Reading Plays: Interpretation and Reception

This is the first collection of essays to consider the whole concept of reading plays. Reading a play is a strange activity, totally unlike the reading of any other literary text. Who reads plays and why do they read them? The readers may be actors in performance, playwrights reading to actors, directors producing a performance, critics analysing plays, students studying a play in class, editors creating editions, playwrights preparing their own work for reading by a non-theatre-going public, playwrights reading other playwrights' work, audiences making sense of the play they are watching, as well as people reading plays rather than watching them in the theatre. These activities and the reasons for reading a play are considered in the essays. The playwrights range from Terence, Shakespeare and Moliere to Chekhov, Pinter and Peter Weiss. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of the theatre and of literature and literary theory as well as to theatre-goers.