Publisher Corrections: Publicity and the Early Modern Stage

Reviewed by: Shakespeare and Childhood Jennifer A. Munroe (bio) Shakespeare and Childhood. Edited by Kate Chedgzoy, Suzanne Greenhalgh, and Robert Shaughnessy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Of the many oft-cited quotes from Shakespeare's plays, few, if any, are about children. Yet a new collection of essays reminds us that Shakespeare's plays portrayed issues relevant to childhood, and children were ready participants on the early modern stage. Rather than simply looking at the way the plays represent children from the perspective of adults, the essays in this collection seek to rediscover the children themselves, from Shakespeare's day to today. This collection will be a useful resource not just to Shakespearean scholars, but also to scholars of childhood and children's literature more broadly as it illuminates the "historical origins and contexts of Shakespearean childhoods and their continuing history of cultural reinvention" (6). Divided into two parts, the volume looks at children first in the context of Shakespeare's day and then from the eighteenth century onward. The first part addresses "the questions of what being a child might have meant, both to children, and to adult others, and of how these meanings were reflected, constructed and negotiated by children both as the subjects and the agents of fictional, theatrical and poetic representation" (6). The second part of the book "addresses the cultural history of the relationship between Shakespeare(s) and childhood(s) from a period spanning the eighteenth century to the present" (7). As the first part of the volume promises to remember that children were (and are) not simply smaller versions of adults, we find various approaches to recovering examples of actual children represented on the early modern stage. Catherine Belsey looks at how the young princes of Richard III, whose voices still echo in the pages of literature and history books as they do in the halls of the Tower of London, are shown to exercise some measure of agency and independence, despite their early death at the hands of their uncle. Two essays examine relationships between parents and children in Shakespeare: Hattie Fletcher and Marianne Novy's essay looks at father-child identification, especially that between fathers and daughters, while Patricia Phillippy concentrates on "child-loss" in the Sonnets, focusing on "competing claims to the possession and importance of sons and daughters" in Shakespeare's poems (97). Rounding out the first part of the volume, A. J. Piesse and Lucy Munro both seek to understand how children in Shakespeare's plays work through issues of developing masculine [End Page 86] identity. For Piesse, the child on Shakespeare's stage is a transitional figure, bearing the signs on his (and we might remember that there were no girls, just as there were no women, on the early modern stage) body of the man he would become; thus, the "Shakespearean child figure is a carrier of culture between the generations" (77). Munro's essay similarly considers how boy actors (and child characters in plays) in Coriolanus figured in liminal ways and illustrated how childhood and adulthood are both performative and how these children were "impersonating" a kind of "hypermasculinity" (92). The second part of the volume moves forward in time, with essays that consider Shakespeare's children (and the children who read the plays and saw them performed on the stage) from the eighteenth century and Victorian era to today's 'tween culture. As Suzanne Greenhalgh's introduction to the second part explains, Shakespeare's plays influenced shifting cultural definitions of "proper" childhood, as Shakespeare has been inherited from one generation to the next as the cultural epitome of "good" literature to which adults and children alike should aspire (120). The essays in the second part of the volume, therefore, "do not merely seek to document the relationship between Shakespeare and childhood but to acknowledge and explore the many ways in which Shakespeare has existed within changing cultures of childhood" (120–21). The essays in the second part of the volume address how children understood and used Shakespeare's plays, increasingly so after the early modern period came to a close. Naomi Miller, like Kate Chedgzoy, considers how children used Shakespeare's plays in subversive ways...

