Bøger i Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama serien

Contends that academic drama represents an important, but understudied, site of cultural production in early modern England. Focusing on plays that were written and performed in academic environments, this work investigates how those plays strive to give coherence to issues of religion, politics, gender, pedagogy, education, and economics.

A study of laughter and weeping in English theatres, broadly defined, from around 1550 until their closure in 1642. This title is concerned both with the representation of these actions on the stage, and with what can be reconstructed about the laughter and weeping of theatrical audiences themselves.

In Staging Spectatorship in the Plays of Philip Massinger, Joanne Rochester examines examples of on-stage spectatorship in three plays by Massinger, head playwright for the King's Men from 1625 to 1640. Focusing on the specific form of metatheatrical inset in each play-plays-within in The Roman Actor, masques-within in The City Madam, and the titular miniature portrait of The Picture - she analyzes Massinger's assumptions about interpretation, perception and spectator response.

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.

The essays in this volume investigate English, Italian, Spanish, German, and Czech early modern theatre, placing Shakespeare and his English contemporaries in the theatrical contexts of early modern Europe. Contributors examine the movement of theatrical units, genres, performance practices and dramatic texts across geo-linguistic borders.

In the first full-length study devoted to John Lowin, Wooding provides a comprehensive overview of the life and times of one of the greatest actors of seventeenth-century England. She examines his involvement in the Jacobean/Caroline world as citizen, performer, and manager of King's Men's Company.

Despite his significant influence as a courtier, diplomat, playwright and Restoration 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 seventeenth-century Englishman 400 years after his birth.

Featuring chapters dealing with Shakespeare and performance culture in modernity, this collection intends to bring better understanding to Shakespeare's imaginative investment in the relationship between theatrical production and the emotional, intellectual and cultural effects of performance broadly defined in social terms.

Thomas Heywood was a playwright, miscellanist and a translator. Arguing that Heywood's theatrical output deserves the same attention and study that has been directed towards Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton, this book looks at the periods of Heywood's creativity. It explores how Heywood participated in the civic life of London in his writings.

Explores the way in which the stories of the Caesars, and of the Julio-Claudians in particular, can be used to figure the stories of English rulers on the Renaissance stage. This title demonstrates how early modern English dramatists, using Roman modes of literary representation as cover, commented on the issues of the day.

Considering major works by Kyd, Shakespeare, Middleton and Webster among others, this book transforms understanding of early modern revenge tragedy. It shows revenge tragedy is not an anti-Catholic and Reformist genre, but one rooted in, and in dialogue with, traditional Catholic culture.

Investigates significant and unexplored signs of John Marston's literary rivalry with Ben Jonson. This book argues that the anonymous play "The Family of Love", sometimes attributed to Thomas Middleton and sometimes to Lording Barry, was in part the work of John Marston, and that it constitutes a whimsical statement of amity with Jonson.

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 on the professional London stages that used men and boys for women's parts. In short, Women Players in England 1500-1660 shows that women were dynamic cultural players in the early modern world.