The Arden Handbook of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama: Perspectives On Culture, Performance and Identity 9781350161856, 9781350161887, 9781350161870

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THE ARDEN HANDBOOK OF SHAKESPEARE AND EARLY MODERN DRAMA

THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE HANDBOOKS The Arden Research Handbook of Contemporary Shakespeare Criticism Edited by Evelyn Gajowski ISBN 978-1-3500-9322-5 The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Social Justice Edited by David Ruiter ISBN 978-1-3501-4036-3 The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Contemporary Performance Edited by Peter Kirwan and Kathryn Prince ISBN 978-1-3500-8067-6 The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Textual Studies Edited by Lukas Erne ISBN 978-1-3500-8063-8 The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Adaptation Edited by Diana E. Henderson and Stephen O’Neill ISBN 978-1-3501-1030-4

THE ARDEN HANDBOOK OF SHAKESPEARE AND EARLY MODERN DRAMA PERSPECTIVES ON CULTURE, PERFORMANCE AND IDENTITY

Edited by Michelle M. Dowd and Tom Rutter

THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE and the Arden Shakespeare logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Michelle M. Dowd, Tom Rutter and contributors, 2023 Michelle M. Dowd, Tom Rutter and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xiv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design: Charlotte Daniels Cover image: The Indian pattern of the mandala (© Getty Images) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dowd, Michelle M., 1975- editor. | Rutter, Tom, editor. Title: The Arden handbook of Shakespeare and early modern drama : perspectives on culture, performance and identity / edited by Michelle M. Dowd and Tom Rutter. Description: London ; New York : The Arden Shakespeare, 2023. | Series: The Arden Shakespeare handbooks | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2022026611 | ISBN 9781350161856 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350161870 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350161863 (epub) | ISBN 9781350161887 Subjects: LCSH: English drama–Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1600–History and criticism. | English drama–17th century–History and criticism. | Theater and society–England– History–16th century. | Theater and society–England–History–17th century. Classification: LCC PR658.S46 A74 2023 | DDC 813/.6–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022026611 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-6185-6 ePDF: 978-1-3501-6187-0 eBook: 978-1-3501-6186-3 Series: The Arden Shakespeare Handbooks Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

L ist of I llustrations  N otes on C ontributors  S eries P reface  A cknowledgements  N ote on the T ext  1

Introduction Michelle M. Dowd and Tom Rutter

2

Material and institutional contexts of early modern drama Ed Gieskes

vii viii xii xiv xv 1 19

Part I  Research methods and problems 3.1 Did early modern drama actually happen? Kurt Schreyer

53

3.2 Drama and society in Shakespeare’s England Jean E. Howard

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Part II  Current research and issues 4.1 Ancient and early modern European contexts of early modern ­English drama Ton Hoenselaars

89

4.2 Playing companies and repertories Elizabeth E. Tavares

109

4.3 Playhouses and performance Laurie Johnson

129

4.4 Drama beyond the playhouses Tracey Hill

147

4.5 Material culture Chloe Porter

163

4.6 Engendering the stage: Women and dramatic culture Clare McManus and Lucy Munro

181

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CONTENTS

4.7 Matter, nature, cosmos: The scientific art of the early modern ­English stage Jean E. Feerick

201

4.8 Early modern race-work: History, methodology and politics Jane Hwang Degenhardt

219

4.9 Sexualities, emotions and embodiment Holly Dugan

239

4.10 Religion and religious cultures Benedict S. Robinson

257

Part III  New directions 5.1 Diversifying early modern drama 1: Early modern disability studies and trans studies Genevieve Love

275

5.2 Diversifying early modern drama 2: Gaining perspective: Race, ­diversity and early modern studies Farah Karim-Cooper

285

5.3 Performing Shakespeare’s contemporaries Harry R. McCarthy

295

Part IV  Chronology and resources 6

Rethinking the early years of the London playhouses: An essay in ­chronology Andy Kesson

