Early Modern Drama Research Articles

Not Something, Not Nothing, Not Shakespeare: Digitized Playbooks and the Question of Access in the Undergraduate Literature Classroom

The digital divide is deeply felt by undergraduate students in resource-restricted universities, but creative, if also labor-intensive, solutions exist for instructors negotiating paywalls and other institutional impediments. In this essay, I argue that teaching early modern drama outside the restraints of the Shakespearean archive and through a host of digital archives, databases, and tools not only engages students in inquiry-based, active learning but also cultivates a critical sense of how digital tools obviate and exacerbate questions of access. To make my case, I describe how I designed and taught a course on non-Shakespearean drama for English majors at Shippensburg University, one of Pennyslvania’s state-funded universities. After describing the mechanics of the course, I further theorize and examine the ways centering digital archives, databases, and tools as course texts enables students to think critically about the content available through these resources as well as the information hierarchies and receptions histories they promulgate.

Reconsidering a Lexical Test of Arden of Faversham: A Response to a Critique

ABSTRACTThis article is a response to a critique by Pervez Rizvi of an essay of mine entitled “A Supplementary Lexical Test for Arden of Faversham”, which employed a few high-quality lexical markers that are used much more often, or much less often, by Shakespeare than by a large control group of early modern dramatists, to support the view that Shakespeare was largely responsible for the central act of Arden. Rizvi drew on my essay to make certain sound points, notably that results for mere acts or groups of scenes cannot validly be mixed with results for whole plays, and that when one relies on only a small number of marker words the outcome can turn on the presence or absence of only one or two instances. Rizvi divided plays into 4657-word segments – the same length as Arden of Faversham, 4–9 – and noted that, when my method was applied to them, some Shakespeare segments yielded very low scores and some non-Shakespeare segments yielded very high scores. My response aims to counter some of Rizvi’s strictures, clarify my assumptions and procedures, and show that the new data that he has generously supplied strengthen, rather than weaken, my original argument.

Re-Orienting Gender and Islamic Alterity in Early Modern English Drama

ABSTRACTEarly modern scholars often read the dramatic representations of the Muslim woman in the light of postcolonial identity politics, which is largely informed by Said’s theory of Orientalism. However, the Ottomans remained as a dominant superpower throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the assumption of a power relation between a dominating West and a subordinate East cannot be sustained within the political and historical context of the age. For this reason, the image of Islamic femininity in the period’s drama should be re-interpreted so as to reflect this overturn in the world’s power balances. In this essay through short analyses of a series of early modern plays with Ottoman themes I argue that while the representations of the Muslim woman in early modern drama share characteristics with the Muslim woman in Orientalist literature, in Ottoman contexts, these representations denote not the inferiority, but the superiority of Islam, and embody the military and religious threat Islam posed to Europe.

Style, Computers, and Early Modern Drama: Beyond Authorship. Hugh Craig and Brett Greatley-Hirsch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. vii+283.

<i>Style, Computers, and Early Modern Drama: Beyond Authorship</i>. Hugh Craig and Brett Greatley-Hirsch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. vii+283.

Dramatic Geography: Romance, Intertheatricality, and Cultural Encounter in Early Modern Mediterranean Drama by Laurence Publicover

