Robert Shaughnessy is Professor of Theatre at the University of Kent, UK
Robert Shaughnessy’s Shakespeare in the Theatre: The National Theatre, 1963–1975: Olivier and Hall makes a valuable contribution to Shakespearean performance history and provides a cornerstone to Bloomsbury’s Shakespeare in the Theatre series. * Theatre Journal * Shows the actor shaping the legacy that so strongly shaped him…Highlights include unsparing accounts of Olivier’s infamous productions of Othello in blackface and of The Merchant of Venice with a custom set of dentures that rearranged his celebrated face into a Semitic caricature. From such appalling expressions of minstrelsy-like love and theft, Shaughnessy does not permit the reader to look away. Yet the picture he paints, of a company cast in the shadow of the Royal Shakespeare Company and fighting to shake its superfluous reputation, is more pointillist tableau than knife-edged portrait. Taken as a whole, the book deftly captures Shakespeare’s centrality to the National Theatre’s sometimes canny, sometimes desultory handling of the period’s political and aesthetic churn. * Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 *