315

7

Resources Catherine Evans and Amy Lidster

327

8

Further reading Michelle M. Dowd and Tom Rutter

339

I ndex

363

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

4.3.1 ‘Map of London Showing the Playhouses’, by C. W. Redwood. J. Q. Adams (1917), Shakespearean Playhouses: A History of English ­Theatres from the Beginning to the Restoration, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, front inset. Source: Wikimedia Commons/ public domain 4.3.2 Aernout van Buchel’s copy of the sketch of the Swan playhouse by Johannes de Witt, c. 1596. Image courtesy Folger Shakespeare Library LUNA Digital Image Collection, ID 8111. From facsimile published in The Graphic, 26 May 1888 4.3.3 A recent photographic enlargement of Wenceslaus Hollar’s drawing of the Globe in ‘A View from St. Mary’s, Southwark, Looking Towards Westminster’ (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection). First published in Tim Fitzpatrick, ‘Reconstructing Shakespeare’s Second Globe using “Computer Aided Design” (CAD) Tools’, Early Modern Literary Studies, Special Issue 13 (April 2004): 4.1–35: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/si-13/fitzpatrick 4.4.1 Map showing playing spaces in the early modern City of London, adapted from C. W. Redwood’s illustration to J. Q. Adams (1917), Shakespearean Playhouses: A History of English Theatres from the Beginning to the Restoration, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Source: Wikimedia Commons/public domain 4.5.1 Thomas Middleton (d. 1627). A game at chæss as it was acted nine dayes to gether at the Globe on the banks side (London: s.n., 1625?), illustrated title page. Call #: STC 17883. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library 4.5.2 German pearwood medallion (c. 1530–58), thought to have been used as a games piece (Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