‘Enter HAMLET reading on a book’.1 What Shakespeare’s Prince might be reading in 2.2 of Hamlet, so ‘sadly’ and ‘like a wretch’ (2.2.169–70), has long been the subject of critical curiosity. Scholarly speculation ranges from the satires of Juvenal to the Essays of Montaigne, while just as plausibly Hamlet could be ruminating on his own ‘tables’ (if, that is, the actor playing the Prince produces a notebook of some kind in the soliloquy of 1.5).2 Yet, what if Hamlet were holding neither a work of philosophy nor a florilegium, but a Bible? Might we read the character, and the tragedy, of Prince Hamlet differently if his book were the Book? The purpose of this essay is not, of course, to attempt to prove that Hamlet’s prop in 2.2 is a copy of the Bible or its representational equivalent. More simply, my aim is to ask what it might mean for any character to read the Bible on the early modern stage, and what the ramifications of such an act might be. Reading the Bible as an object of drama – as an artefact of the material and spiritual cultures of early modern England – is our starting point. It is through the Book’s physical presence on the early modern stage that the performance of Biblereading – a performance rooted in questions of authority and power of various kinds – will be explored via two plays in particular: Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus and Thomas Heywood’s If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody.

Reviewed by: The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment by Farah Karim-Cooper Vanessa I. Corredera (bio) Farah Karim-Cooper. The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment. New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016. Pp. xiii + 309. $114.00 cloth, $35.95 paper, $28.99 eBook. Continuing the long-standing yet ever evolving scholarly treatment of the early modern body, Farah Karim-Cooper crafts a study that is narrow in focus yet wide-ranging in breadth by casting attention upon the early modern hand. Like previous notable contributions to early modern body studies, Karim-Cooper takes a historicist approach, culling the archives to uncover discourses about the hand in pamphlets, art manuals, anti-theatrical tracts, and conduct books, among other texts. These varied discussions of the hand, Karim-Cooper demonstrates, significantly informed its presentation on the early modern stage, and more specifically, in Shakespeare’s oeuvre. The hand in early modern England, she argues, “was viewed as a microcosm of the self and could indicate the moral character and physical health of the person to whom it was attached” (2). She notes that even today, “the hand is the instrument with which we engage with the physical world and it is the part of our body, apart from the face, with which we communicate most expressively and passionately” (3). For early moderns, the hand even served as a part that distinguishes the human from animal-kind. As such, “The hand is and always has been a symbol of our dignity as human, as civilized beings” (3). It is unsurprising then, that the hand has garnered attention in texts such as Jonathan Sawday’s The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture and David Hillman and Carla Mazzio’s collection The Body in Parts. Karim-Cooper productively builds upon these accounts by concentrating on the hand “as a sign of character and identity” (5). Whether “attached or amputated,” she contends, the hand on Shakespeare’s stage continuously communicated facets of the self, particularly “character and identity” (5). [End Page 410] Across six chapters, Karim-Cooper reveals the capacious symbolic capacity of the hand in early modern culture and, attendantly, on the stage. The hand signaled on a metaphysical scale by revealing a person’s character, gesturing toward the pursuit of knowledge, or serving as a reminder of human dignity and the “omnipresence of God” (27). On a more personal and interpersonal level, the hand communicated qualities like gentility, beauty, and foreignness. Karim-Cooper ably weaves the connections between these significations and numerous early modern concerns, such as aesthetics, music, clothing, medicine, and more. The female hand, for example, served a key role in romantic exchanges with its visible whiteness, cleanliness, and sleekness signaling for suitors a woman’s beauty and suitability. In order to highlight these qualities, artists therefore commonly painted women’s hands holding “something, like gloves, an elaborate fan or a handkerchief ” (60). Her study thus shows the hand’s key role in the philosophical as well as in day to day life. As her title suggests, it also served an important purpose on Shakespeare’s stage. Of particular interest to readers of Comparative Drama would be chapters 3, 5, and 6, which focus most extensively on Renaissance plays. In chapter 3, Karim-Cooper turns to an act of the hand—gesture—and considers how early modern actors may have performed gestures that emphasized the hand. Karim-Cooper notes how gestures on stage served many functions, one of the most important being the communication of emotions. Because emotions are so wide ranging, and because they were at times represented as being fabricated, Karim-Cooper makes the case that gestures on the early modern stage were not performed in any one particular way. “It is unnecessary for gestures to adhere to one particular form,” she explains (78). Rather, “My contention in this study is that gestures were fundamentally varied: sometimes iconic [meaning a ‘formal hand (or body) movement or sequence of movements that would have been highly recognizable to an early modern audience’ (82–83)], sometimes natural or drawn from everyday life; sometimes subtle, other times...