Reviewed by: Dramatic Geography: Romance, Intertheatricality, and Cultural Encounter in Early Modern Mediterranean Drama by Laurence Publicover Barbara Fuchs Laurence Publicover. Dramatic Geography: Romance, Intertheatricality, and Cultural Encounter in Early Modern Mediterranean Drama. oxford up, 2017. 204 pp. to begin: a caveat for bulletin readers: although Publicover's title announces a focus on "Mediterranean drama," his study considers exclusively English plays. Two central claims will nonetheless be of interest to scholars working more broadly across the national traditions. First, Publicover argues that early modern theater was particularly suited to the representation of far-flung romance geographies, given how flexible and minimal its scenery and stage apparatus were. As is well known to scholars of the comedia, "location was established through a number of strategies, but most importantly through the words of the actors" (22). This argument works against teleological readings that might equate the increased complexity of theatrical apparatus over the course of the seventeenth century with an increased complexity of the theater itself. Second, Publicover argues for reading dramatic versions of romance as "intertheatrical geographies," marked more by what had already appeared on the London stage than by any actual experience of the Mediterranean, so that "the dramatic Mediterranean became a site within which conversations—often about London-related topics—took place" (172). Unfortunately, "intertheatricality" here considers only plays within the same tradition, despite the promising recent work on traveling companies and other forms of transnational engagement in the period. Publicover's English purview also complicates certain claims of primacy, as when he posits that a female character disguised as a pageboy in Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamides (published in 1599, likely performed in the early 1580s) may "possibly" be "the first instance of what will become a long-standing plot device in early modern drama" (67). This will surprise Italianists familiar with Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena's La Calandria (1513), or Gl'Ingannati (1532), written collectively by the Accademia degli Intronati. The first part of Dramatic Geography addresses "Geography and Romance," with a focus on the broader literary antecedents for the conception of [End Page 327] the Mediterranean in early modern English drama. Publicover focuses on the geographies associated with "Hellenistic" romance (by which he actually means Boccaccio) and chivalric romance respectively, finding in the former a generous cosmopolitanism and in the latter a more conflictive ethnocentrism—what Denis Cosgrove called the "distance-decay model," as Publicover usefully notes (57). The second and longer part of the book, "Intertheatrical Geography," explores the reworkings of earlier versions of the Mediterranean in a tightly linked set of English plays: Thomas Kyd's Soliman and Perseda (ca. 1592), Publicover argues, is satirized in Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta (ca. 1590), which is in turn "reenchanted" in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (ca. 1597). In the latter, Publicover notes, Marlowe's Jewish merchant Barabas is split into two figures: the Jewish Shylock and the merchant Antonio, thus foregrounding a revalorization of commercial activity that associates it with romance questing. At the same time, the play's—and often the characters'—self-consciousness about the space between romance and commerce suggests the difficulties of papering over that gap. Publicover covers well-trod territory on romance and the Mediterranean. He follows in the footsteps of Benedict Robinson and Cyrus Mulready in his attention to romance as the mode through which new geographies were processed and of Jane Hwang Degenhardt in recognizing the interrelatedness of the English Mediterranean corpus in the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. Yet in the fine balance that is this kind of formalist historicism, Publicover clearly privileges the literary over the historical or ideological. Cumulatively, this has the unfortunate effect of effacing English expansionist aspirations in this period and relegating drama to a purely literary sphere. Thus, his discussion of the relation between travel and travail, for example, makes no mention of the key conjunction of those terms in the nascent discourse of English expansion in the work of Richard Hakluyt, even though The Principal Navigations (1598) is briefly mentioned elsewhere in the book (117). His arguments about the distancing of North Africa in The Tempest (ca. 1610) emphasize "narrative and emotional considerations" (41), but omit the loaded question...

Distance without Distraction: Audience Response to Metatheater in Early Modern Plays

Several essays in Shakespeare Bulletin's recent issue on early modern metatheater present a powerful and long-overdue challenge to the assumption that it creates a Brechtian alienation effect. While these critics are correct that metatheater does not alienate an audience on an emotional level, a significant proportion of spectators at metatheatrical early modern plays do experience a reflective distancing. I discovered evidence of this effect by using the best way to understand audience members' experiences: asking them. My essay employs audience surveys I conducted at productions of Knight of the Burning Pestle and Hamlet to contend that, contrary to claims made in the Bulletin issue, early modern metatheater creates mental distance in many audience members. Forty-three percent of Pestle respondents reported being more aware than usual of theatrical elements like acting choices, staging, and audience behavior. Far from emotionally alienating the spectators, however, this type of distancing can actually heighten an audience member's engagement with the production, as multiple comments by those who experienced reflection suggest. One found it "fascinating." Another "really felt like a part of the production." They explicitly stated that they felt this way because of their conscious thoughts about interpretive choices. Establishing such a fine distinction—distancing, but not alienation—is only possible if one speaks directly to audience members. By attending to what they have to say about themselves, we can sharpen our claims about how metatheater affects them. This approach is vital to clarifying the phenomenon's role in the performance of early modern plays.

