The Shakespeare Pre-Theatre Guide

Curtain up in twenty minutes - and you can’t quite remember who Malvolio is, or why everyone is in a wood.Forty plays. Two facing pages each. Everything you need before the lights go down.Shakespeare’s plots were never meant to be a surprise. His first audiences already knew the stories, which is why he gives away the ending of Romeo and Juliet in the opening fourteen lines. The pleasure was never in wondering what happens. It was in watching it done - and that is far easier when you know who is who before the lights go down.The Shakespeare Pre-Theatre Guide covers forty plays, from Hamlet, Macbeth and Twelfth Night to Coriolanus, Pericles, Edward III and Sir Thomas More - each one self-contained on a single spread, so nothing is ever continued overleaf. Read it over dinner, on the train, or in the last few minutes before the house lights dim.What’s insideForty plays, two facing pages each - the whole of it in front of you at onceWho’s who - the names you need, and how they relateAct by Act - what actually happens, told plainlyListen for - the speeches worth waiting for, and who says themWhy it matters - what to watch the production do with itThe theatre Shakespeare wrote for - daylight, three thousand people, and why the soliloquies are spoken straight at youThe First Folio - why eighteen of these plays exist at all, and why a line you remember may not be in tonight’s textNo criticism. No theory. No homework. This is a book for the hour before you go, written on the assumption that you are there to enjoy yourself - because in 1599 the audience ate, drank, shouted at the stage, and when the tragedy was over the company came back on and danced.If you enjoyed it, you did it correctly. There is no other test.Time is knowledge.