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A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama 1580-1642, by Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xvi + 289. Cloth $69.96; paperback $24.95.
To what kinds of offstage sounds can "noise" refer in stage directions? About how often does this term occur in the plays of the period? What about specific examples of usage? What was it that players were expected to do when instructed to "pass"? Exactly what are "permissive stage directions"? Everyone remembers the drunken porter, but where can other examples of knocking be found in plays of the period and under what conditions? "Great" would seem an easy term to define, but what did it signify when used in stage directions? Are there usages of "tents" other than in Richard III? Where can one find specific calls for the use of "cloaks"? And what about the intriguingly complicated problems of calls for "banquets"? Besides The Tempest, where can these be found and under what conditions? Answers to these and countless other questions pertaining to what happened on Elizabethan-Jacobean-Caroline stages await the users of this fascinating and enormously useful volume.
For many years, Alan Dessen has been educating students and the professoriate about how Elizabethan playwrights, players, and stages worked. Many hundreds have been helped greatly by Recovering Shakespeare 's Theatrical Vocabulary (1995), Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters (1984), Elizabethan Drama and the Viewer's Eye (1977), as well as many shorter works. Here he teams with Leslie Thomson for something almost completely different. As the title correctly describes, this is not a narrative explicatio as in the past, but an alphabetical listing...