Reviewed by: Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure on the Early Modern Stage, and: Staging Anatomies: Dissection and Spectacle in Early Stuart Tragedy Julie Robin Solomon Stephanie Moss and Kaara L. Peterson , eds. Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure on the Early Modern Stage. Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2004. xvii + 218 pp. Ill. $89.95 (0-7546-3791-3). Hillary M. Nunn . Staging Anatomies: Dissection and Spectacle in Early Stuart Tragedy. Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2005. x + 231 pp. Ill. $89.95 (0-7546-3399-3). Hillary M. Nunn. Staging Anatomies: Dissection and Spectacle in Early Stuart Tragedy. Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2005. x + 231 pp. Ill. $89.95 (0-7546-3399-3). The volumes under review both examine intersections between medicine and literature—primarily drama—in early modern England. Stephanie Moss and Kaara Peterson's edited volume offers up a set of useful and engaging essays that explore the historical and literary significance of various medical references and representations in the work of English dramatists. Peterson's essay argues that the disease known as hysterica passio must be distinguished from the later assessments of psychological hysteria by Charcot and Freud. Early modern hysterica passio was an organic disease of the dysfunctional womb, which induced symptomatic odd behaviors in its victims as well as seeming death; such behavior was to be distinguished [End Page 656] from the duplicitous performances of those who were faking demonic possession. Peterson bases her argument on Edward Jorden's reading of the Mary Glover possession case of 1602: Jorden contended that the young girl's bodily contortions were a consequence of hysterica passio rather than actual or dissimulated possession. Peterson claims that Shakespeare and Middleton employed references to hysterica passio in contradistinction to exorcism in several plays. Tanya Pollard takes on Ben Jonson's representations of medical remedies and poisons in his drama. That medical remedies also had poisonous potential was commonplace knowledge in the early modern period. Pollard points out that antitheatrical critics of the period associated the theater with the poisoning of the morals and minds of its audience; hence, the references to and representations of drugs and poisons in early modern drama had both ambivalent and metatheatrical import, reflecting upon the beneficence or maleficence of theater itself. Barbara Traister's essay offers explanations for the fact that Shakespeare's plays before 1603 contain few physicians, and these are comic and medically incompetent characters, whereas physicians or healers appear in seven of the fifteen plays written after 1603 and are treated seriously as figures of authority. However, when it comes to a difficult situation requiring cure, Shakespeare looks to nonprofessional healers to do the job—reflecting the limited power of professional medicine to cure in this period. Carol Thomas Neely's essay, "Hot Blood," considers the construction of the Mediterranean humoral body—overheated by climate—as the site of pathological lovesickness: the inhabitants of warm climates possess hotter humors and thus are more liable to develop lovesickness. Othello stands out among Shakespeare's plays in resisting a simplistic humoral explanation of the Mediterranean and its inhabitants. Othello—at least until Iago spins his evil web—is represented as a man who does not naturally suffer from lovesickness or overheated desires; individual circumstance and human efforts, not humoral predestination, determine the course of events. The construction of an essential, humor-defined, and racialized other clearly postdates the Shakespearean moment. Jonathan Gil Harris's excellent contribution explores the intersecting discourses of syphilis, medicine, and commerce in The Comedy of Errors. Harris traces the parallels between two types of causal explanation that medical and protomercantilist writings share. An internalist explanation manifests itself in medicine as traditional Galenic humoralism, which posits that disease is generated by an internal imbalance between the body's four humors; in economic writings, the internalist explanation takes the form of a belief that economic ills are due to greed and lack of moral self-regulation in economic affairs. Paracelsus heralded the externalist explanation by arguing that diseases are caused by external "seeds" that invade and infect that body; Harris argues that in the economic arena...

