SHAKESPEARE'S THEATER

A thumbnail history of the English theater, from its ancient and medieval predecessors to its suppression by the Puritans. Using the familiar one-topic-per-spread format, this tracks theater's checkered history as it slowly developed from a religious teaching tool to secular entertainment. Morley (Entertainment, not reviewed, etc.) mixes fictional and historical characters to portray a player's often hand-to-mouth life. She focuses on Shakespeare's period in particular, describing the structure of a typical theater company, the major London stages of the time, what it was like to put on and to attend a play (specifically A Midsummer Night's Dream, though other plays and playwrights get mentions), and the Globe's phoenix-like career. The book closes with a page of random but revealing anecdotes and an actor's 1593 letter to his wife. James's pale paintings (accompanied by captions that are at least as long as the main text) scatter across the pages in sequences that are sometimes hard to follow, but their small, precisely rendered figures, many in elegant costume, reward close inspection. A sturdy addition to the Inside Story series. (Index; glossary; chronology) (Nonfiction. 10-13)