133

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137

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166 167

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Jane Hwang Degenhardt is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her work focuses on early modern drama, with particular interests in the histories of race and religion, the effects of globalizing processes, and the relationship between literature and social justice. She is the author of Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage (2022) and Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage (2010) and co-editor of Religion and Drama in Early Modern England (2011) and of the journal English Literary Renaissance. Michelle M. Dowd is Hudson Strode Professor of English and director of the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama. In addition to co-editing several volumes, she is the author of Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (2009), The Dynamics of Inheritance on the Shakespearean Stage (2015) and articles in such journals as Criticism, Shakespeare Studies, English Literary Renaissance and Renaissance Drama. She also edits a book series, Strode Studies in Early Modern Literature and Culture. Holly Dugan is Associate Professor of English at the George Washington University. She is the author of The Ephemeral History of Perfume (2011) and co-editor with Karen Raber of The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Animals (2020). Catherine Evans is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the John Rylands Research Institute (University of Manchester) working on a project entitled Reflecting Devotion which examines pearls and glass in early modern religious culture. She has taught at the Universities of Edinburgh, York and Sheffield, and her research has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Huntington Library, the UCLA-Clark Library, IASH Edinburgh and the University of McGill. She is currently working on a monograph entitled The Time of the Book. Jean E. Feerick is Associate Professor of English at John Carroll University. She is the author of Strangers in Blood: Relocating Race in the Renaissance (2010) and co-editor of The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature (2012). Her work on pre-modern race, literature and science, and ecocriticism has appeared in recent volumes published by Wiley Blackwell, Oxford, Palgrave and Bloomsbury. Her current research investigates the elemental underpinnings of human identity in early modern literature and builds on her published work examining the tendency among Renaissance writers to conceptually conjoin human and botanical forms.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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Edward Gieskes teaches Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. He has published on a wide range of early modern plays, most recently on Shakespeare’s Henry VIII in the Routledge Companion to Shakespeare and Memory. Tracey Hill is Emeritus Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at Bath Spa University, UK. Author of two books  – Anthony Munday and Civic Culture (2004) and Pageantry and Power: A Cultural History of the Early Modern Lord Mayor’s Show (2010), she is also editor-in-chief of the Records of Early English Drama project Civic London 1558–1642. She is a Freeman of both the City of London and the Worshipful Company of Founders. Ton Hoenselaars is Professor of Renaissance Literature at Utrecht University. His research focuses on the international relations of early modern English literature and Shakespeare’s afterlives. Books include Images of Englishmen and Foreigners in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (1992), Shakespeare’s Italy (1993, 1997), Shakespeare and the Language of Translation (Arden, 2004, 2012), Shakespeare’s History Plays (2004, 2006), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists (2011) and Shakespeare Forever! (2017). He was one of the six editors on the Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare (2 vols, 2016). Jean E. Howard is George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University where she teaches early modern literature, Shakespeare, feminist studies and theatre history. Her new book on King Lear: Language and Writing was published by Bloomsbury Press in spring 2022; another book, Staging History: Forging the Body Politic, on the differing fates of the history play in Britain and the United States in twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is nearing completion and will be published by Columbia University Press. Laurie Johnson is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia, and current President of the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association (since 2016). Publications include Shakespeare’s Lost Playhouse: Eleven Days at Newington Butts (2018) and The Tain of Hamlet (2013), and edited collections Embodied Cognition and Shakespeare’s Theatre: The Early Modern Body-Mind (with John Sutton and Evelyn Tribble, 2014) and Rapt in Secret Studies: Emerging Shakespeares (with Darryl Chalk, 2010). Farah Karim-Cooper is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at King’s College London and the co-director of Education at Shakespeare’s Globe. She is on the executive board of RaceB4Race, President of the Shakespeare Association of America 2021–22, on the Council for the Warburg Institute and a Trustee of the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre in London. In addition to publishing many articles and chapters in books, Farah has written two monographs, Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Drama (2006, 2019) and The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment (Arden, 2016), and has edited and co-edited five essay collections. She launched the Globe’s work on Shakespeare and Race in 2018 and has since led anti-racist Shakespeare initiatives there and at King's College London, including co-founding the Early Modern Scholars of Colour Network. She is currently writing The Great White Bard: Shakespeare and Race, Then and Now (USA), due out in 2023. Andy Kesson is Reader in Renaissance Literature at the University of Roehampton, the author of John Lyly and Early Modern Authorship and, with Emma Smith, the co-editor of The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England. He led the Before Shakespeare research project (BeforeShakespeare.com) and is currently a member of the Box Office Bears research team (BoxOfficeBears. com). His online platform, ABitLit.co, aims to bring research and creativity of all kinds to new audiences. Amy Lidster is Departmental Lecturer in English Language and Literature at Jesus College, Oxford. She is the author of Publishing the History Play in the Time of Shakespeare: Stationers Shaping a Genre, and her work has also appeared in edited collections and journals, including Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Studies and Renaissance Drama. She is working on two further monograph projects – Wartime Shakespeare: Performing Narratives of Conflict, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, and Authorships and Authority in Early Modern Dramatic Paratexts. Genevieve Love is Professor of English at Colorado College, where she teaches courses on Shakespeare, early modern drama, poetry, and LGBTQIA+ literature. Her book, Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability, argues that the figure of the physically disabled prosthetic body in early modern English theatre mediates a set of related ‘likeness problems’ that structure the theatrical, textual and critical lives of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Harry R. McCarthy is Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College, University of Cambridge. He is the author of Performing Early Modern Drama Beyond Shakespeare: Edward’s Boys (2020) and Boy Actors in Early Modern England: Skill and Stagecraft in the Theatre (2022). His work on early modern theatre history and contemporary performance has appeared in Early Theatre, English Literary History, Shakespeare and Shakespeare Survey. He currently serves on Shakespeare Survey’s editorial board. Clare McManus is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Theatre and director of the Centre for Literature & Inclusion at the University of Roehampton. She publishes on Shakespearean women’s performance and has edited Shakespeare, Fletcher and Shirley. With Lucy Munro, she leads Engendering the Stage: The Records of Early Modern Drama (funded by the Leverhulme Trust), part of the international Engendering the Stage collaboration (https://engenderingthestage.humanities.mcmaster.ca/). She is completing a monograph on the effects of women’s performance on the Shakespearean stage.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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Lucy Munro is Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at King’s College London. Her most recent publications include editions of Massinger’s The Picture and Shirley’s The Gentleman of Venice; a monograph, Shakespeare in the Theatre: The King’s Men; and essays on theatrical investment, status and gender in Early Theatre, English Literary Renaissance and Shakespeare Quarterly. She is a co-investigator on Before Shakespeare (https://beforeshakespeare.com) and the international Engendering the Stage collaboration (https://engenderingthestage.humanities.mcmaster.ca/). Chloe Porter is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and the co-director of the Centre for Early Modern and Medieval Studies at the University of Sussex. Her first monograph, Making and Unmaking in Early Modern English Drama: Spectators, Aesthetics and Incompletion (2013), explores the significance of processes of making and destruction in plays by dramatists including Shakespeare, Lyly and Greene. She has published widely on intersections between early modern drama and visual and material cultures. Benedict S. Robinson is the author of Islam and Early Modern English Literature: The Politics of Romance from Spenser to Milton (2007) and Passion’s Fictions from Shakespeare to Richardson: Literature and the Sciences of Soul and Mind (2021); he is the editor of John Webster’s The White Devil (The Arden Shakespeare, 2019). He is currently editing Antony and Cleopatra for Arden Shakespeare and writing about the literary and cultural history of resentment, part of which is forthcoming in PMLA. Tom Rutter is Senior Lecturer in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama at the University of Sheffield. His publications include Work and Play on the Shakespearean Stage, The Cambridge Introduction to Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare and the Admiral’s Men and, most recently, A Companion to the Cavendishes, co-edited with Lisa Hopkins. He is an editor of the journal Shakespeare and is currently writing a book on Shakespeare and science. Kurt Schreyer is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Missouri  – St. Louis. His interests extend to a wide variety of genres and texts across the traditional medieval/Renaissance divide, and his work has appeared in Exemplaria, the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies and Shakespeare Quarterly (forthcoming). He is the author of Shakespeare’s Medieval Craft: Remnants of the Mysteries on the London Stage (2014). Elizabeth E. Tavares is Assistant Professor with the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama, where she focuses on playing companies, theatre history and Shakespeare in performance. Currently completing a book on the development of the repertory system in the early modern theatre with support from the NEH and Mellon Foundation, Tavares’s award-winning work has appeared in Early Theatre, Shakespeare, Shakespeare Bulletin, Shakespeare Studies, The Map of Early Modern London and Notes & Queries, among other venues.

