Reviews for Lorca: The Theatre Beneath the Sand

The average rating for Lorca: The Theatre Beneath the Sand based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-01-24 00:00:00 Brian R Bigler To me, this book's title does it a disservice. While in part it discusses fascinating original research about how some French people used demands for Molière's play "Tartuffe" ' featuring a hypocritical religious zealot as its titular villain ' as a way to protest the perceived religious zealotry of the Bourbon Restoration, the overall focus of the book is a broader history of religion and resistance in the Restoration, not a narrow cultural history of the Restoration theater. It tells the story of the Catholic religious revival under the Restoration, the backlash this sometimes provoked, and the bind this created for state officials who supported the aims of the religious revival but abhorred the unrest their methods provoked. This is not a book for people without any background in the history of the Restoration, but is not as limited to specialists as its title might imply.

Review # 2 was written on 2021-01-04 00:00:00 Jeremy Lenard A truly astounding amount of scholarship went into writing this book. Tiffany Stern has documented enormous bodies of evidence about theatrical practice from the mid-sixteenth through late eighteenth centuries. I have to confess I only read through the closure of the theaters in 1642 (my interests do not at this time extend to Restoration theater), but I found the whole fascinating. I read with an eye for one particular project I'm working on, but Stern's book has sparked ideas for two other projects. Stern's book, as the title suggests, focuses on rehearsal,but of necessity in covering that topic she extends to many other considerations of the early professional theater, including casting, playing space, revision. and company management. This is an excellent study.