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This series presents original research on theatre histories and performance histories; the time period covered is from about 1500 to the early 18th century. Studies in which women's activities are a central feature of discussion are especially of interest; this may include women as financial or technical support (patrons, musicians, dancers, seamstresses, wig-makers) or house support staff (e.g., gatherers), rather than performance per se. We also welcome critiques of early modern drama that take into account the production values of the plays and rely on period records of performance.
Callan Davies presents “strangeness” as a fresh critical paradigm for understanding the construction and performance of Jacobean drama—one that would have been deeply familiar to its playwrights and early audiences. This study brings together cultural analysis, philosophical enquiry, and the…
Hardback – 2020-09-01
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London brings together a group of essays from across multiple fields of study that examine the socio-cultural, political, economic, and aesthetic dimensions of pageantry in sixteenth and seventeenth-century London. This collection…
Hardback – 2020-02-12
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
Starting from the early modern presumption of the incorporation of role with authority, Jean Lambert explores male teachers as representing and engaging with types of authority in English plays and dramatic entertainments by Shakespeare and his contemporaries from the late sixteenth to the early…
Hardback – 2019-11-14
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
Unruly Audiences and the Theater of Control in Early Modern London explores the effects of audience riots on the dramaturgy of early modern playwrights, arguing that playwrights from Marlowe to Brome often used their plays to control the physical reactions of their audience. This study analyses how…
Hardback – 2019-10-03
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
Facial Hair and the Performance of Early Modern Masculinity is the first full-length critical study to analyse the importance of beards in terms of the theatrical performance of masculinity. According to medical, cultural, and literary discourses of early modern era in England, facial hair marked…
Hardback – 2019-07-02
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
Portraits in Early Modern English Drama studies the complex web of interconnections that grows out of the presentation of portraits as props in early modern English drama. Emanuel Stelzer considers this theory from the Elizabethan age up to the closing of the theatres. This book examines how the…
Hardback – 2019-05-16
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
Immigrants from the Low Countries constituted the largest population of resident aliens in early modern England. Possessing superior technology in a number of fields and enjoying governmental protection, the Flemish were charged by many native artisans with unfair economic competition. With…
Hardback – 2018-10-09
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
Drama and the Politics of Generational Conflict in Shakespeare’s England examines the intersection between art and culture and explains how ideas about age circulated in early modern England. Stephannie Gearhart illustrates how a variety of texts – including drama by Shakespeare, Jonson, and…
Hardback – 2018-03-23
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
The Chester Cycle in Context, 1555-1575 considers the implications of recent archival research which has profoundly changed our view of the continuation of performances of Chester's civic biblical play cycle into the reign of Elizabeth I. Scholars now view the decline and ultimate abandonment of…
Paperback – 2017-05-24
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
The Children’s Troupes and the Transformation of English Theater 1509–1608 uncovers the role of the children’s companies in transforming perceptions of authorship and publishing, performance, playing spaces, patronage, actor training, and gender politics in the sixteenth century. Jeanne McCarthy…
Hardback – 2017-01-24
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
Drawing on broad research, this study explores the different social and theatrical masking activities in England during the Middle Ages and the early 16th century. The authors present a coherent explanation of the many functions of masking, emphasizing the important links among festive practice,…
Paperback – 2016-11-30
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
In this essay collection, the contributors contend that academic drama represents an important, but heretofore understudied, site of cultural production in early modern England. Focusing on plays that were written and performed in academic environments such as Oxford University, Cambridge…
Paperback – 2016-11-28
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
Performing Maternity in Early Modern England features essays that share a common concern with exploring maternity's cultural representation, performative aspects and practical consequences in the period from 1540-1690. The essays interrogate how early modern texts depict fertility, conception,…
Paperback – 2016-11-28
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
In the early seventeenth century, the London stage often portrayed a ruler covertly spying on his subjects. Traditionally deemed 'Jacobean disguised ruler plays', these works include Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, Marston's The Malcontent and The Fawn, Middleton's The Phoenix, and Sharpham's…
Paperback – 2016-11-16
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