Journal Article Garrett A. Sullivan Jr. The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property, and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage. Get access The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property, and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage. By Garrett A. Sullivan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Pp. xii + 292. $39.50 cloth. Andrew McRae Andrew McRae Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 51, Issue 2, Summer 2000, Pages 250–252, https://doi.org/10.2307/2902144 Published: 01 July 2000

This introductory article situates the collection ‘Space on the Early Modern Stage’ ( Cahiers Elisabéthains 88) within the context of existing scholarship on the staging practices and architecture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century playhouses. Pointing to the impact that reconstructed theatres have had on scholars' interest in the relationship between space and performance, it argues that, nonetheless, work in this area remains comparatively fragmented. It then outlines the various ways in which the collection develops scholarship in this emerging field by considering how the practical conditions of staging – both within and beyond the commercial playhouses – shaped the spatial grammar of early modern performance.

Reviewed by: Shakespeare’s Double Plays: Dramatic Economy on the Early Modern Stage by Brett Gamboa Ann Thompson SHAKESPEARE’S DOUBLE PLAYS: DRAMATIC ECONOMY ON THE EARLY MODERN STAGE. By Brett Gamboa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018; pp. 300. Might the actor who plays Juliet’s Nurse double as Tybalt, Angelo double as Claudio, Desdemona as Bianca, Leontes as Autolycus, and Cymbeline’s Queen as Iachimo? Might many of Shakespeare’s heroines have been played by young men, not boys, and might doubling in his company have been much more extensive, imaginative, and meaningful than we have been led to believe? At a time when many of our modern theatre companies are experimenting with gender-blind and race-blind casting, Brett Gamboa argues that audiences at the Globe and the Blackfriars enjoyed much more radical practices than we usually see today. As he writes, “[b]iases towards verisimilitude have been projected onto Shakespeare’s company, leading to widely held but largely unfounded assumptions: that sharers wouldn’t double in minor roles; that the company would require sufficient time for actors to change [End Page 570] clothes; that adult males never played female roles; that actors would not double multiple roles within the same scene” (219). Gamboa explores these “widely held but largely unfounded assumptions” through a series of chapters on topics such as “Versatility and Verisimilitude on Sixteenth-Century Stages,” “Dramaturgical Directives and Shakespeare’s Cast Size,” and “‘What, are they children?’: Reconsidering Shakespeare’s ‘Boy’ Actors.” He offers detailed discussion of the doubling possibilities in The Winter’s Tale, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, and Othello; an appendix provides thirty-two “hypothetical casting charts” for all the plays that Shakespeare wrote for the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men from 1594 to 1610. His intention is not only to challenge received ideas about casting, but also to argue that a different approach would offer both actors and audiences more pleasure and a greater depth of engagement with the plays. He is not offering new historical evidence, but rereading the evidence we already have, mainly through a very thorough and careful analysis of Shakespeare’s own dramaturgical practice. Gamboa is not prescriptive about modern practices: he writes toward the end of his book that “[w]hen it comes to theatre productions, my hope is less to define how a play should be cast, than to show the value of doubling, and to invite directors to be less random in the assignation of roles” (235). He does not in fact spend very much time discussing modern practices; his emphasis is more on what might have happened in Shakespeare’s own time. Much of the book is devoted to a thorough re-examination of the kinds of evidence that previous scholars have used. Gamboa demonstrates how flimsy some of it is and how dangerous it might be to rely upon documents from the 1620s or later to deduce earlier practices. For example, the extant “plots” from the Caroline period show that the companies used more actors than was strictly necessary, compared to the efficiency of the Tudor patterns that Shakespeare inherited or those that can be derived from his own dramatic structures. His most striking challenge is perhaps to the assumption that “boy actors” would have been prepubescent teenagers who played exclusively female roles. Instead, he argues convincingly that they were much more likely to have been young men, capable of acting male parts as well, since Shakespeare would have needed to make the best use of a comparatively small company. He points out that “[w]hatever Shakespeare’s intent or practice, his play[s] carefully avoid the need for 13 speakers to share the stage at all times. . . . When a scene with 12 speakers wants one more, something happens to excuse someone” (148). Sometimes the absence is a conspicuous one, for example that of Lady Montague at the end of Romeo and Juliet or of Maria at the end of Twelfth Night. The explanation might be that the actor is onstage, but in a different role. The consistency of the twelve-speaker rule across thirty-two plays can hardly be a coincidence; Shakespeare must have written with...