Playing Indoors. Staging Early Modern Drama in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse by Will Tosh

Playing Indoors. Staging Early Modern Drama in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse by Will Tosh

Stage Directions and Shakespearean Theatre ed. by Sarah Dustagheer and Gillian Woods

Reviewed by: Stage Directions and Shakespearean Theatre ed. by Sarah Dustagheer and Gillian Woods Derek Dunne Stage Directions and Shakespearean Theatre. Edited by Sarah Dustagheer and Gillian Woods. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2017; pp. 368. Stage Directions and Shakespearean Theatre makes a welcome entrance to Shakespeare studies by bringing together editorial experience, practitioner knowledge, and theoretical chops to an elusive topic that hovers between page and stage. Indeed, it is the edited collection format that leads to such rich insights that no "monograph," with all that that prefix implies, could hope to achieve. Alongside long-time Shakespeare editors such as Terri Bourus and Suzanne Gossett, there are practiceas-research specialists like Martin White and Paul Menzer. The latter co-writes with doctoral student Jess Hamlet, while Sarah Dustagheer appears in conversation with Philip Bird, a veteran actor of the Globe stage. Such a collaborative approach models good scholarship not only through its inclusivity, but also through the holistic view that it produces of a complex theatrical riddle: In what sense can printed phrases that post-date performance be said to "direct" the stage? The book is divided into sections on taxonomy, text, editing, space, and plays, although naturally there is overlap among all of these. Throughout there is a great sensitivity to the many agents who may have a hand in the (re)production of stage directions: actors, authors, print-house staff, later editors. Tiffany Stern's opening essay gives a counter-intuitive history of the term stage direction, from a term of opprobrium used by Lewis Theobald to describe dumb shows in Shakespeare to late-nineteenth-century attempts to prescribe actors' movements. She goes on to pose the provocative question, "Are there in fact no stage directions in Shakespeare?" (40). Stern's work is complemented by Laurie Maguire's [End Page 527] wide-ranging survey of "The Boundaries of Stage Directions." Using both Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean examples, this chapter does justice to the multiplicity of directions that constantly toggle between fictional worlds and theatrical landscapes. Explaining a line like "Shift with a bag as it were full of gold on his back," Maguire takes the simple phrase as it were and shows the complex work that it does to mediate among audience, actors, characters, and later readers—"all theatre is 'as it were'" (50). The section is rounded out by Menzer and Hamlet, who discuss the difficulty of talking about early modern staging conventions, when so many stage directions are themselves unconventional. Taking one-off "nonce" stage directions like "Peter falls in a hole" or "An artificial charm of birds being heard within," they ask what is to be gained by paying attention to those unique (often non-Shakespearean) examples over the more familiar instances from the First Folio. The second section on "Text" has contributions from Emma Smith and Douglas Bruster. This may be down to reading one after the other, but Smith's argument on reading Shakespeare's stage directions as a form of free indirect discourse seems more nuanced and convincing than Bruster's take on "Shakespeare's Literary Stage Directions," which at times seeks to recover "Shakespeare's mind at work" (133). That most famous of stage directions, "Exit pursued by a Beare," becomes, in Smith's hands, "the joyfully random ursine irruption into the narrative" (113). Gossett and Bourus make up the "Editing" section, tracing the thin line that editors tread between facilitating understanding and closing off interpretation. Page design, asides, onstage deaths, and even the appearance of ghosts are all treated with the skill and sensitivity of seasoned editors, as they draw on their combined experience of editing the New Oxford Shakespeare, Norton Shakespeare, Arden Early Modern Drama, and more. Gossett's candor is to be admired when she says, "[c]onsciously or unconsciously editors assume that, given their intense familiarity with the text in question, they can envision its action better than an inexperienced reader" (147). Similarly, Bourus discusses editors being "caught between the demand for authenticity … and the demands of legibility" (172), while also toying with the literal marginality of the stage directions themselves. The section on "Space" is filled by White's discussion of indoor playing practice (including candles...

The theatrical adaptation of Merry More

The early modern play Sir Thomas More, written by Anthony Munday, Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Heywood, and William Shakespeare, takes an ecumenical viewpoint of the play's Catholic hero in order to conform to the expectations of the Master of the Revels and to appeal to a cross-confessional audience. The playwrights carefully construct the play within the confines of censorship by centering the play's action around More's dynamic personality instead of giving a full exposition of historical plot. More's personality and famous wit function together as a means for diverting attention away from the controversy surrounding More's silent opposition to Henrician policy while subtly validating his martyrdom. The argument of this article examines the adaptation of the play's ideologically diverse source material, the playwrights’ use of martyrological conventions, and the subtle traces of Erasmian allusion and recusant rhetoric in its reading of the play.

