Shakespeare in his Theatre
G. B. Harrison
Almost endless talks could be planned on Shakespeare's prose, his poetry, the sources of his fertility, his heroes, heroines, villains, clowns, but in these ten talks, beginning tonight, all will be subservient to Shakespeare and the theatre, for which he wrote.... Shakespeare the actor-playwright, who himself donned the motley and knew how to get laughs and how to play on the emotions of his audience.
One of the big features of these talks is the distinguished men and women who are going to give them -among them probably the greatest modern producer of Shakespeare in Granville Barker , one of our greatest Shakespearean actresses in Edith Evans , and Nugent Monck who has kept the torch burning at Norwich.
Tonight in the opening talk
G. B. Harrison is to show what Shakespeare's own theatre was like, who came to see his plays, what the professional standing of his actors was. He will take the line that The Merchant of Venice, Love's Labour's Lost, Othello and the rest would have been very different plays had they been written for any other theatre or audience. He is a well-known authority on Shakespeare, his better known books being the three volumes of the ' Elizabethan
Journals ', while he has worked out Shakespeare's reactions to his own times in ' Shakespeare at Work ', and has written, with Granville Barker , ' Companion to Shakespeare Studies '.