Shakespeare in the Theatre: Sir William Davenant and the Duke’s Company

Eubanks Winkler and Schoch reveal how – and why – the first generation to stage Shakespeare after Shakespeare’s lifetime changed absolutely everything. Founder of the Duke’s Company, Sir William Davenant influenced how Shakespeare was performed in a profound and lasting way. This open access book provides the first performance-based account of Restoration Shakespeare, exploring the precursors to Davenant’s approach to Restoration Shakespeare, the cultural context of Restoration theatre, the theatre spaces in which the Duke’s Company performed, Davenant’s adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, acting styles, and the lasting legacy of Davenant’s approach to staging Shakespeare.

The eBook editions of this work are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Queen's University Belfast.

Amanda Eubanks Winkler is Professor of music history and cultures at Syracuse University, USA. She has published extensively on the Restoration music and theatre and is the author of Music, Dance, and Drama in Early Modern English Schools (2020) and O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note: Music for Witches, the Melancholic and the Mad on the Seventeenth-Century English Stage (2006). She has edited two volumes of Restoration theatre music (John Eccles's Incidental Music, 2015; Music for Macbeth, 2004) and recently edited the collection Beyond Boundaries: Rethinking Music Circulation in Early Modern England (2017). From 2017-2020 she was the Co-Investigator for 'Performing Restoration Shakespeare'.

Richard Schoch is Professor of drama at Queen’s University Belfast, UK. He is the author of Writing the History of the British Stage, 1660-1900 (2016), Queen Victoria and the Theatre of her Age (2004), Not Shakespeare (2002) and Shakespeare’s Victorian Stage (1998). For the Arden series Great Shakespeareans, he edited the prize-winning volume Macready, Booth, Terry, Irving (2010). From 2017-2020 he has been Principal Investigator for ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare’, a practice-based research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He currently serves on the editorial boards of Shakespeare Quarterly and Shakespeare Bulletin.