to directing and was a major figure in British theatre in the Edwardian and inter-war periods. As a writer his plays, which tackled difficult and controversial subject matter, met with a mixed reception during his lifetime but have continued to receive attention.
In his own time, William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was rated as merely one among many talented playwrights and poets, but since the late 17th century has been considered the supreme playwright and poet of the English language.
Sejanus His Fall, a 1603 play by Ben Jonson, is a tragedy about Lucius Aelius Sejanus, the favourite of the Roman emperor Tiberius.
Walter Nugent Monck CBE (1878–1958) was an English theatre director and founder of Maddermarket Theatre, Norwich.
Sir Francis Robert Benson was an English actor-manager. He founded his own company in 1883 and produced all but two of Shakespeare's plays. His thirty-year association with the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre and the annual Shakespeare Festival in Stratford-upon-Avon laid down foundations for the creation of the Royal Shakespeare Company after his death.
Shakespeare's plays are a canon of approximately 39 dramatic works written by the English poet, playwright, and actor William Shakespeare. The exact number of plays as well as their classifications as tragedy, history, comedy, or otherwise is a matter of scholarly debate. Shakespeare's plays are widely regarded as among the greatest in the English language and are continually performed around the world. The plays have been translated into every major living language.
John Corbin was an American dramatic critic and author.
William Bridges-Adams was an English theatre director and designer, associated closely with the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, from 1919 until 1934.
The Maddermarket Theatre is a British theatre located in St. John's Alley in Norwich, Norfolk, England. It was founded in 1921 by Nugent Monck, and is situated next to Strangers' Hall.
Thousands of performances of William Shakespeare's plays have been staged since the end of the 16th century. While Shakespeare was alive, many of his greatest plays were performed by the Lord Chamberlain's Men and King's Men acting companies at the Globe and Blackfriars Theatres. Among the actors of these original performances were Richard Burbage, Richard Cowley, and William Kempe.
Booth's Theatre was a theatre in New York built by actor Edwin Booth. Located on the southeast corner of 23rd Street and Sixth Avenue, Booth's Theatre opened on February 3, 1869.
John Paterson is a Canadian director, devisor, dramaturg, translator, actor and theatre creator who works across Canada, the United Kingdom, and internationally. His favourite credits include directing the installation of The List (BoucheWHACKED!), the site-specific The Women of Troy and F. Garcia Lorca’s The Love of Don Perlimplin for Belisa ; production dramaturgy on the English language premiere of H. Muller’s Macbeth: nach Shakespeare; and playing Adolf Hitler and Walt Disney in The Blue Light and Scheffler in The Ugly One.
The Elizabethan Stage Society was a theatrical society dedicated to putting on productions of drama from the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, particularly those of William Shakespeare. It was founded in 1895 by William Poel. Its minimal scenery, platform stage, quick scene changes and emphasis on the poetry was in direct and deliberate contrast to Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Henry Irving's large-set productions, and were a major influence on later staging and production of these works. Walter Nugent Monck was its stage manager in the 1920s, and its actors included Ben Greet
Professor Thomas J. King Jr. was an educator, and an early user of word processing and sequence analysis to compare available early versions of William Shakespeare's plays for identification of variant texts and their analysis. Dr. King's historical work also researched original prompt copies of Elizabethan Era and Jacobean Era plays contemporary to Shakespeare, along with their marginalia, in order to identify stage directions and infer physical staging of Shakespeare's plays at the Globe and other London venues, as well as at provincial halls and inns where Elizabethan troupes performed on tour. In his extensive studies, Prof. King created databases of every Shakespeare play and other extant Elizabethan contemporary playhouse documents, by scene and character, to determine number of lines, and therefore the roles that could be doubled with sufficient time between for costume change, thus enabling him to determine the size of a working Elizabethan theater company.
The Little Theatre Complex consists of three theatres in a building located on the University of Cape Town's Hiddingh campus on Orange Street in Cape Town. The Little Theatre, the main theatre in the building, is actually the largest providing seating for 240 people. The other two theatres, the Arena and Intimate theatres, can seat 70-80 people. The theatre complex is adjacent to the fine arts and drama departments at the University of Cape Town.
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