Narrating Pregnancy and Childbirth: Infanticide and the Dramatization of Reproductive Knowledge

In early modern England, infanticide was a crime overwhelmingly associated with women. Both popular texts and legal records depict women accused of infanticide as mothers acting against nature. These figures, however, do not often appear in the period’s drama. Instead, early modern drama includes fictionalized mothers who kill their children beyond infancy and into adulthood. By eschewing portrayals of neonaticide and the trials associated with it, the drama highlights a dependency upon female characters’ verbal narratives of the reproductive body that reinforces pregnancy’s unstable epistemology. I argue that the flexibility of this epistemology allows women, whether female characters in drama or historical women on trial, to distance themselves from the crime of infanticide by reconstructing narratives of both pregnancy and childbirth. Sharing rhetorical devices with the testimonies of women accused of infanticide, dramatic mothers such as Videna in The Tragedie of Gorboduc and Brunhalt in Thierry and Theodoret linguistically sever the biological ties between mother and child, thus disrupting conventional portrayals of reproduction. These parallel strategies position the reproductive female body as a site of resistance to the legal mechanisms designed to interpret it.

Emotion, Cognition and Spectator Response to the Plays of Shakespeare

Recapturing what early modern spectators thought and felt when attending the theatre has for some years been a kind of Holy Grail for scholars of Renaissance drama. As Myhill and Low point out in Imagining the Audience in Early Modern Drama (2011), although we now know a great deal about the material conditions of early modern theatre and theatre-going, the actual intellectual and emotional experience of spectators ‘has proved remarkably resistant to examination.’ This article discusses some of the strategies that previous critics have employed in the attempt to rediscover what it felt like to be an early modern spectator, and then proceeds to suggest a new approach to this problem, which aims to acknowledge more fully the ways in which spectator response to drama can be multiple, unpredictable and unstable, shaped as it is by a wide variety of factors such as the play's cultural contexts, its dramatic architecture, and its linguistic registers. I will then show how this approach might work in practice through an examination of the figure of Lavinia in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, considering particularly how spectators might have responded to her role in the play's final revenge plot. Here, I will explore some of the frames of reference that early modern spectators might have brought to bear on their understanding of Lavinia and her role as revenger, and how these frames might have affected their emotional responses to the character, examining some contemporary responses to classical tales of female revengers; the treatment of rape victims in other drama of the period; and contemporary attitudes towards female anger and violence.

『현당극담』 에 나타난 교화기관의 극에 대한 현철의 인식

This paper is aimed at analyzing Hyeon Cheol’s argument on the educational organ drama in Hyeondanggukdam, Hyeondang’s discussion on theatre and examining that his being unable to work together the people in charge of modern drama was due to his theatre view that denied a kind of Ibsen’s Social problematic drama. Hyeon Cheol who applied Japanese early modern drama movement as it was excluded from theatrical world in colonized Joseon, which tells the fact that the characteristics distinguishing Japanese modern drama movement from Korean’s began to form in 1920s.BR Hyeon Cheol admitted that educational organ drama was needed, but he criticized strongly Ibsen’s Social problematic drama. His reasons for it was summarized in two things. First thing was that it was not ideal for playwright’s purpose to educate the audience to appear directly in the work and second thing was that educational organ dramas could not work because audience’s likes and dislikes on contents could be different according to their tastes. He insisted that the value of Shakespeare plays is higher than that of Ibsen’s as educational organ dramas.BR Hyeon Cheol’s argument in Hyeondanggukdam was one to accept Chubouchi Syoyo’s theatre view unchanged. Chubouchi Syoyo did not follow the control policy by Meiji government but searched for his own theatrical improvement. He asserted that the theater which was not ‘practical skill‘ should be Japanese modern drama and presented shakespeare drama as an example, criticizing Ibsen. Hyeon Cheol took the experience to take active part in Geijyutuja seriously, so he believed that Chubouchi Syoyo’s theatre view could be applied to colonized Joseon which had to face Japanese policy to control theater.BR The people in charge of performance leading the modern drama movement in colonized Joseon in 1920s was students studying in Japan. They were active in Geugyesulyeonguhoe and Towolhoe and their point of view on educational organ drama was different from Hyeon Cheol’s. The modern drama movement in colonized Joseon considered Ibsen’s Social problematic drama as a model and there was no place Hyeon Cheol could belong. In spite of this situation, he did not understand exactly educational organ drama which the society of colonized Joseon wanted after 3.1 Independence Movement. It was his limitation that he was trapped in premodern ‘art view for amusement.’