SERIES PREFACE

The Arden Shakespeare Handbooks provide researchers and graduate students with both cutting-edge perspectives on perennial questions and authoritative overviews of the history of research. The series comprises single-volume reference works that map the parameters of a discipline or sub-discipline and present the current state of research. Each Handbook offers a systematic and structured range of specially commissioned chapters reflecting on the history, methodologies, current debates and future of a particular field of research. Additional resources, such as a chronology of important milestones that have shaped the field, a glossary of key terms, an annotated bibliography and a list of further resources, are included. It is hoped that the series will provide both a thorough grounding in the range of research under each heading and a practical guide that equips readers to conduct their own independent research. The topics selected for coverage in the series lie at the heart of the study of Shakespeare today, and at the time of writing include: • • • • • •

contemporary Shakespeare criticism and theory Shakespeare and textual studies Shakespeare and contemporary performance Shakespeare and adaptation Shakespeare and social justice Shakespeare and early modern drama

While each volume in the series provides coverage of a distinct area of research, it will be immediately apparent that ‘distinct’ becomes a slippery concept: how does one define contemporary criticism as distinct from contemporary performance? Indeed, the very porousness of research areas becomes even more marked if, for instance, one explores research in Shakespeare and contemporary performance (in the volume edited by Peter Kirwan and Kathryn Prince) and Shakespeare and adaptation (in the volume edited by Diana Henderson and Stephen O’Neill). Questions of social justice permeate each area of research, for, as Evelyn Gajowski notes in the introduction to The Arden Research Handbook of Contemporary Shakespeare Criticism, ‘many of the essays … suggest the inseparability of critical practices, on the one hand, and social justice and political activism, on the other’. Even where we might be inclined to feel on safer ground about the ‘particular field’ of textual studies as distinct from other fields of Shakespeare studies, Lukas

SERIES PREFACE

xiii

Erne disabuses that notion in his introduction to The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Textual Studies: Textual variants and multiplicity create their own proliferation of meanings, nor can textual studies and criticism ultimately be kept apart. For the question of what the text is decisively impacts the question of what the text means. While acknowledging the artificiality of boundaries and the inevitability of some degree of overlap, we have nevertheless encouraged editors to determine the contours of their Handbook with an eye on other titles in the same series. Just as each book provides a systematic grounding for readers, the series as a whole presents an invitation to readers to delve into each volume, to find those connections and points of intersection, and to explore the related fields that ultimately will enrich their own research.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are enormously grateful to the contributors for graciously sharing their expertise with us for this volume, especially during what has proved to be an exceptionally challenging period due to the Covid-19 pandemic. It has been a true privilege to work with this outstanding group of scholars to bring this collaborative volume to light. Our thanks also go to Mark Dudgeon and Lara Bateman of The Arden Shakespeare at Bloomsbury Publishing in London for their support for this project from its inception. We would also like to thank Ella Wilson at Arden and Viswasirasini Govindarajan at Integra Software Services for their assistance in the final stages of the project. The anonymous external reviewers for the press provided incisive comments on the volume at various stages of the project, and we are grateful for their careful review and constructive feedback. We also wish to thank the University of Sheffield and the University of Alabama for providing us with research and sabbatical leaves that enabled us to finalize the project; additional financial support from the University of Alabama assisted us with indexing costs. Finally, we would like to thank our families, Mike (Michelle) and Sophie, Caedmon and Aphra (Tom) for their love and support.

NOTE ON THE TEXT

Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Shakespeare’s plays are taken from the Arden Third Series editions, with act, line and scene numbers cited parenthetically. When quoting from early modern manuscripts and printed texts, we have retained original orthography for u/v but have modernized i/j where necessary. We have followed contributors’ preference regarding the use/capitalization of the terms ‘BIPOC’ and ‘black’.

