English Drama Research Articles

Birth of a Tragedy Queen: Richard Robinson and the Repertory of the King's Men, 1610-11

In his 2004 essay, ‘The Sharer and His Boy’, Scott McMillin hypothesized that what he called ‘restricted roles’ in early modern English drama, roles in which female characters take cue lines only from a small group of other characters, resulted from moments when new leading boy actors were being trained by their masters. This essay applies McMillin's hypothesis to two new plays that entered the King’s Men’s repertory around 1610, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy, asking how they might have interacted with earlier plays within the company’s repertory to shape the training of Richard Robinson as its new leading tragic boy.

Whitewashing white permanence: The (dis)/(re)membering of white corporeality in early modern England

AbstractIn early modern English drama, black flesh is remarkable. In the Shakespeare canon, the visibly black flesh of the eponymous Moor of Venice in Othello and the villainous Aaron in Titus Andronicus has been the subject of scholarly analysis for centuries. Yet, in a field that has placed so much emphasis on flesh marked by color, unmarked flesh is imbued with assumptions of whiteness that make unremarkable, a privilege that renders it unthought and uncritiqued, processes that contribute to the normativity of whiteness as inextricable from subjectivity. This rhetoric of whiteness as largely unremarkable continues to influence our modern conceptualizations of what Shakespeare looks like both in our minds and on the stage. Too often, modern productions of Shakespeare engage in casting practices that elide important early modern identity distinctions in service of contemporary white supremacy. For instance, national identity—the difference between being English, Irish, Scottish, French, etc—mattered both for character and actor on the Early Modern English stage. Yet, these distinctions fade into the fringes of memory when casting today's productions, allowing directors to include and exclude bodies based on modern conceptions of racial difference and mis‐remembering of whiteness as a coherent and stable early modern identity. But whiteness was neither so stable nor so stoic in Shakespeare's day or in the works of Shakespeare as our modern theatrical culture continually mis‐remembers and re‐performs. This essay engages with the ways in which the modern theatre mis‐remembers Shakespeare in relation to whiteness to reinforce white supremacy. This essay uses contemporary theories of Afro‐Pessimism and Black Critical Theory to destabilize the mythology of white permanence that undergirds Renaissance history. I argue that the notions of the stable white corporeal whole that scholars and artists assume of the majority of Shakespeare's characters requires an anachronistic reading of whiteness that is the product of chattel slavery and a paradigm that relies on the destruction of black flesh for the unified white body to gain corporeal coherence. The essay concludes with a critique of epistemology arguing that this forgetting of the historical dismemberment of white flesh makes us mis‐remember the role of whiteness in our present.

Temporal Instability, Wildernesses, and the Otherworld in Early Modern Drama

This article shows how temporal disorder diffuses into the wildernesses within early modern English drama. Those areas beyond the walls of cities and castles in—among other plays—The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth thus flit free from the temporal rules that construct a play’s quotidian world, and the conspicuous partitions that enclose an otherworld in medieval iconography no longer seem clear within them. I argue that these spaces enact an unfamiliar and chaotic ‘otherworld’ within quotidian space, and characters’ ventures into these outer regions at certain points resemble movements into an ‘afterlife’. Journeys into a wilderness, then, parallel a shift from one temporal sphere to another, and characters encounter a post-death state of being within the play’s present.

The Effectiveness of the Intercultural Learning Materials in Teaching English Drama

Teaching English drama to multicultural students has the problem of solving the similarities and differences between language and culture. This research aimed to determine the effectiveness of intercultural learning materials (ILM) in English drama at English Department. This study was quantitative research that explored quasi-experimental research. The sample of this research was eleven students in the experimental group and ten in the control group. The sample was taken by using random cluster sampling. The instrument of this research was a test that developed the student drama performance test. The data were analysed by using a T-test. The result shows that the students scored significantly in the experimental group with an average score of 201.85 % (a sig value of 0.003 0.05). Based on the result of this research, there was a significant effect of intercultural learning material in improving students' English drama. Then, the intercultural learning materials were the alternative resources for linking the different languages and cultures in teaching and learning drama.

Ursula A.Potter: The Unruly Womb in Early Modern English Drama: Plotting Women's Biology on the Stage. Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, Medieval Institute Publications, 2019; pp. x + 263.

Ursula A.Potter: The Unruly Womb in Early Modern English Drama: Plotting Women's Biology on the Stage. Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, Medieval Institute Publications, 2019; pp. x + 263.

King Lear “After” Auschwitz: Shakespeare, Appropriation and Theatres of Catastrophe in Post-War British Drama. By Richard Ashby

Richard Ashby’s King Lear “After” Auschwitz takes flight from Adorno’s famous dictum that “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.”1 Adorno’s call for an aesthetics founded on contradiction rather than harmonization speaks directly to the dissonances of King Lear, and Adorno’s turn to Beckett in search of a dramaturgy tuned to catastrophe dovetails with the Lear-Beckett rapprochement that defines so much postwar theater. Ashby uses Adorno’s aesthetic and cultural writings to organize a project enriched by many other thinkers who were interred or displaced by the Holocaust, including Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, Elias Canetti, and Walter Benjamin, and the cover of the book displays a sketch of Poor Tom in his hovel by the Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka, who was deemed a degenerate by the Nazis. Nonetheless, this is not an inquiry into the meanings of King Lear for Jewish thinkers or other victims, survivors, and direct witnesses of the camps. Instead, Ashby, like Adorno, uses the phrase “after Auschwitz” to diagnose postwar consumerism, the automatism of mass culture, and the rise of the administrative and biopolitical state. This metonymizing of Auschwitz allows Ashby to take up a subject rather different from Shakespeare and the Holocaust per se: namely, appropriations of King Lear by postwar British playwrights, who addressed historical and existential traumas that unfolded after the camps had been emptied, such as the pain of exile and social alienation (David Rudkin’s 1984 Will’s Way), the genocide in Bosnia (Sarah Kane’s 1995 Blasted), and the devastations of industrialism and climate change (Forced Entertainment’s 2016 Table Top Shakespeare, Dennis Kelly’s 2010 The Gods Weep). The result is a powerful study of Shakespearean appropriation that deftly maneuvers among critical, textual, philosophical, and performance materials in order to craft definitive readings of major works of modern British drama and establish the unique thematic and formal affordances of King Lear as equipment for confronting catastrophe.

:Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater

:<i>Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater</i>

Anja Hartl. Brecht and Post-1990s British Drama: Dialectical Theatre Today. London: Methuen, 2021, vii + 192 pp., £80.00 (hardback), £72.00 (EPUB/Mobi ebook), £72.00 (PDF ebook).

Article Anja Hartl. Brecht and Post-1990s British Drama: Dialectical Theatre Today. London: Methuen, 2021, vii + 192 pp., £80.00 (hardback), £72.00 (EPUB/Mobi ebook), £72.00 (PDF ebook). was published on November 1, 2022 in the journal Journal of Contemporary Drama in English (volume 10, issue 2).

Selina Busby. Applied Theatre: A Pedagogy of Utopia. London: Methuen Drama, 2022, xv + 247 pp., £72.00 (hardback), £22.49 (paperback), £57.60 (PDF ebook).

Article Selina Busby. Applied Theatre: A Pedagogy of Utopia. London: Methuen Drama, 2022, xv + 247 pp., £72.00 (hardback), £22.49 (paperback), £57.60 (PDF ebook). was published on November 1, 2022 in the journal Journal of Contemporary Drama in English (volume 10, issue 2).

Peter Eckersall and Helena Grehan, ed. The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics. London: Routledge, 2019, xx + 364 pp., £190.00 (hardback), £39.99 (paperback), £35.99 (ebook).

Article Peter Eckersall and Helena Grehan, ed. The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics. London: Routledge, 2019, xx + 364 pp., £190.00 (hardback), £39.99 (paperback), £35.99 (ebook). was published on November 1, 2022 in the journal Journal of Contemporary Drama in English (volume 10, issue 2).

Ian Ward. The Play of Law in Modern British Theatre. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2021, 221 pp., £80 (hardback), £75 (PDF ebook).

Article Ian Ward. The Play of Law in Modern British Theatre. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2021, 221 pp., £80 (hardback), £75 (PDF ebook). was published on November 1, 2022 in the journal Journal of Contemporary Drama in English (volume 10, issue 2).

Carina E. I. Westling. Immersion and Participation in Punchdrunk’s Theatrical Worlds. London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2020, vi + 200 pp., £65.00 (hardback), £21.99 (paperback), £19.79 (PDF ebook).

Article Carina E. I. Westling. Immersion and Participation in Punchdrunk’s Theatrical Worlds. London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2020, vi + 200 pp., £65.00 (hardback), £21.99 (paperback), £19.79 (PDF ebook). was published on November 1, 2022 in the journal Journal of Contemporary Drama in English (volume 10, issue 2).

Michael Billington. Affair of the Heart: British Theatre from 1992 to 2020. London: Methuen Drama, 2021, 303 pp., £25.00 (hardback), £22.50 (ebook).

Article Michael Billington. Affair of the Heart: British Theatre from 1992 to 2020. London: Methuen Drama, 2021, 303 pp., £25.00 (hardback), £22.50 (ebook). was published on November 1, 2022 in the journal Journal of Contemporary Drama in English (volume 10, issue 2).

Alan Read. The Dark Theatre: A Book About Loss. London: Routledge, 2020, viii + 342 pp., £120.00 (hardback), £34.99 (paperback), £29.74 (ebook).

Article Alan Read. The Dark Theatre: A Book About Loss. London: Routledge, 2020, viii + 342 pp., £120.00 (hardback), £34.99 (paperback), £29.74 (ebook). was published on November 1, 2022 in the journal Journal of Contemporary Drama in English (volume 10, issue 2).

Lose Your Father

Lose Your Father

Ways and means of creating a comic effect in English drama discourse

The article is devoted to the study of the nature of the authors remark and its functional ability to create a comic effect. At the first stage, an attempt was made to determine the role of the authors commentary in the text of the play. Within the framework of this question, we have highlighted the key characteristics of dramatic discourse, namely, fiction and stylization. Next, we focused on the phenomenon of paratext, presenting the positions of both domestic and foreign researchers regarding the role of paratext in a dramatic work, namely the need to take into account the features of paratext when performing discourse analysis. In addition, in the article we made an attempt to present a brief history of the origin of the term paratext. Thus, the processes of interaction within the pair text-paratext substantiated the need to study the dramatic text precisely through the prism of this correlation. As sources of factual material, we selected plays (The Comedy About a Bank Robbery, The Play that Goes Wrong), the authors of which were a galaxy of British playwrights working in tandem: Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields. In the course of the study, a selection of text fragments was formed, which made it possible to identify a number of authorial techniques for creating a comic effect, the mechanisms of which are repeatedly duplicated from play to play, which makes it possible to suggest the presence of a characteristic comic style inherent in this trio of playwrights. As a basic technique for creating a comic effect, the authors use the interaction of replicas of the characters of the play and remarks that contradict each other, thereby realizing the principle of inconsistency, which in turn becomes one of the basic principles of comedy. Thus, the final part of the study is devoted to the implementation of the principles of absurdity, inconsistency and deceived expectations through the interaction of the authors remark and the dialogue part of the play.

A Field Study on the Script Structure of English Drama in Education in Chinese Primary and Secondary School

Drama in Education (DIE) is believed to play a specially positive role in helping students in primary and secondary schools to form language awareness and develop language abilities. It has gradually formed its own script structure characteristics in the practice of local English teaching. By analyzing the scripts of 31 dramas staged by three local schools in the English culture and drama festivals, this paper summarizes the implementation characteristics of DIE from the aspects of story source, script source, students&amp;rsquo; involvement, and theme distribution. In addition, this paper also analyzes the script structure favored by local teachers and students from four stages: the beginning, the development, the climax and the ending, which will greatly help solve the problem of drama creation for primary and secondary school teachers and students, and improve their enthusiasm to implement DIE in English classroom.

Post-Auschwitz Dramaturgy: Toward the Later Edward Bond

Although British playwright Edward Bond is well known for his early plays during the 1960s–80s, his later works, from the late 1990s onward, have been relatively overlooked and underexplored. In this article, I aim to bridge these two phases and propose a theoretical framework to approach Bond’s evolution as a playwright. I will first examine Bond’s critical engagement with Brecht, and then I will proceed to analyse Bond’s evolving dramaturgy of the Holocaust, which will help to demonstrate how Bond has developed what we might call his post-Auschwitz dramaturgy. While criticizing Brecht’s theatre for being the “Theatre of Auschwitz,” Bond bases his post-Brechtian dramaturgy on his specific understanding of the infamous Nazi concentration camp. Bond regards Auschwitz as not only a localized historical event but also a trans-historical structure of biopolitics, manifested in both the camp and an ensuing neoliberal capitalist system. By drawing on two pivotal passages of the Palermo improvisation (which took place in 1983) and the Russian guard’s story, both of which Bond describes in “Commentary on The War Plays” (1991), I will elucidate how these examples herald a “post-Auschwitz” dramaturgical model that can be understood through Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics and Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitics. Building on this analysis, I will analyse Bond’s plays The Crime of the Twenty-First Century (1999) and Born (2006) to argue that it is the dissonance between the biopolitical paradigm exemplified in Auschwitz and the human subject’s fundamental creativity that defines Bond’s later works.

Henrik Ibsen and Conspiracy Thinking: The Case of Peer Gynt

Henrik Ibsen and Conspiracy Thinking: The Case of <i>Peer Gynt</i>

Shakespeare at work. On J. Shapiro’s book A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599

The article prefaces the publication of chapter 8 (Is This a Holiday?) from J. Shapiro’s book on W. Shakespeare and examines the architecture of the intellectual docu-novel which carefully reconstructs a period in the English playwright’s life and work and shows how the social and political developments of the Elizabethan era as well as specific facts of the Bard’s biography found their way into Shakespeare’s plays dated 1599. Drawing on documentary evidence, Shapiro pieces together the events of the year that marked a turning point in Shakespeare’s work. In terms of its genre, the book follows the traditions of W. Scott’s historical novels. The author succeeds in rendering the spirit of the daily life in a 16th-c. London, and discusses, along with Shakespeare’s plays, the city’s news and gossip, sermons and pamphlets, as well as curious incidents at the court theatre, etc. On the whole, Shapiro paints a portrait of a playwright who shuns debauched London pastimes.