Harley Granville Barker: A Preface to Modern Shakespeare

Among his many other achievements, Granville Barker's influence on the modern understanding and performance of Shakespeare’s plays has been crucial and pervasive: not only did he demolish the pictorial tradition, restore the complete texts, and establish natural and rapid speech in the acting of Shakespeare’s plays, but he also proved Shakespeare’s case as a playwright, thus establishing performance as an integral element in the interpretation of a play’s meaning. This book, originally published in 1986, is the first comprehensive study of Granville Barker's Shakespeare productions and criticism, in which Christine Dymkowski examines both his theory and his practice. The study begins by outlining the state of Shakespeare production in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and exploring the theatrical experiments of William Poel and Gordon Craig, both of whom influenced Barker. It then examines in detail Barker’s Savoy productions of The Winter’s Tale, Twelfth Night (1912), and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1914), which shattered the prevailing scenic tradition. Using promptbooks and reviews to reconstruct their significant aspects, the author evaluates the productions’ originality and contemporary reception, as well as their influence on modern staging, using Peter Brook’s famous Dream (1970) as a point of comparison. The next chapter examines the principles behind Barker’s Savoy productions through discussion of his Shakespeare criticism, focussing not on the more familiar Prefaces to Shakespeare but on Barker’s less well-known articles, books, lectures, and reviews. The relationship between Barker’s theory and his own practice is further explored in an extensive examination of the Preface to King Lear and the 1940 production at the Old Vic that it inspired and which Barker directed. A wealth of documents records this production and John Gielgud’s performance as Lear: an unpublished reconstruction of the production by Hallam Fordham and Gielgud himself, letters and notes from Barker to Gielgud, photographs taken during actual performance, actors’ memoirs, contemporary reviews, and subsequent criticism – all of these are marshalled for a thorough analysis of the interplay between literary criticism and actual production. Containing more than 40 black-and-white photographs of the productions discussed as well as several reproductions of sketches from the Savoy promptbooks, Harley Granville Barker is certain to interest not only students and teachers of Shakespeare and drama, but also anyone with an interest in the theatre, whether casual or professional. Read more