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction MICHELLE M. DOWD AND TOM RUTTER

This introduction begins by explaining a difficult word from the title of The Arden Handbook of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama, and that word is ‘and’. The book appears as part of a series that has also produced handbooks to Shakespeare and Textual Studies (Erne 2021), to Shakespeare and Contemporary Criticism (Gajowski 2021), to Shakespeare and Contemporary Performance (Kirwan and Prince 2021) and to Shakespeare and Social Justice (Ruiter 2021), with a handbook to Shakespeare and Adaptation forthcoming (Henderson and O’Neill); in each of those cases, ‘and’ serves to herald the approach to Shakespeare or the aspect of Shakespeare studies on which the book focuses and therefore means something like ‘considered from the perspective of’. By extension, a handbook of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama would look at Shakespeare in relation to other early modern dramatists and the environment they worked in. It might consider the influence of (for example) Marlowe’s innovations in tragedy on Shakespeare’s early history plays or the way Shakespeare’s own development of the form went on to shape the writing of later tragedians like Webster and Ford. It might also look at the impact of the working conditions and conventions of the early modern stage upon Shakespeare’s writing: how the experience of belonging to an acting company informed the kinds of role he wrote (such as the clown parts he wrote for Will Kemp and, later, Robert Armin); how the practice of having male actors play female parts affected his depiction of women; or the importance of the different playhouses in which he worked, including the Theatre, the Globe and the Blackfriars. All of those concerns – the development of English drama, acting companies and their personnel, theatrical cross-dressing, playhouse design – are addressed in this book, but with one crucial difference. Rather than focusing primarily on Shakespeare and discussing other dramatists and their working conditions in relation to his plays, we are interested in early modern drama more broadly – and indeed, the nature and limits of ‘early modern drama’ are themselves an explicit theme of this collection (especially in Sections 3 and 6). Readers will find discussions of Shakespeare’s plays here, and of the conditions within which they were written. However, they will also find analysis of other dramatists and plays, some of them written after Shakespeare’s death, with no sense of an invariable obligation to relate them to Shakespeare; of important social and discursive contexts for the drama (such as science, race-work, religion and sexuality); and of ways in which early modern plays function in the

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THE ARDEN HANDBOOK OF SHAKESPEARE AND EARLY MODERN DRAMA

present (both on stage and in relation to modern concerns around disability, gender identity and race). Our contributors also insist on the need to look beyond neat chronological, spatial and gendered limits when addressing the subject, troubling the boundaries between the early modern and the medieval, between England and the rest of Europe, and between playhouses and other performance spaces  – not to mention the cliché that early modern performance was an all-male enterprise. Accordingly, ‘and’ in our title may be taken as meaning not ‘considered from the perspective of’, but rather something like ‘and the broader topic of’. In effect, this is a handbook of early modern drama, including Shakespeare. The question of exactly how to go about ‘including Shakespeare’ is, however, a problem for any author who wants to address the topic of early modern drama in its broadest sense. One reason for this is the role that Shakespeare has played in the history of its scholarship. To give an early example: in 1744 the bookseller Robert Dodsley published A Select Collection of Old Plays, a twelve-volume collection of ‘the best and scarcest of our old Plays’ (Dodsley 1744: i). Many of these, such as Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy and Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness, are now central to the canon of early modern drama, but in Dodsley’s time they had not been printed for over a century. In the preface to his updated edition of the collection, published in 1780, Isaac Reed looked back on the scholarly rediscovery of early modern drama beyond ‘our most esteemed authors’: At a time when destruction seemed to threaten most of the productions of the early stage, and after, it is to be feared, many of them were irrecoverably lost, the explanation of those writers, who may be esteemed the classics of this country, began to engage the attention of some of the ablest writers of the present times. Struck with the absurd alterations and wild conjectures of critics, who mangled and disfigured their authors, instead of elucidating their obscurity, they determined to search into contemporary writers for a solution of such doubts as had been created chiefly by time. The success which attended their enquiries soon shewed the necessity of an acquaintance with works which had until then been overlooked, to obtain a perfect knowledge of some of our most esteemed authors. It shewed also, that many beauties had long remained unknown and unnoticed; that fame had not always accompanied worth; and that those who wished for information concerning ancient manners would not be able to obtain it so well from any other source. (Reed 1780: xi–xii) The final sentence of this extract asserts the beauty, worth and interest of neglected plays, but the sentences that come before make it clear that the resurgence of interest in them grew out of the desire to explain, elucidate and ‘obtain a perfect knowledge of some of our most esteemed authors’. Admittedly, Reed refers to ‘authors’ in the plural, presumably to include the other dramatists besides Shakespeare (Ben Jonson, and Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher) whose works had been preserved in prestigious folio editions and whom he mentions earlier in the preface as the most enduring writers of their day (ix). But he also shows that scholarly interest in the