Grieving women in early modern English drama, this study argues, recall not only those of Classical tragedy, but also, and more significantly, the lamenting women of medieval English drama, especially the Virgin Mary. Looking at the plays of Shakespeare, Kyd, and Webster, this book presents a…
Paperback – 2016-11-11
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
With the publication of Brian Gibbons's Jacobean City Comedy thirty-five years ago, the urban satires by Ben Jonson, John Marston and Thomas Middleton attained their 'official status as a Renaissance subgenre' that was distinct, by its farcical humour and ironic tone, from 'citizen comedy' or '…
Paperback – 2016-11-11
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
Disguise devices figure in many early modern English plays, and an examination of them clearly affords an important reflection on the growth of early theatre as well as on important aspects of the developing nation. In this study Peter Hyland considers a range of practical issues related to the…
Paperback – 2016-11-11
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
Emphasizing a performative and stage-centered approach, this book considers early modern European theater as an international phenomenon. Early modern theater was remarkable both in the ways that it represented material and symbolic exchanges across political, linguistic, and cultural borders (both…
Paperback – 2016-11-11
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
Through exciting and unconventional approaches, including critical/historical, printing/publishing and performance studies, this study mines Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to produce new insights into the early modern family, the individual, and society in the context of early modern capitalism.…
Paperback – 2016-11-11
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
Theatrical performance, suggest the contributors to this volume, can be an unpredictable, individual experience as well as a communal, institutional or cultural event. The essays collected here use the tools of theatre history in their investigation into the phenomenology of the performance…
Paperback – 2016-10-19
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
In this study, the author offers new interpretations of Shakespeare's works in the context of two major contemporary notions of collectivity: the crowd and rumour. The plays illustrate that rumour and crowd are mutually dependent; they also betray a fascination with the fact that crowd and rumour…
Paperback – 2016-10-11
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
James Shirley was the last great dramatist of the English Renaissance, shining out among other luminaries such as John Ford, Ben Jonson, or Richard Brome. This collection considers Shirley within the culture of his time, and highlights his contribution to seventeenth-century English literature as…
Hardback – 2016-10-06
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
Drawing upon recent scholarship in Renaissance studies regarding notions of the body, political, physical and social, this study examines how the satiric tragedians of the English Renaissance employ the languages of sex - including sexual slander, titillation, insinuation and obscenity - in the…
Paperback – 2016-10-03
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
Restoration Staging 1660–74 cuts through prevalent ideas of Restoration theatre and drama to read early plays in their original theatrical contexts. Tim Keenan argues that Restoration play texts contain far more information about their own performance than previously imagined. Focusing on specific…
Hardback – 2016-09-14
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
Focusing on Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, John Webster and John Milton, Martyrs and Players in Early Modern England argues that the English tragedians reflected an unease within the culture to acts of religious violence. David Anderson explores a link between the unstable emotional…
Paperback – 2016-08-26
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
The English Renaissance has long been considered a period with a particular focus on imitation; however, much related scholarship has misunderstood or simply marginalized the significance of emulative practices and theories in the period. This work uses the interactions of a range of English…
Paperback – 2016-08-26
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
Well illustrated, accessibly presented, and drawing on a comprehensive range of historical documents, including British, German and other European images, and literary as well as non-literary texts (many previously unconsidered in this context), this study offers the first interdisciplinary…
Paperback – 2016-08-26
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
Did Shakespeare's original audiences weep? Equally, while it seems obvious that they must have laughed at plays performed in early modern theatres, can we say anything about what their laughter sounded like, about when it occurred, and about how, culturally, it was interpreted? Related to both of…
Paperback – 2016-08-26
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
Desires of Credit in Early Modern Theory and Drama traces the near-simultaneous rise of economic theory, literary criticism, and public theater in London at the turn of the seventeenth century, and posits that connecting all three is a fascination with creating something out of nothing simply by…
Hardback – 2016-05-18
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
Magical Transformations on the Early Modern Stage furthers the debate about the cultural work performed by representations of magic on the early modern English stage. It considers the ways in which performances of magic reflect and feed into a sense of national identity, both in the form of magic…
