Adrian Noble’s How to Direct Shakespeare and Greg Doran’s My Shakespeare: A Director’s Journey through the First Folio

Two former Artistic Directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) published books within seven months of each other. Both are from Bloomsbury Publishing. Adrian Noble’s How to Direct Shakespeare was released under Bloomsbury’s Arden Shakespeare imprint and Greg Doran’s My Shakespeare: A Director’s Journey through the First Folio under its Methuen imprint. The marketing for both books promote the authority of the authors to write about staging Shakespeare, yet the books are so different that “authority” does not mean quite the same thing.

Noble has directed many of Shakespeare’s plays, some multiple times, directed a film of his A Midsummer Night’s Dream staging, and several operas adapted from Shakespeare. Arden’s marketing department portrays Noble as an authority on directing the plays of Shakespeare, and he needs to be. How to Direct Shakespeare is a self-help book that may be characterized as, “How I do that.”

Methuen marketing proclaims Doran’s authority with several admiring quotes on the dust jacket and it seems written in the subtitle, but readers will eventually realize that Journey means lessons Doran learned as he tackles each play. This book is a loose, incomplete autobiography that takes us through the First Folio plays Doran has directed and sometimes into the events of his life. Doran’s book may be characterized as, “How I did that.”

Noble’s Table of Contents is an unusually complete outline of the book, so I have added a link to the TOC should anyone want to…