Much Ado About Nothing Director's Playbook

This Director's Playbook expands the text of the play with plenty of sketchbook space, and a number of features that a director will need to keep track of: auditioning, entrances and exits, plot summary, acting techniques for new actors, the producer functions: budget, designing the playbill, the publicity campaign, fundraising, arranging for theater, etc., and the pre-production side: set design, wardrobe or costumery, stage managing, sound, lights, photography. The play has a glossary for unfamiliar terms. Scheduling becomes important in a production of this size, and a team organized around a timeline to get everything ready at the same time and on schedule. The text itself is broken into segments, each scene has a stage diagram for placement of sets -- as well as the set design section for director's notes on what to build, dimensions of the stage, etc. Also included are keylines for each segment of each scene, for ease of reference. This Director's Playbook is ideal for a high school English teacher willing to take on such a project, providing opportunities for many young actors to try out their stuff, and have fun doing it. College drama teachers may find it useful as a class exercise in envisioning a whole production. And community theater groups will find it valuable as a guide to keeping track of all the components. The Playbook is designed to stimulate the director into his/her own ideas about how to present the material. Shakespeare plays are often set in interesting time periods other than the Elizabethan age, and many of his themes resonate with today's headlines -- the eternal themes of love, ambition, skulduggery, and the broad human drama. The list of Playbooks available: Hamlet (www.createspace.com/3742231) Merchant of Venice (www.createspace.com/3862570) Taming of the Shrew (www.createspace.com/3938142) Twelfth Night (www.createspace.com/3894336) Romeo and Juliet (www.createspace.com/3891241) A Midsummer Night's Dream (www.createspace.com/3893774) Much Ado About Nothing (www.createspace.com/3965392) Macbeth (www.createspace.com/3967549) Othello (www.createspace.com/3963830) As You Like It (www.createspace.com/3940714) Richard III (www.createspace.com/3962607) Henry V (www.createspace.com/3969195)

William Shakespeare, the third of eight children, was born on April 23, 1564 in the English market town of Stratford-upon-Avon. His father became the mayor of Stratford in 1568 and worked as a glovemaker and a moneylender. Four years after leaving school at approxi-mately the age of fourteen, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway in November of 1582; their first child Susan-nah was born in May of the following year. Two years later, Anne gave birth to twins, Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, a period called “the lost years,” there is almost no evidence about Shakespeare’s life, nor is there any solid evidence about how or why he made his way to London to become a dramatist. By 1592, however, Shake-speare’s reputation as a playwright and poet had begun to grow. In 1594, he helped found a new theater company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and be-came the company’s dramatist. Shakespeare’s success increased, and by 1598, the year he registered The Merchant of Venice, he had already purchased one of the biggest residences in Stratford. Some of Shakespeare’s richest dramatic work was written after the founding of the Globe Theater by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1599, including Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. After 1611, Shakespeare largely retired from the theater to spend more time in Stratford. He died in 1616 on his birthday, April 23, when he was fifty-two years old.