Beyond Shakespeare's land of ire: Revisiting Ireland in English Renaissance drama

AbstractThere has been much critical work on the symbolic centrality of Ireland to English Renaissance literature and drama. To focus on the latter, Shakespeare's histories have been read topically in terms of the contemporaneous Irish wars and also more historically, in terms of English colonialism in Ireland. Topical readings have been followed by allegorical approaches with, for instance, attention to Othello's “ghostly Irish subtext” (Hadfield, ) or Troilus and Cressida's memories of Elizabethan conflict in Ireland (Parker, ). Such interpretations suggest scholarly imaginativeness, the discovery of surprising meaning about a text we thought we knew, albeit within a Shakespeare‐centric frame. They further suggest the capacity of Ireland to enter a play's imaginary—as problem, as image, as other world. At stake here, then, are interrelated questions about what Ireland is doing in English Renaissance drama, where and when we expect to find it, and how we read it. This essay re‐examines the question of why and how Ireland features in plays by Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists. This deceptively simple question is intended to revisit some assumptions that underpin current critical understandings. Why Ireland features in plays has been largely understood as a function of historical contexts and processes: critics and scholars have turned to these as an important site of explanation, with the early modern colonialist discourse on Ireland given special prominence as a determinant of meaning. However, this focus has sidelined other considerations. This article argues for a broadening of context, beyond a focus on topical resonance, to allow for a consideration of dramatic genre and form, the imitative nature of dramatic writing, and the theatre companies themselves, as important factors that shaped how a text and context like Ireland and the Irish found its way into a play. This approach treats representations as a series of reciprocal markings, intertextual echoes, and foregrounds the capacity of a play to make meaning within its own frame. The objective here is less about discounting the political and ideological work of Renaissance plays than about exploring their possibilities to (re)imagine the early modern “land of ire.”

TURKISH IMAGE IN THE WEST DURING THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE: HISTORICAL FACTS AND PRESENT DAY CONNOTATIONS

Throughout history there have been opposing forces, one of which is the conflict between ‘West and East’ as Huntington claims. One of the earliest, major competitions, in this matter, has been the one with Ottoman Empire, representing Islam and European countries, followers of Christianity. These forces have been clashing in the form of several means and for reasons to predominate each other if they can achieve it at all. How has such a ‘clash’ begun between civilizations and what is the present status of it between Turkey and Western countries? This study aims at highlighting the background from a historical point of view beginning with the capture of Jerusalem by Ottoman Turks and how Turkish Image is created and portrayed in Early English Plays in relation to the rise and fall of Ottoman Empire as depicted in The Sultan Speaks by Linda McJannet. Since the core of the Ottoman Empire is modern Turkey today, the recent changes in their image on the way to full membership to the EU as well as to ‘interreligious/intercultural dialog’ in an attempt to bring peace to both parties in question for a sustainable and amicable future. It is concluded that there are still concerns between the global signatories. It will take some more time and effort to mature the thinking that they could live harmoniously developing their countries economically and their democracies for a mutual understanding.Key Words: Turkish Image, Early Modern Plays, Ottoman Empire, Islam, Turks.

Introduction: Shakespeare and Riot

ABSTRACTThis introduction establishes riot and riot studies as contexts for the analysis of Shakespearean drama and performance. It raises questions about the understanding and depiction of riot in early modern drama and about the provocation of riot in Shakespearean performance contexts to demonstrate how studies of Shakespeare and early modern drama might inform and be productively informed by fresh conceptualisations of riot.