Hardback – 2016-03-18
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
Contending that criticism of Marlowe’s plays has been limited by humanist conceptions of tragedy, this book engages with trauma theory, especially psychoanalytic trauma theory, to offer a fresh critical perspective within which to make sense of the tension in Marlowe’s plays between the tragic and…
Hardback – 2016-03-18
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
In this sustained full length study of Marlowe's plays, Andrew Duxfield argues that Marlovian drama exhibits a marked interest in unity and unification, and that in doing so it engages with a discourse of anxiety over social discord that was prominent in the 1580s and 1590s. In combination with the…
Hardback – 2016-03-18
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
A decade after the Restoration of Charles II, a disturbing group of tragedies, dubbed by modern critics the horror or the blood-and-torture villain tragedies, burst onto the London stage. Ten years later they were gone - absorbed into the partisan frenzy which enveloped the theatre at the height of…
Hardback – 2016-03-18
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
This book establishes new information about the likely content of ten lost plays from the period 1580-1642. These plays’ authors include Nashe, Heywood, and Dekker; and the plays themselves connect in direct ways to some of the most canonical dramas of English literature, including Hamlet, King…
Hardback – 2015-11-28
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
The essays in this volume investigate English, Italian, Spanish, German, Czech, and Bengali early modern theater, placing Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the theatrical contexts of western and central Europe, as well as the Indian sub-continent. Contributors explore the mobility of theatrical…
Hardback – 2014-08-18
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
Despite his significant influence as a courtier, diplomat, playwright and theatre manager, Thomas Killigrew (1612-1683) remains a comparatively elusive and neglected figure. The original essays in this interdisciplinary volume shine new light on a singular, contradictory Englishman 400 years after…
Hardback – 2013-10-18
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
Even for scholars who have devoted their careers to the early modern theatre, the name John Lowin may not instantly evoke recognition-until now, the actor's life and contribution to the theatre of the period has never been the subject of a full-length publication. In this study, Barbara Wooding…
Hardback – 2013-08-23
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
In this major reassessment of his subject, Richard Rowland restores Thomas Heywood-playwright, miscellanist and translator-to his rightful place in early modern theatre history. Rowland contextualizes and historicizes this important contemporary of Shakespeare, locating him on the geographic and…
Hardback – 2010-03-12
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
Significant and unexplored signs of John Marston's literary rivalry with Ben Jonson are investigated here by Charles Cathcart. The centrepiece of the book is its argument that the anonymous play The Family of Love, sometimes attributed to Thomas Middleton and sometimes to Lording Barry, was in part…
Hardback – 2008-04-28
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
Considering major works by Kyd, Shakespeare, Middleton and Webster among others, this book transforms current understanding of early modern revenge tragedy. Examing the genre in light of historical revisions to England's Reformations, and with appropriate regard to the social history of the dead,…
Hardback – 2008-03-28
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
Caesarian power was a crucial context in the Renaissance, as rulers in Europe, Russia and Turkey all sought to appropriate Caesarian imagery and authority, but it has been surprisingly little explored in scholarship. In this study Lisa Hopkins explores the way in which the stories of the Caesars,…
Hardback – 2008-03-28
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
Offering evidence of women's extensive contributions to the theatrical landscape, this volume sharply challenges the assumption that the stage was 'all male' in early modern England. The editors and contributors argue that the pervasiveness of female performance affected cultural production, even…
Paperback – 2008-03-12
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
In this comparative study of English and Spanish drama, the author concerns himself with theatrical conventions, the social significance of drama, and audience-reception in the early modern court-cities of London and Madrid. The primary focus of this study is the drama of Shakespeare and some of…
Hardback – 2005-10-28
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
In Cymbeline: Constructions of Britain, Ros King argues that because of previous misunderstanding of the nature and history of tragi-comedy, critics have mistaken the tone of Shakespeare's play. Although it is often dismissed as a pedestrian 'romance', or at best a self-parodic reworking of…
Hardback – 2005-02-28
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama
Staging Gender in Behn and Centlivre studies the representation of gender in four of the most important plays by the leading professional women playwrights of the late Stuart period. Behn's The Rover (1677) and The Luckey Chance (1686) and Centlivre's The Busie Body (1709) and The Wonder: A Woman…
Hardback – 2004-03-28
Routledge
Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama