Early Modern Drama Research Articles

Thomas Killigrew and the Seventeenth-Century English Stage: New Perspectives. Philip Major, ed. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2013. xii + 224 pp. $99.95.

Thomas Killigrew and the Seventeenth-Century English Stage: New Perspectives. Philip Major, ed. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2013. xii + 224 pp. $99.95. - Volume 68 Issue 2

Staging the Blazon in Early Modern English Theater. Deborah Uman and Sara Morrison, eds. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2013. xi + 220 pp. $99.95.

Staging the Blazon in Early Modern English Theater. Deborah Uman and Sara Morrison, eds. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2013. xi + 220 pp. $99.95. - Volume 68 Issue 2

John Lowin and the English Theatre, 1603–1647: Acting and Cultural Politics on the Jacobean and Caroline Stage. Barbara Wooding. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2013. xiii + 210 pp. $99.95.

John Lowin and the English Theatre, 1603–1647: Acting and Cultural Politics on the Jacobean and Caroline Stage. Barbara Wooding. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2013. xiii + 210 pp. $99.95. - Volume 68 Issue 3

Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage. Lisa Hopkins and Helen Ostovich, eds. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2014. xii + 266 pp. $109.95.

Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage. Lisa Hopkins and Helen Ostovich, eds. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2014. xii + 266 pp. $109.95. - Volume 68 Issue 4

Staging England in the Elizabethan History Play: Performing National Identity. Ralf Hertel. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2014. ix + 272 pp. $119.95.

Staging England in the Elizabethan History Play: Performing National Identity. Ralf Hertel. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2014. ix + 272 pp. $119.95. - Volume 68 Issue 2

“How easy is a bush supposed a bear?”: Differentiating Imaginative Production in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

This article examines the experiments that A Midsummer Night’s Dream undertakes in three distinct modes of audience imagination: the radical abstraction from the stage required by the visualization of exotic landscapes; perceived alterations of what is materially present onstage; and the “apprehension” of what is materially present onstage. I argue that the range of imaginative production tested by the play reflects the contested nature of psychological models of the imaginative faculty in the period, though the specific functions that Shakespeare foregrounds depart in important ways from these models. Most significantly, the play explores what I call imaginative “presentation,” in which the imagination plays a fundamental role not only in representing fictional scenes or re-presenting stored impressions but also in presenting what is accurately perceived. This last function, especially, raises difficult questions about the ontology of images that theater is uniquely equipped to answer. The play thus makes two important interventions with regard to imagination: first, in its rearrangement of the series of imaginative functions set out in faculty psychology, and second, in what counts as an image. In methodological terms, this essay engages recent models of “distributed cognition” in early modern drama by suggesting that the internal differentiation of psychological faculties may be as important as their external distribution.

Sex Before Sex: Figuring the Act in Early Modern England ed. by James M. Bromley and Will Stockton