Hugh Craig and Brett Greatley-Hirsch, Style, Computers, and Early Modern Drama: Beyond Authorship

FOLLOWING John Burrows’ use of the commonest (function) words in English and principal component analysis as the ‘key method for what came to be known as computational stylistics’, Hugh Craig and Brett Greatley-Hirsch extend quantitative analysis to include Random Forests, Shannon Entropy, Delta, and Student’s t-test as tools of literary exploration. Random Forests and Shannon Entropy are explained in Chapter 1, although their thorough understanding requires greater familiarity than that enjoyed by literary scholars. Unfortunately for the exposition, the PCA biplot of Figure 1.3 (37) overprints Figure 1.2 (36) with scant regard for the reader. Although the focus of computational stylistics has been chiefly on authorship, Craig and Greatley-Hirsch use the extended methods of computational stylistics to engage with six questions that exclude the determination of authorship. These questions are explored individually in Chapters 2 to 7: the difference between prose and verse; the affinity (or not) of dramatic characters within and without the same authorial canon; analysis of the type and distribution of stage properties in the early modern theatre; the ‘cultural drift’ of the English language used by dramatists 1585–1624; the influence of theatre company house style on early modern dramatists in comparison with individual authorial style; the relationship of Restoration plays to plays before the Puritan closing of the theatres. The common theme is the methodology of quantitative analysis.

‘A pleasant tragicomedy, the cat being scap’t’?: William Sampson’s The Vow Breaker (1636) and the instability of genre

William Sampson’s 1636 play The Vow Breaker presents us with what looks like generic confusion: a cat (of all the creatures the least likely to stick to the script) seems to offer us comic relief in a play which, though intended as tragedy, descends into melodramatic sub-Kydian fustian. This essay discusses how the genre of early modern drama is affected by the employment of cats as actors, focusing on Sampson’s play which seeks to consolidate tragic effect by emphasising the parallels between a persecuted or helpless animal and the tragic protagonist, in the person of Ann. The cat in the original production was almost certainly real (though we can’t prove this), and the essay will argue that tone and genre are crucially influenced by this casting decision. The play is rescued from its fustian, made more troubling, by the uncomfortable stage effects resulting from its feline performer. The essay interacts with Nicholas Ridout’s reading of the ‘affect’ of real animals on the stage, arguing, though, that the early modern stage cat resists a clash between semiotics and phenomenology by not conforming to Ridout’s competing binaries. Ridout argues – following Vidal-Naquet – that ‘sacrifice is intrinsic to tragic form’. In The Vow Breaker neither sacrificial victim accepts her fate willingly, and it is this return to the pre-tragic, ‘known of old’ as Freud might have it – holy, wild, live, phenomenal, magic – which Sampson struggles to contain. The final act of the play seeks to restore the ritual of tragedy, disturbed by the various uncontrollable variables in the main plot, by means of ritual animal disguise and by the effacing of the pre-tragic and the feminine.

Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage

Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage

“Draw thy rapier, for we’ll have a bout”: duelling on the early modern stage

ABSTRACTIn Early Modern England, duelling was a serious business. Or so it would seem. Not so, I would suggest, for early modern playwrights, for whom the conventions of duelling and the newly established honour culture that underpinned it provided material for all kinds of comedy, from slapstick silliness to piercing satire and bitterly ironic scorn. Through close-readings in dramatic texts of the period, I suggest that dramatists laugh at and encourage their audiences to laugh at duelling and duellists throughout the period 1599–1630, and that they use duels which are inappropriately staged as a way of interrogating duelling practices and theories, and the values which lie behind them.

