DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Preface to Hamlet

Harley Granville Barker author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Nick Hern Books

Published:13th May '04

Currently unavailable, our supplier has not provided us a restock date

Preface to Hamlet cover

The best known - and longest - of Harley Granville Barker's celebrated Prefaces to Shakespeare: some of the best practical guides to Shakespeare's work yet written. With a foreword by Richard Eyre.

In his Preface to Hamlet, Barker takes the reader through the play, quoting freely and commenting on the meaning and impact of each moment. In doing so he combines his experience as a director and actor with his scholarly knowledge of the Elizabethan stage.

'I regard Granville Barker not only as the first modern English director but as the most influential' Richard Eyre

'A deep and penetrating intelligence illuminates his observations, and they remain permanently relevant' Peter Brook

"'I still find Granville Barker indispensable after 45 years of using his Prefaces. He is the only critic who consistently treats Shakespeare as a playmaker of living drama, rather than as written texts' Peter Hall; 'Barker offers a learned yet deeply intuitive approach to Shakespeare as a man-of-the-theatre, an act of empathy so complete as to give the illusion that Shakespeare himself has been given the opportunity to say what he was aiming for' Simon Callow; 'Granville Barker's deep and penetrating intelligence illuminates his observations and they remain permanently relevant' Peter Brook"

ISBN: 9781854597861

Dimensions: 210mm x 150mm x 20mm

Weight: 465g

352 pages