INTRODUCTION

3

plays reprinted by Dodsley had its original basis in the desire to better understand ‘those writers, who may be esteemed the classics of this country’. Later on in the preface, Reed takes it for granted that buyers of his collection will already own an edition of Shakespeare (xix). Clearly, things have changed since 1744 as far as the availability and familiarity of non-Shakespearean drama are concerned; the century that followed saw editions of the works of Massinger (1761), Ford (1811), Marlowe (1818), Peele (1828), Webster (1830), Greene (1831) and Shirley (1833) (Lopez 2014: 73). However, over the intervening years Shakespeare’s status as one of ‘the classics of this country’ has only increased. The process of his elevation to pre-eminence as Britain’s national poet has been widely analysed, for example by Michael Dobson (1992), in the collection edited by Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor (2012) and by Emma Depledge (2018), and its ongoing nature was inescapably evident in the myriad of events staged in 2016 to mark the quatercentenary of his death (Waghorn 2018). It has also been duplicated in education systems – notably, as Gauri Viswanathan points out, from an earlier date outside England than in England itself, since Shakespeare figured prominently among the authors ‘put in the service of British imperialism’ in the education system of India, as in other colonies (Viswanathan 1989: 169). Today, in England and Wales the national curriculum prescribes that students at Key Stage 3 (the first three years of secondary school) should study two of his plays and at Key Stage 4 (the next two years) at least one (‘National Curriculum’ 2014). In the United States, ‘[t]he Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy strongly encourages teachers to use “seminal U.S. documents” and offers 38 fiction and nonfiction titles that the writers consider “illustrative texts” – but Shakespeare is the only author specifically named as worth teaching’ (Turchi and Thompson 2013: 32; ‘Common Core State Standards’ 2010). Shakespeare’s prominent role in the school system is supported by, and helps support, other cultural institutions: as Sarah Olive notes, in the UK his ‘long-standing value in theatre, heritage and tourism has, for decades, been attested to by organizations such as the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and Shakespeare’s Globe – each of which also acknowledges his place in the curriculum through their substantial education departments’ (Olive 2015: 3). And, needless to say, Shakespeare’s prominence in schools, in the arts and heritage sectors, and in national cultures – leaving aside any questions of artistic merit – continues to make him a central figure on many university curricula, where it is still not uncommon to find an entire module devoted to the study of his work. All of this creates a second reason why Shakespeare can be a problem for scholars wanting to address early modern drama as a broad phenomenon: the market in books, and in research generally, tends to favour publications that focus on Shakespeare. Scholars seeking to discuss non-Shakespearean dramatists in texts intended for a broad readership have responded to these pressures in different ways. One approach is exemplified in Studying Shakespeare’s Contemporaries, by Lars Engle and Eric Rasmussen, which ‘aims to accompany students who have embarked on first readings of major plays’ by dramatists other than Shakespeare including Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton, Webster and Cary (2014: xi). This book is alert to the danger of such

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dramatists ‘being relegated to the background’, and it foregrounds them by removing Shakespeare from the picture and offering detailed, acute critical readings of some two dozen non-Shakespearean plays and biographies of their dramatists. At the same time, though, the authors (understandably) assume that their readers will be more familiar with Shakespeare than with the dramatists under consideration. Their first detailed discussion of a play, Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, links ‘the combination of brilliant stage and psychological effects’ in the play’s third scene to a series of Shakespeare plays, namely Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice and Macbeth (11–13), perhaps in order to help readers appreciate the historical significance of a play that they may find both generically unsettling and racially offensive. Part of Shakespeare’s role here seems to be to legitimize the study of dramatists who are not Shakespeare, and the authors make that more explicit in the final part of their book: ‘While we yield to few in bardolatry … we hope that our book will help readers see how worthy both of comparison with Shakespeare and of admiration in their own right his contemporaries are’ (207). By contrast, the essays collected in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists (Hoenselaars ed. 2012) place Shakespeare in dialogue with his fellow dramatists on more equal terms. Some focus on the relationship between them: for example, Richard Wilson’s chapter on Marlowe concentrates on Shakespeare’s creative response to his short-lived contemporary. Others are more concerned with their non-Shakespearean subjects, and although they fulfil their brief by relating those writers to Shakespeare, they unabashedly assert their independent historical importance. For instance, Arthur J. Kinney’s chapter on the University Wits ends by discussing John Lyly’s influence on Shakespeare but also remarks of George Peele’s The Old Wives’ Tale, ‘[i]ts plot construction is stunning, the most ingenious of all plays of the English Renaissance’ (7), while his discussion of Peele’s The Arraignment of Paris (performed before Queen Elizabeth by the Children of the Chapel) and Thomas Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament (probably performed for Archbishop Whitgift at Croydon Palace) implicitly asserts the importance in theatrical history of venues other than the public playhouses with which Shakespeare is typically associated. While Engle and Rasmussen’s book on non-Shakespearean drama ultimately cedes priority to Shakespeare, the essays in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists are less inclined to allow him this dominance. A third model for reckoning with Shakespeare’s centrality while surveying early modern drama is offered in Shakespeare and the Drama of His Time, by Martin Wiggins. Like the authors of this introduction, Wiggins treats that position as a consequence of ‘reasons that have more to do with the cultural and political climate of later times than with a serious assessment of relative literary merit’ (2000: 3), and like us, he worries away at the ‘and’ in his title, on the grounds that ‘it posits a binary where it would be more accurate to see a continuum’. Rather than making Shakespeare’s plays ‘the book’s conceptual bottle-neck’, he emphasizes ‘a series of fundamental historical changes in drama’, namely ‘the emergence of the London theatre industry in the late 1570s and of new kinds of first tragedy, then comedy in the late 1580s and 1590s’, followed by ‘the development of tragicomedy in the early