Journal Article Patricia A. Cahill. Unto the Breach: Martial Formations, Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage. Get access Unto the Breach: Martial Formations, Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage. By Patricia A Cahill. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Illus. Pp. x + 228. Cloth $99.00. Heather Hirschfeld Heather Hirschfeld Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 61, Issue 1, Spring 2010, Pages 138–141, https://doi.org/10.1353/shq.0.0123 Published: 01 April 2010

Journal Article Ayanna Thompson. Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage. Lara Bovilsky. Barbarous Play: Race on the English Renaissance Stage. Get access Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage. By Ayanna Thompson. New York and London: Routledge, 2008. Illus. Pp. xii + 174. $100.00 cloth.Barbarous Play: Race on the English Renaissance Stage. By Lara Bovilsky. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Pp. x + 220. $67.50 cloth. Ian Smith Ian Smith Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 60, Issue 3, Fall 2009, Pages 372–375, https://doi.org/10.1353/shq.0.0096 Published: 01 October 2009

Editing for Performance or Documenting Performance?:Exploring the Relationship Between Early Modern Text and Clowning Stephen Purcell The complexity of the relationship between writing and performance on the early modern stage is particularly evident in its scenes of clowning. A performance tradition that relied upon a combination of scripted and unscripted speech, clowning resists documentation in printed form: indeed, printing turns it into something else entirely. As Richard Preiss has noted in his recent book on early modern clowning, [a] playbook is not a performance: it is the retrospective fantasy of one, abstracted from the play’s synchronic and diachronic stage lives, privileging certain voices over others, retroactively framing playgoing as a continuous, monological, readerly experience. (6) It might be helpful to think of the printed record of clowning scenes (and indeed of early modern drama more broadly) along the lines of the “geological metaphor” used by Michael Keefer in his 2007 edition of the play to describe the 1616 text of Doctor Faustus: as “the product of distinct phases of sedimentation and partial subduction” (20). Unlike those of a geological specimen, of course, the layers of sedimentation in a printed text are impossible to separate from one another. The metaphor is nonetheless useful to describe the multiple processes of scripting, performing, transcribing, copying, remembering, rescripting and reperforming that underlie the composition of an early modern playbook. In 2012, I undertook an exploration of the Doctor Faustus clown scenes in an open workshop with actors from The Pantaloons theater company. This was not an “excavation” of the text: there was no attempt to recover original practice. It was, rather, an attempt to gain an insight into the [End Page 5] structures underpinning such scenes, and to explore the ways in which layers of textual sedimentation might build up through a new process of scripting, improvisation, remembering, and rescripting. The workshop explored the differences between the clowning scenes of the two surviving texts of Doctor Faustus (1604 and 1616), and encouraged the actors to analyze the structure of one scene in particular before generating their own semi-improvised version of it. In order to approximate the process of memorial reconstruction and gain a practical sense of the differences between semi-improvised performance and textual accounts of it, I then asked the workshop audience to take notes and translate the resulting performance back into text. This article gives an overview of some of the ways in which the scene travelled through its various performative and textual forms, and speculates as to the relationship between clowning and text on the early modern stage and page. The texts of Doctor Faustus bear the traces of the play’s early performance history. The 1616 text, or B-text, is considerably longer than the earlier version, containing 676 additional lines. Recent scholarship has tended to conclude that the 1604 A-text is probably closest to the version of the play that was performed towards the end of Marlowe’s life (c. 1588), and that the B-text represents William Birde and Samuel Rowley’s revised version (for which Philip Henslowe recorded a payment in 1602). The B-text alone includes such episodes as Faustus’s rescue of Saxon Bruno from the Pope (3.1), and the three-scene sequence in which the knight humiliated by Faustus in 4.1, here named Benvolio, plots a revenge that subsequently backfires (4.1, 4.2, 4.3).1 The B-text also features two additional comic scenes, in which the clowns meet the horse-courser who was earlier cozened by Faustus (4.5), and then return in the subsequent scene to be humiliated at the court of the Duke of Vanholt (4.6). Curiously, though, despite the B-text’s greater overall length, the first clown scene, 1.4, is longer in the A-text. This first scene stages the meeting between the play’s primary clown, Robin, and Faustus’s servant Wagner. Wagner’s lines are substantially similar in both texts, but the A-text’s Clown is much more verbose than his equivalent in B. The second clown scene, 2.2, features a similar scenario in both texts—Robin has stolen one of Faustus’s books, and...