James M. Bromley and Will Stockton, eds. Sex Before Sex: Figuring Act in Early Modern England. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. 329 pages. $27.50.The title of Sex Before Sex is deliberately disorienting. That modern sexual subjectivity did not exist in early modernity is by now familiar to us, providing impetus for recent overview of premodern sexual historiography entitled Sex Before Sexuality. But until now, critics have been likely to assume that while early modern cultural formations of sexuality were different than our own, early modern sexual acts were much like ours. Aren't sexual acts, if not their meanings, instinctive, natural, and timeless? The essays gathered here, authored by some of most creative scholars currently working in early modern sexuality studies, suggest that this is decidedly not case. Taken as a whole, collection argues for a reorientation of field away from axes of desires and identities and towards those of acts and their figurations, emphasizing importance of viewing acts as interpretive cruxes that must be parsed before one can construct arguments about sexual desires and identities. In their provocative introduction, James M. Bromley and Will Stockton rightly point out that despite wealth of scholarship on early modern sexuality produced since Jonathan Goldberg's landmark collection, Queering Renaissance (1994), the act itself actually remains an undertheorized and underhistoricized concept (10). The result of this methodological focus on hermeneutic complexity of sexual signification (6) is an admirably diverse series of essays that leaves reader with a renewed appreciation for how little we know about before sex, and how rich opportunities are for future research.In addition to introduction and an afterword, volume contains ten essays organized into five pairs. The first two essays, by Christine Varnado and Kathryn Schwarz, analyze the construction of sexual (15). The collection begins with an eye-opening critical intervention, in which Varnado persuasively argues that early modern studies has yet to implement full interpretive power of a queer analytic for understanding early modern sexual figuration. Examining on- and off-stage figurations of in Romeo and Juliet (1594-95), The Roaring Girl (1611), and The Changeling (1622), Varnado's essay demonstrates that our largely heteronormative critical practice has tended to overlook potential presence of queer in early modern drama. As a corrective to this bias, essay calls for an active queer reading practice that is not limited to those acts that are explicitly represented or discussed on stage. Schwarz's essay uses a range of texts, including Thomas Heywood's Gynaikeion (1624), to take a new look at feminist insight that patriarchal reliance on female sexualized bodies is circular, since sexually secure body that subtends social order depends upon social processes of sexual regulation. Schwarz complicates this formulation by considering resistance that material body-including dead body-registers to its inscription into socio-sexual discourse. The violent cultural response this resistance provokes not only fails to secure social order, but also fractures [social and sexual] knowledge into imaginative possibilities and obscures social meanings of sex (73). Both of these essays, then, respond to challenge of how early modern before figured-not by answering question, but by complicating what it means to ask it.The next pair of essays, by Melissa J. Jones and Nicholas F. Radel, examines relationship between gender and fantasy. Jones's essay turns to modern pornography that focuses on humiliation of men with flaccid phalluses to reinterpret male spectacular impotence in Thomas Nashe's Choise of Valentines (1592-93) and John Marston's Metamorphosis of Pigmalion's Image (1598). …

Liminal Gardens: Edenic Iconography and the Disruption of Sexual Difference in Tragedy

Societal fascination with and anxiety over the potential unfixing of essentialized, oppositional gender roles manifests itself at many different levels in early modern English drama. What Catherine Belsey labels “the tradition of female transvestism,” and its facilitation of staged, comedic, female usurpation of masculine authority, is noticeably absent from tragedy. This article proposes a tragic tradition employing Edenic iconography in connection with female gender-transgressive behavior. Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus showcase the ways in which the unfixing of sexual disposition intersects in tragedy with the garden/bower as a physical setting, with Edenic/garden metaphor applied to and around the bodies of the plays’ female characters, and with an emphasis on perpetual and multilayered vulnerability to observation which, as in Eden, threatens patriarchal inheritance and ultimately results in death.

Exploring the Critical Turn to Religion in Early Modern Drama Studies

Exploring the Critical Turn to Religion in Early Modern Drama Studies

The Pirate, the Pirate‐Hunter, and the Beginning of Early Modern Play Editing

Previous article No AccessOriginal ArticlesThe Pirate, the Pirate‐Hunter, and the Beginning of Early Modern Play EditingMatteo A. PangalloMatteo A. PangalloHarvard University Search for more articles by this author Harvard UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by English Literary Renaissance Volume 45, Number 1Winter 2015 Published in association with the Arthur F. Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6757.12041 Views: 277Total views on this site © 2015 The Author(s). English Literary Renaissance © 2015 English Literary Renaissance Inc.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Introduction: Global Shakespeare for Anglophone Audiences

Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance vol. 11 (26), 2014; DOI: 10.2478/mopa-2014-0002 Reflecting on the 2012 Globe to Globe Festival, Bridget Escolme hopes that this unique project might paradoxically be the beginning of a decentring of Shakespeare in global knowledge production. What questions, she asks, might this Festival continue to provoke that arent about Shakespeare? And how might theatres and universities start to explore and answer them (309)? Escolme joins other scholars left asking questions, about Shakespeare, non-Shakespeare and performance, in reaction to an unprecedented few years of foreign productions staged for Anglophone audiences. Many of those excellent responses are collated in Shakespeare Beyond English (2013), edited by Susan Bennett and Christie Carson, and A Year of Shakespeare (2013), edited by Paul Edmondson, Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan. This special edition of Multicultural Shakespeare is part of that response and seeks to engage with and develop the debate started by these two important books. We do this not least with a review of both books which productively places them in dialogue with one another, but also with a rich, eclectic set of articles that considers the genesis of the Globe to Globe Festival, foreign Shakespeare performance practices, the politics of translation and the ethics of reviewing such productions, amongst other things. A Year of Shakespeare offers an archive of accounts of an exceptionally wide range of theatrical experiences made available within a short space of time and originating in many different cultures (Wells xxiii). Similarly, Shakespeare Beyond English serves, according to its editors, as a scholarly archive of the Globe to Globe Festival; albeit one they hope challenge[s] the business of Shakespeare and so is a great deal more (Bennett and Carson 3). Rather than emulate these comprehensive works, this journal is not an archive but rather a diverse snapshot of scholars analysis of foreign Shakespeare in 2014, focussing on a range of performances from Globe to Globe, to the Edinburgh International Festival, to the Royal Shakespeare Complete Works Festival. Escolme wonders Lecturer in Early Modern English, University of Kent. London Shakespeare Centre, Kings College London. Sarah Dustagheer, Aleksandra Sakowska Introduction: Global Shakespeare for Anglophone Audiences 10 Sarah Dustagheer, Aleksandra Sakowska how theatres and universities might begin to explore the questions raised by foreign Shakespeare and we hope that this journal begins some of that exploratory work. Shakespeare remains a focus but, again picking up on Escolmes thoughts about questions that are not about the early modern playwright, articles here offer thoughts on contemporary Chinese, Indian and Polish theatre practices from practitioners and researchers working in these areas. The next few pages introduce the articles that follow, but also seek to identify three of the reoccurring themes that they examine: performance spaces, languages and reception. Performance Spaces For David Wiles, the play-as-event belongs to the space, and makes the space perform as much as it makes actors perform (1); the importance of space, as asserted by Wiles, is confirmed by the discussion of many foreign Shakespeare productions. The way a space performs in the sense of working both with or even against a production is pertinent for shows which are transferred across not only different theatre spaces but different countries too. For the Globe to Globe Festival, the specific performance conditions of Londons reconstructed theatre challenged many companies performing during 2012. Reviewing Andrea Baracco and Vincenzo Mannas Giulio Cesare (Julius Caesar) for Shakespeare Beyond English, Sonia Massai points out that the performance space offered by the Globe is not neutral and often clashes with the aesthetic and more generally artistic principles that inform the theatrical language and approach shared by some directors, including Baracco (97). …

The Aesthetics of Spectacle in Early Modern Drama and Modern Cinema: Robert Greene’s Theatre of Attractions by Jenny Sager (review)

Reviewed by: The Aesthetics of Spectacle in Early Modern Drama and Modern Cinema: Robert Greene’s Theatre of Attractions by Jenny Sager Callan Davies The Aesthetics of Spectacle in Early Modern Drama and Modern Cinema: Robert Greene’s Theatre of Attractions. Jenny Sager. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Pp. x + 208. $90 (hardback), $73.12 (e-book). In one of his Lord Mayor’s Pageants, Thomas Heywood complains of the “throng” who “carry their eares in their eyes” (Londini Emporia, London 1633, B3v-B4r). His contempt for fans of spectacle is ironic, considering that he is one of early modern England’s most spectacular dramatists, sitting firmly alongside Robert Greene, the subject of Jenny Sager’s exciting monograph. Though a preference for the ear over the eye has characterized criticism, past and present, of early modern drama, recent studies have sought to balance the scales. The Aesthetics of Spectacle is part of a growing body of criticism—one that combines literary analysis with performance and film studies—that seeks to see again the value of early modern visual effects. In so doing, it brings into focus one of the most influential and critically overlooked Elizabethan dramatists. Twenty-first-century film critics are less scornful of those who “carry their eares in their eyes”; reviews of the recent blockbuster Gravity suggest that its powerful visual effects are artistic and intellectual achievements. Variety’s Justin C. Chang praised it for restoring “a sense of wonder, terror and possibility to the bigscreen [sic] that should inspire awe among critics and audiences worldwide” (28 August 2013). If the visual qualities of a 2013 film can be intellectually appreciated, then why not the dumb-shows, brazen heads, squibs, and hell-mouths that are so prominent in the popular entertainment of the 1590s and 1600s? Sager’s study, then, remedies the “taint of Puritanism and anti-theatricalism” in literary criticism by using “modern cinema” as a comparative medium with analogous visual effects (1). It associates early modern theatrical practices with the twentieth- and twenty-first-century commercial film industry (a methodology also seen, for instance, in Emma Smith’s “Genres: Cinematic and Early Modern” in Shakespeare Bulletin 32.1). In order to suggest the usefulness of cinematic analogy, The Aesthetics of Spectacle begins and ends each chapter with a short consideration of a visually spectacular film, from Jaws to The Godfather to George Méliès’s The man with the rubber head. It is not, however, a comparative study. These cinematic correspondences bookend what are largely historical readings of Greene’s plays and their affect, effects, contexts, and popularity. Yet, while the comparisons are slight, they underline Sager’s aim of applying to early modern plays the more generous and sensitive approach to visual effects seen in film studies. The chapter on Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and Alphonsus King of Aragon uses Méliès’s metatheatrical special effects as a means of appreciating the value and influence of Greene’s drama; like early film’s “cinema of attractions,” Greene’s plays “prioritise the act of display not the need to tell a story; they prioritise mimesis over diegesis” (106). [End Page 771] Indeed, the comparisons with modern cinema are part of the monograph’s theoretical framework—a framework outlined in the introduction and the opening chapter, drawing on a number of modern and early modern influences, from the Aristotelian conception of wonder to Brechtian theory. If the range of reference in these establishing chapters seems broad, it represents Sager’s interest in using cinema as a conceptual analogy while maintaining, in reading the plays themselves, a considered historical analysis. While Friar Bacon and Alphonsus can be seen to contain the hallmarks of a “theatre of attractions,” they are also deeply concerned with idolatry, iconoclasm, and religious representation. The reading of Orlando Furioso explores the association between madness and creativity through a comparison with Rob Reiner’s 1990 film adaptation of Stephen King’s Misery. The chapter goes beyond theoretical discussion to argue concisely and persuasively for Greene’s interrogation in the play of intertextuality, classical imitation, and Marlovian drama. If one of the book’s aims is to establish “how spectacle, rather than being...

Early Modern Audiences and the Pleasures of Cross-Dressed Characters

This essay constructs a genealogy for early modern audience studies, showing how this subcategory of scholarship on early modern drama responds to some of the questions raised by early New Historicist criticism. The foundation of audience studies is theater history; its methodology often derives from phenomenology-inflected theater studies, which examines perceptions of experience onstage and off. However, the assumption in New Historicist criticism that early modern drama actively participates in its culture, not merely reflecting the public sphere but actively shaping it, leads naturally to an investigation of the interactions among theater audiences and the various parts of the theater industry. To demonstrate the possibilities of audience studies, this essay includes an analysis of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher's play Love's Cure; or, The Martial Maid (1647), a comic drama with a cross-dressed brother and sister. The analysis examines the construction of the play and its production history to understand the potential pleasures it offered to early modern spectators. This adds a new dimension to the gender studies that formerly dominated the scholarship on this play. The combination of several factors suggests that it was the element of femininity, both artificial and somewhat exaggerated, in performance, that made watching boy actors in the roles of young maidens so pleasurable for spectators. Among the factors involved are the playwright's decision to foreground the characters' study of appropriate gender performance; the creation of this play for the King's Men, a company whose repertoire frequently featured multiple female characters; and the peculiar acoustics of the Globe, which made alto voices particularly resonant.

Heywood’s Epic Theater

Heywood’s Epic Theater Mark Bayer (bio) As scholarship of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama turned towards questions of politics in the 1980s and 1990s, many commentators turned to Bertolt Brecht for a theoretical vocabulary to describe a socially engaged theater of the early modern era. Jonathan Dollimore opened his groundbreaking Radical Tragedy (1984) with an epigraph from Brecht’s The Exception and the Rule, insisting (a few pages later) that “Brecht in fact figures prominently in my argument to the effect that a significant sequence of Jacobean tragedies, including the majority of Shakespeare’s, were more radical than has hitherto been allowed.”1 Brecht, in other words, was essential in illuminating this important and underappreciated aspect of Shakespearean drama. For materialist critics like Dollimore, turning to Brecht offered an extraordinarily cogent and enormously productive critical agenda. After all, Brecht himself was interested in Shakespeare’s history plays and saw in them a precursor of his own theatrical experiments. Just as Brecht sought to save the German theater from the bourgeois aestheticism that had come to permeate it in the early twentieth century, so Dollimore’s generation of critics sought to save Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists from an arid formalism that ignored the social and political energies of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. Although I don’t wish to repudiate this productive line of inquiry, I want to suggest that the application of Brechtian principles to early modern drama is considerably more complicated. To locate traces of what we now perceive as Brechtian dramatic techniques in the drama of this period, I want to do more than examine the plays for moments of artistic discontinuity, ideological rupture, and self-conscious theatricality. Instead, I want to think about the positioning of early modern audiences in relation [End Page 371] to the drama they witnessed. How were specific groups of spectators affected by these plays? How did theatrical performance interrupt their daily lives, enlisting them in the production of theatrical meaning that resonated with their shared experiences? I will argue that the early modern theater in several important ways resembled what Brecht would later call the “epic” theater, but that we might more easily recognize that theater’s contributions to a socially resonant dramatic praxis by looking beyond Shakespeare and the Globe to Thomas Heywood and the Red Bull. Specifically, I want to look at the five-part cycle of plays known as the Ages (c. 1609–13) that draw on classical epic to trace Roman mythical history from the birth of Jupiter to the fall of Troy.2 Examining the Ages, and the venue at which they were staged, according to Brechtian precepts gives us a new way to appreciate these frequently disparaged plays while marking a significant contrast with Shakespeare’s much more acclaimed history plays. When evaluated according to twentieth-century critical tastes, the Ages didn’t measure up to the canonical plays with which they were compared; the action and spectacle that are Heywood’s plays’ most prominent features pale next to the linguistic density, vivid characterization, and literary merits of Shakespearean drama.3 Understanding these plays historically, however, we must recognize that their differences have less to do with abstract aesthetic standards and more to do with the different expectations and tastes of the audiences that the two playwrights catered to. According to James Wright’s retrospective account in 1699, the Red Bull was “mostly frequented by citizens, and the meaner sort of people,”4 a group perhaps best placated by nostalgic tales, visual effects, and the exploits of larger-than-life classical heroes—audiences who enjoyed nothing but “drums, Trumpets, Battels and Hero’s,” according to that theater’s detractors.5 Thomas Dekker, writing for the Red Bull in 1612, realized that audiences at this playhouse required a different kind of play, that the playwright’s “Worthy friends Muse...deserve[s] a Theater full of very Muses themselves to be Spectators.”6 Rather than “hearing a play,” as Hamlet proposed to the audience at the Globe, the “uncapable multitude” at the Red Bull seemed more interested in seeing the drama, a predisposition satisfied abundantly by the Ages.7 [End Page 372] Such claims have...

Merlin’s Conception by Devil in William Rowley’s Play The Birth of Merlin

Rowley’s early modern play amalgamates both the medieval Galfridian-based and Francophone narratives of Merlin’s conception by daemon, incubus, and devil in order to engage contemporary debates on the devil’s influence in the world, to ventriloquize social commentary via the figure of the Clown, and to have Merlin hail Prince Charles as the future Arthur.

“O, Tom Thumb! Tom Thumb! Wherefore art thou Tom Thumb?”: Early Modern Drama and the Eighteenth-century Writer – Henry Fielding and Fanny Burney

An essay is presented on modern drama. It focuses in the theatrical interpretations, reflections in the fascination for Shakespeare drama, and significance and growing series of writing in critical publications. Also discussed the eighteenth-century cultural fascination in producing national poet, restoration of traditions of dramatic literature in modern age, and early modern dramatists.

