Paul Menzer (North Texas) has edited another collection of essays distributed by Associated University Presses, 2006. This one, from Susquehanna University Press (US $ 52.50) is Inside Shakespeare: Essays on the Blackfriars Stage. There have been numerous new Globes built over the last century or more, and recently a Blackfriars was built in Staunton (VA). What was Shakespeare's indoor theater like, how did it shape the plays presented there, was it an advance on the roofless theaters or something of a return to the earlier kind of presentation of plays in great halls, colleges, the Inns of Court, etc? Here some 20 scholars, young and promising and emeritus and distinguished (Andrew Gurr) give us a great deal of interesting information on the theater that drew audiences to the plays of Shakespeare and others in The City rather than The Bankside. Whether the audiences of today want to stand in a roofless Globe or sit in a group of 300 in a new Blackfriars rather than get up close and personal with a television set, where they have the best seat in the house and can take snack breaks, or even go back and repeat a scene with their DVD, I cannot say. I expect that new ways of presentation are still to come and that, as ever, productions will be influenced by them.
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