Reviewed by: Playwright, Space and Place in Early Modern Performance: Shakespeare and Company Michael Flachmann (bio) Tim Fitzpatrick . Playwright, Space and Place in Early Modern Performance: Shakespeare and Company. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Pp. xiv + 314. $124.95. As its title implies, Tim Fitzpatrick's compendious Playwright, Space and Place in Early Modern Performance offers a detailed analysis of the intricate relationship between Renaissance playwrights and the semiotics of received spatial conventions in theaters like the Globe, the Rose, the Red Bull, the Fortune, and the Cockpit. Building on the work of such scholars as Andrew Gurr, Alan Dessen, Leslie Thompson, Mariko Ichikawa, Bernard Beckerman, and others, the author argues convincingly that most early modern stages had two double doors, each approximately six feet wide, that opened onto the stage and hinged back against the tiring house wall. He posits further that instead of a third door, assumed by some scholars to be centrally located, most of these theaters had a concealment space upstage center, cloaked by a curtain, in which characters could hide temporarily, but without access to and from the tiring house. Linking his conclusions to an exhaustive survey of over fifty playscripts ranging from Macbeth and King Lear through Cupid's Whirligig, Hengist King of Kent, The Battle of Alcazar, and A Knack to Know an Honest Man, he moves smoothly through three sequential subdivisions: "Onstage and Offstage Resources in Early Modern Performance," "Establishing a Sense of Place and Fictional World," and the somewhat inelegantly titled "A Spatially-Based Stage Management and Meaning-Making System." Based on what Fitzpatrick calls a "triangular division of the fictional world" (195), each theatrical moment is split into three separate areas: "here," "outwards," and "inwards." That is, the stage represents where the action is currently taking place; the first of the two doors usually leads to the outside world; and the other door generally ushers characters into an interior locus such as a study, bedroom, council chamber, or similarly cloistered environment. Although the author makes concessions based on the extent to which rapid changes of location depend on an audience's ability to "wipe and reset" the spatial connotations of the stage (235), he proceeds to identify the "outwards" and [End Page 241] "inwards" binary doors with a number of intriguing symbolic correspondences. Using, for example, Viola's "Then westward-ho!" in Twelfth Night (3.1.134) and Celia's "West of this place" in As You Like It (4.3.78), Fitzpatrick identifies the stage-left door, which usually leads outward, with fictional west, while the stage-right door points inward toward the east, where "Juliet is the sun" (Romeo and Juliet, 2.2.3).1 Similarly, the stage-left "outward" door is most often identified with stereotypical male activity (going off to war, for example), while the stage-right "inward" door, leading frequently to interior domestic spaces, is usually aligned with females. Likewise, he provides evidence that the stage-left door would have reminded audiences of the medieval Hellmouth, while the stage-right door was associated with St. Peter's gate and Heaven ("the elect on the right hand, and the damned, cast into 'outer darkness,' on the left"), thereby identifying the stage-right door with the "high status" locus of "authority, power, and royalty" (222) and designating the stage-left door as the lower-status entrance and exit used more frequently in comic situations. Sequestered oddly in an appendix, Fitzpatrick's most persuasive point is that "early modern playwrights, actors, and audiences shared a sophisticated sense of space and place in performance" (247). In other words, he postulates that the foregoing staging conventions were well known to the authors of these plays (who wrote their scripts based on this shared global shorthand), but also to the actors (who instinctively knew which entrances and exits to use according to their characters' status in the plays and whether they were making an "inward" or "outward" journey from the "place in the middle") and the audiences (who had been tutored by dramaturgical tradition to recognize and decode such signifiers within their theatrical experiences). Especially interesting are the author's contentions about the vast size of most early modern stages: the Fortune, for...