Doctoral Projects in Progress in Theatre Arts, 2018

Doctoral Projects in Progress in Theatre Arts, 2018 Troy Matthew Lescher (bio), Amy Beltrán (bio), and Sammi Stowe (bio) This is the sixty-sixth annual report of dissertations in progress in theatre arts in the United States. The entries contained in this report were gathered from those institutions offering a doctoral degree in theatre or related fields. The accuracy of the report depends largely on the cooperation of those faculty members who submitted complete and timely information. By compiling this data, we seek to inform the greater theatre community of the diverse research projects currently underway across various universities and disciplines. This report lists (in order) the doctoral student's name, dissertation title, institution, academic department, faculty supervisor, and projected year of completion. Dissertation topics are arranged in two parts: in part 1, topics are listed first geographically, and secondarily by time periods; and part 2 provides additional divisions for those projects that are not easily classified within geographic or historical parameters, but conform to other emerging areas of contemporary research. A request for submissions for the 2019 edition will be mailed in October 2018. Please contact the 2018–19 editor, Troy Matthew Lescher (troy.lescher@humboldt.edu), if your institution is not already receiving the annual call for submissions. My fellow associate editors and I are grateful for the effort of all those who have contributed to this annual report. We would like to express our sincere appreciation to the Humboldt State University Department of Theatre, Film & Dance and its chair, Ann Alter, for sponsoring this endeavor. [End Page 281] PART I ASIA Mantillake, Sudesh. Colonial Choreography: The British Colonial Construction of Sri Lankan Dance. University of Maryland. Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies. Esther Kim Lee. 2018. Pitchford, Bart. Hela L'Wein: Imagining Citizenship through Performance in Displaced Syrian Communities. University of Texas at Austin. Theatre and Dance. Charlotte Canning. 2018. CHINA Huang, Yizhou. Staging Colonial Modernity: Performances for English-speaking Audiences in Shanghai between Two World Wars. Tufts University. Theatre and Performance Studies. Noe Montez. 2019. Kang, Bindi. Post-collective and Community in Contemporary Chinese Performance. The Graduate Center/CUNY. Theatre. Peter Eckersall. 2021. Zhang, Wei. Estranging a Post-Socialist China: Adaptations of Brecht in Chinese Theatre since the Cultural Revolution. University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. Theatre and Dance. Markus Wessendorf. 2018. ENGLAND Medieval/Renaissance Nakawaki, Bryan. "You played once i' th' university, you say?": Shakespeare's Drama on the University Stage. Purdue University. English. Charlie Ross and Paul White. 2018. Wicks, Heather. Love Her after: Desire, Death, and Tragic Subjectivity on the Early Modern Stage. Purdue University. English. Charlie Ross and Paul White. 2018. Restoration and Eighteenth Century Gallagher, Megan. Accidentally Substantive: Editorial Influence in Shakespeare's Fourth Folio. Claremont Graduate University. English. Lori Anne Ferrell. 2018. Lutz, Michael. Performative Humanism in Early Modern Drama. Indiana University. English. Linda Charnes. 2019. Zoch, Amanda. Pregnancy and Erasure in Early Modern Drama and Women's Writing. Indiana University. English. Ellen MacKay. 2018. Nineteenth Century Grinder, Brittany Proudfoot. Bitches in Britches: A History of Female Travesty Actresses of the English Stage. University of Maryland. Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies. Esther Kim Lee. 2018. Twentieth Century Pierson, Kate. "When All the Town's a Stage": Ann Jellicoe's Community Play Process. Florida State University. Theatre. Mary Karen Dahl and Elizabeth Osborne. 2018. GERMANY Piggott, Jessi. Staging Commitment: The Social Aesthetics of Weimar Agitprop. Stanford University. Theater and Performance Studies. Matthew Smith. 2019. IRELAND Van Winkle, Kathryn Rebecca. "They shall be speaking forever": Performances of Rising, Riot, and the Nation in Ireland 2016. University of Texas at Austin. Theatre and Dance. Charlotte Canning. 2018. SOUTH AMERICA Thompson, Jennifer. Dramaturgies of Democracy: Performance, Cultural Policy, and Citizenship in Chile, 1979–Present. The Graduate Center/CUNY. Theatre. Jean Graham-Jones. 2021. Villada, Diego. Visiting the Living Museum: Brazilian Roots Tourism and the Emancipatory Possible. University of Pittsburgh. Theatre Arts. Lisa Jackson-Schebetta. 2018. USA General Ormiston, Rebecca. Acts of Recovery: Eugene O'Neill and Addiction Treatment in Post-WWII America. Stanford University. Theater and Performance Studies. Jennifer Brody. 2018. Nineteenth Century Hughes, Bethany. Playing Indian on Stage, 1829–1924. Northwestern University. Theatre. Harvey Young. 2018. Twentieth Century Brooks, John. The Racial...