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seventeenth century’ (5). The chapters that follow tend to devote more space to nonShakespearean than to Shakespearean drama and to present Shakespeare himself not so much an innovator as a dramatist able to capitalize on others’ innovations: the tragedies of Marlowe and Kyd, the humours comedies of Chapman and Jonson. While Wiggins acknowledges that it took very little time after Shakespeare’s death for him to be seen as the dominant dramatist of his era, arguing that ‘the writers and playgoers of the 1620s and 1630s … knew that their times were above all “postShakespearian”’ (129), his depiction of Shakespeare during his career is very much as one dramatist among many, experiencing similar working conditions and equally susceptible to changes in theatrical fashion. Wiggins’s decentring of Shakespeare and his preference for treating him as a professional dramatist among professional dramatists are practices with which the authors of this book are very much in sympathy. At the same time, however, the decision to contextualize Shakespeare in this way leads to another set of omissions and marginalizations. For instance, focusing on commercial drama means excluding from consideration drama that was written for other contexts such as the court, civic pageantry and private households. It privileges London. And it means that female dramatists, who may not have written for the London theatres but who published plays both translated and original as well as writing plays for private reading and performance, are not considered. This is not to criticize Wiggins for not achieving something he does not set out to do; it is, instead, to make the more general point that even criticism of early modern drama that strives to decentre Shakespeare may still be implicitly informed by a Shakespeare-driven notion of what early modern drama looks like. One consequence of this may be the marginalization of drama that was not associated with London’s professional theatre. Another, however, is that as Jeremy Lopez complains, even the most frequently studied and anthologized plays tend to embody ‘a “Shakespearean” aesthetic’ (2014: 18), one that values ‘a combination of poetic complexity, formal innovation, and heightened, quasinaturalistic characterization’ (204). For most readers and audiences, the canon of non-Shakespearean early modern drama is much more likely to be represented by Doctor Faustus, The Duchess of Malfi or ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore than by Thomas Heywood’s schematically structured crusader romance The Four Prentices of London or by the anonymous Look About You, with its hectic succession of disguise plots, still less by one of Heywood’s civic pageants or by Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory. An approach to early modern drama that seeks to include plays that are nonShakespearean not only in their authorship but in their aesthetic, and in the cultural contexts for which they were produced, inevitably generates a much more varied picture of its subject: one that includes plays like the German and Dutch versions of plays like The Spanish Tragedy and The Revenger’s Tragedy that had been popularized on mainland Europe by travelling English players (see Ton Hoenselaars’s chapter), the performances by women surveyed below by Clare McManus and Lucy Munro, and the civic pageantry discussed by Tracey Hill. It also highlights some of the limitations of Shakespeare’s own dramaturgy, which never gives a woman sole billing in a play title, avoids direct depiction of contemporary England and represents English history in a way that prioritizes the struggles of monarchs and nobles: a