When banquets are performed on the early modern stage, devils can be seen beside the eaters. This is notably the case when grace has not been said properly before the meal. This article focuses on a group of four texts: Thomas Dekker's If This Be Not a Good Play, The Devil Is In It (1611), Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome's The Late Lancashire Witches (1634), William Winstanley's The Essex Champion (1690?), and Christopher Marlowe's Dr Faustus (c.1592). These texts contain particularly striking examples of an early modern anxiety about the importance of saying grace and eating piously rather than greedily for maintaining hierarchies within the state and the household. They also show the ways in which debates about the Eucharist underlie, and can be mapped on to, representations of saying grace. The article demonstrates that the theatre makes visible early modern concerns about souls imperilled and household hierarchies destabilised by improper eating practices.

In the early modern drama of John Webster, representations of pathos invite the interrogation of rhetorical theory as a comprehensive account of the role of emotion in persuasion. A White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi reveal unexpected trajectories of passionate appeal and persuasive effect, particularly in the ways female rhetors undercut early modern rhetorical advice regarding the deployment of pathos. While contemporary rhetorical treatises, such as Thomas Wilson's The Art of Rhetoric, insist that arguments based on emotion render immediate and undeniable the connection between rhetor and audience, the female rhetors' male audiences do not acknowledge emotional persuasion as confirmation of consensus or likeness. Instead, gender difference elides the possibility for commiseration, rendering any effectiveness of female passionate appeal the product of male evaluation, and not its source. This article charts a nuanced understanding of gendered pathos in Webster's drama by employing an analysis of the treatment of pathos in rhetorical theory and the considerations of pathos in representing female sexual desire on the early modern stage.

Reviews: History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism, History and its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence., a Companion to Bede, Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth-Century England, Staging the Old Faith: Queen Henrietta Maria and the Theatre of Caroline England, 1625–1642, Unto the Breach: Martial Formations, Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage, the Ends of Life:

Contents: Introduction, Robert Henke Part I Traveling Actors: Border crossing in the commedia dell' arte, Robert Henke English troupes in early modern Germany: the women, M.A. Katritzky. Part II Transportable Units: A Midsummer Night's Dream and Italian pastoral, Richard Andrews Dramatic bodies and novellesque spaces in Jacobean tragedy and tragicomedy, Melissa Walter. Part III The Question of the Actress: Moral and Theoretical Transnationalisms: Ophelia sings like a prima donna innamorata: Ophelia's mad scene and the Italian female performer, Eric Nicholson Theorizing women's place: Nicholas Poussin, The Rape of the Sabines, and the early modern stage, Jane Tylus. Part IV Performing Alteriety: Doubled National Identity: The Dutch diaspora in English comedy: 1598 to 1618, Christian M. Billing Foreign emotions, Susanne L. Wofford Translated Turks on the early modern stage, Jacques Lezra. Part V Performing a Nation: Transregional Exchanges: Epicene in Edinburgh (1672): city comedy beyond the London stage, Clare McManus Proto-nationalist performatives and trans-theatrical displacement in Henry V, David Schalkwyk Shakespeare on the Indian stage: resistance, recalcitrance, recuperation, Shormishtha Panja. Epilogue: Reading Shakespeare, reading the masks of the Italian commedia: fixed forms and the breath of life, Mace Perlman Select bibliography Index.