David Albert Mann

David Mann is best known for his books and journal articles on Elizabethan Theatre, concentrating on the evidence in play-texts of how the plays were performed, seeing their interest for the spectator not as being in themes or meanings, but as ‘narratives as they are performed’. The Elizabethan Player (1991), now in paperback, focuses on itinerance, clowning, doubling and improvisation and how the players were presented as characters, especially by their rivals and enemies in juvenile, apprentice and inns-of-court dramas. Shakespeare’s Women (2008) explores the implications for character and performance of their being played by young men, more capable of empathy perhaps than the received view of the ‘boy-actress’, but often mockingly satirical, ultimately disengaged from the roles they played and spokesmen for the male point of view. His latest book, Shakespeare’s Staging & Properties (2017), addresses the recurring urge to put scenery back onto the empty stage and shows how the brevity of preparation and continued touring led them instead to exploit the suggestive possibilities of the stage itself to indicate locale, and how Shakespeare fused the hitherto peripheral performance skills of music, combat and clowning into a new and indivisible whole, with the humble stage property at its centre, providing a physical pivot by which to display character interaction.

His other work includes a novel, The Elevation of Audley Masterton, about a company of Edwardian actors adrift in Africa whose leader gradually realizes and comes to accept the consequences of his earlier amour; Scotland…Almost Afraid to Know Itself: Facing the Truth About the Past, which exposes the distortions of Scottish History pressed to their detriment on Scottish children with the collusion of Scottish academia; and The Crannogshire Gazette, a humorous pastiche inviting you to read between the lines of a local newspaper and discover tales of desire, ambition and despair that lurk beneath the endless trivia of its weekly reporting. For more details of all of these see www.david-albertman.com, which also contains a blog on the place of bricolage in the construction of furniture and toys.