A Hyperelliptic View on Teichmuller Space. I

We explicitly describe the Teichmuller space TH_n of hyperelliptic surfaces in terms of natural and effective coordinates as the space of certain (2n-6)-tuples of distinct points on the ideal boundary of the Poincare disc. We essentially use the concept of a simple earthquake which is a particular case of a Fenchel-Nielsen twist deformation. Such earthquakes generate a group that acts transitively on TH_n. This fact can be interpreted as a continuous analog of the well-known Dehn theorem saying that the mapping class group is generated by Dehn twists. We find a simple and effective criterion that verifies if a given representation of the surface group \pi_1\Sigma in the group of isometries of the hyperbolic plane is faithful and discrete. The article also contains simple and elementary proofs of several known results, for instance, of W. M. Goldman's theorem [Gol1] characterizing the faithful discrete representations as having maximal Toledo invariant (which is essentially the area of the representation in the two-dimensional case).