Shakespeare's Dramaturgy ─ A Case Study of Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth

In Shakespearean Dramaturgy, Robert Blacker asks us to forget what we think we know about Shakespeare; his work should be rediscovered on our feet, in the rehearsal room and in performance. Staging Shakespeare today is a process of stripping away 400 years of obfuscation between us and the social and personal observations that lie at the core of his plays. While customs and theatre have changed in that time, people themselves haven't. This book explores the universal themes of power and love in Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth, mining both the texts and a lifetime of productions to share the invaluable discoveries that these experiences throw up.

Robert Blacker was the first dramaturg at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater in New York City, and Des McAnuff’s associate artistic director and dramaturg at the Tony-award-winning La Jolla Playhouse for?twelve seasons, where he worked on The Who’s Tommy and Steppenwolf’s Grapes of Wrath. Over fifty projects from Blacker’s eight years as artistic director of the Sundance Theatre Labs went on to production, including I Am My Own Wife and The Laramie Project. He worked on 20 productions of Shakespeare at these theatres and the Stratford Shakespeare Festival of Canada, where he was insitutional dramaturg for five seasons. He has taught Shakespeare studies in graduate theatre programs at Columbia, Iowa, UCSD, and the Yale School of Drama, where he was interim chair of playwriting. His interview is the first of?eighty-five articles in The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy (2015). He is a graduate of Cornell University.