“In Everything Illegitimate”: Bastards and the National Family

“In Everything Illegitimate”: Bastards and the National Family

Constructing the canon of early modern drama

Constructing the canon of early modern drama

Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees by Vin Nardizzi (review)

Reviewed by: Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees by Vin Nardizzi Lowell Duckert WOODEN Os: SHAKESPEARE’S THEATRES AND ENGLAND’S TREES. By Vin Nardizzi. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013; pp. 224. Just how modern is the phenomenon of “green architecture?” Although it has recently become a catch-phrase for buildings assembled from recycle/d/able materials, structures were once primarily composed of “green” stuff—wood. Take the early modern English playhouses, a series of commercial theatres in the round—so-called wooden Os—that dotted the outskirts of London’s city limits, from the opening of the Theatre in 1576 to the closure (and eventual demolition) of all theatres circa 1642. And yet, as Vin Nardizzi pronounces, these wooden rings have somehow escaped environmental analysis. Wooden Os adds to the long-engrained critical history of early modern drama by magnifying the physical substance that most studies overlook: the woody matter of the stage itself. Investigating “the cultural pervasiveness of the material link between theatres and woodlands” (24), Nardizzi deftly employs an ecocritical methodology that examines (and frequently challenges) implied divisions between nature (trees) and culture (wood products). Wood works upon culture; what work would wood do? Using Jonathan Gil Harris’s term of untimely matter (4) to trace wood’s “eco-material effects” (22), Nardizzi’s answer is the book’s central argument: far from exhibiting a “green” abundance of forests that we might expect, the art of Shakespeare and his contemporaries responded to the real wood shortages facing England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Wooden Os traces an “eco-material history of English theatre” (30) that reacted to this scarcity. For playwrights, the response to ecological crisis worked synecdochally; wooden props on the stage (like stage trees) and the wood of the stage (such as ceiling supports) stand in for the once-living trees that fell in order to erect wooden theatre spaces. Plays highlight this crisis of deforestation, Nardizzi smartly shows, through their gestic and deictic language: for instance, a remark like “yon pine does stand” (4.13.1) from Antony and Cleopatra (ca.1606–07) may reference either a stage prop or the theatre’s built-in wooden columns (or both). For theatre entrepreneurs like the Burbages the response was pragmatic: the first Globe, the author reminds us, was a product of “recycling”: built from the Theatre’s wooden remains transported across the Thames to Bankside during 1598–99. Overall, we are implored to “see … the English woods inhering in the superstructure of the wooden O” (136). A play was not just imagined to be in the woods, but was within them already. Each of the four chapters addresses particular “eco-solutions and fantasies” (12), as well as “never-green nightmare[s]” (87) in response to England’s wood woes. Chapter 1 puts the “vanishing” onstage tree of Robert Greene’s play Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (late 1580s) into conversation with sixteenth-century geopolitical and theatrical pressures: its magical departure symbolizes the salvation of wooden Os from the abuses of anti-theatricalists who wished to tear down the theatres; protection of England’s trees from the conquest of the Spanish Armada that wished to invade England’s forests; and fantasies of colonialist extraction in Virginia’s New World woods. Chapter 2 reads the “felling” (and burning) of wood/man Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597–98) as a middle-class act of environmental protest against the aristocracy (represented by Windsor Forest or the knight’s rotund body). Situating this class struggle onstage alongside John Manwood’s Treatise (1598) on better management of monarchical forests, civic pressures to shut down the theatres, and the company’s movement to Bankside, we glimpse a search for a more rooted “playhousehold” (77) within conflicts of the commons. Chapter 3 investigates the critically neglected composite version of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (ca.1600), claiming that the tree on which Horatio’s murdered body hangs, and that is subsequently destroyed by Isabella, demonstrates the process by which environmental devastation could be transformed into commercial gain: the hewn trees necessary for the Fortune Theatre’s construction (that made fortunes by restaging...

Early modern theatricality

The original essays in<italic>Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature</italic>mean to provoke rather than reassure, to challenge rather than codify. Instead of summarizing existing knowledge scholars working in the field aim at opening fresh discussion; instead of emphasizing settled consensus they direct their readers to areas of enlivened and unresolved debate. Following the models established by previous volumes in the series,<italic>Early Modern Theatricality</italic>launches a new generation of scholarship on early modern drama by focusing on the rich formal capacities of theatrical performance. The collection gathers some of the most innovative critics in the field to examine the techniques, objects, bodies, and conventions that characterized early modern theatricality, from the Tudor period to the Restoration. Taking their cues from a series of guiding keywords, the contributors identify the fundamental features of theatricality in the period, using them to launch conceptually adventurous arguments that provoke our rediscovery of early modern drama in all its complexity and inventiveness.