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telling contrast might be with Heywood’s two-part Edward IV, discussed by Jean E. Howard in this volume, which in spite of its title emphasizes the sufferings of the commoner Jane Shore and her husband. Shakespeare steers clear of direct engagement in contemporary political controversy such as can be found in Thomas Middleton’s A Game of Chess (see Chloe Porter’s chapter), and when placed beside, say, William Rowley’s The Travels of the Three English Brothers (see Jane Hwang Degenhardt’s chapter), the confinement of his stage worlds to Europe becomes increasingly obvious. Decentring Shakespeare can reveal a picture of early modern drama that is less masculine, less aristocratic, less defined by a handful of theatres and more global. At the same time, though, the above position has its own limitations. In a 2016 survey of recent criticism on early modern drama, Curtis Perry expresses concern about ‘the cumulative effect on our field of its self-replicating focus on Shakespeare, and in particular about the way assumptions and evaluations sedimented into Shakespeare studies shape the way scholars pose and address questions that might otherwise demand more heterogeneous archives and have a broader historical or cultural purchase’. However, he also admits both that ‘job-market and publicationmarketing pressures contribute to the field’s self-perpetuating focus on the Bard’ and (more apocalyptically) that ‘Shakespeare’s cultural capital is essential to the survival of our field’ (2016: 436). As was noted earlier in this Introduction, eighteenthcentury studies of early modern drama stemmed from a desire to better understand Shakespeare, while his continued cultural centrality underwrites the study of early modern drama more generally: it is legitimate to ask whether non-Shakespearean drama would get the scholarly attention it does if not for its association with Shakespeare. A more optimistic way of making a similar point, however, would be to say that Shakespeare’s relatively secure status – at least at time of writing – on school and undergraduate curricula, in theatres, and in the public consciousness generally, has been beneficial to the wider study of early modern drama in so far as it has offered a means by which new and diverse critical approaches to the topic have been able to gain traction. In the 1980s and 1990s, key works of feminist, new historicist, queer and postcolonial criticism took Shakespeare as their focus, including texts by Jardine (1983), Greenblatt (1988), Sedgwick (1985) and Loomba (1989), and collections such as those edited by Lenz, Greene and Neely (1980), Dollimore and Sinfield (1985), Howard and O’Connor (1987) and the ongoing Alternative Shakespeares series variously edited by Drakakis (1985), Hawkes (1996) and Henderson (2008). More recently, the same has been true of critical race studies (Akhimie 2018; Little 2000; Loomba 2002; Thompson 2011) and ecocriticism and posthumanism (Dionne 2016; Dugan and Raber 2021; Egan 2006; Estok 2011), to give but two examples. The diverse contents of Valerie Traub’s Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment (2016), which range across race, gender, queer theory, disability, animal studies, textual studies and more, testify to the range of cutting-edge critical approaches that Shakespeare both sustains and is sustained by. More problematically, this same prominence can make Shakespeare a touchstone in often acrimonious debates, outside as well as within the academy, over questions of

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cultural value, educational standards, national identity, colonization/decolonization, race, gender and a host of other controversial topics. When journalists and commentators fulminate over casting practices (see Kirwan and Prince 2021: 16–18), the position of Shakespeare in the school or university curriculum, or the alleged use of Shakespeare by educators to promote a particular agenda (Alexander 2021), their arguments are only partly to do with Shakespeare; they are also over the status of the kind of cultural authority that Shakespeare has been made to signify, who has access to it, and who gets to control it. As a result, one significant argument against an approach to early modern drama that treats Shakespeare as simply one dramatist among many is that it risks excluding scholars from consequential political struggles, minimizing their voice in wider and urgent debates. This book is therefore beset by two contradictory imperatives: one that strives to escape Shakespeare’s historical dominance of the study of early modern drama and one that recognizes the enabling effect of Shakespeare studies on the field, as well as the politically energizing effect (for good and ill) of Shakespeare’s cultural centrality. But our ultimate goal in bringing the study of Shakespeare and early modern drama into dialogue in this volume is to expand the conversation and diversify our approaches to early modern theatre writ large. This brings us to the subtitle of our volume: Perspectives on Culture, Performance and Identity. These three key concepts guide the various critical approaches discussed in the pages that follow, pointing to new directions for scholarship on early modern drama that embrace the possibilities and challenges of our current sociopolitical moment. What makes this book distinctive, then, is that it is a research handbook focused not only on the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries but also on the relationship between those plays and early modern theatrical and cultural contexts, including the social and material conditions of performance as well as the broader cultural milieu in which these plays were written and performed. In addition, ‘identity’ serves as an important category of analysis throughout the volume; our contributors thus explore avenues of research that relate to questions of race, gender, disability and sexuality, both severally and in combination. As we’ve suggested, these are areas of study that will benefit significantly from an expansive analysis of early modern drama including but not exclusive to Shakespeare. Writing about early modern race studies, for instance, Urvashi Chakravarty has suggested that ‘in an era when undergraduate curricula are less and less likely to be populated a wide array of non-Shakespearean Renaissance classes, non-Shakespearean authors might … be rich ground for the work of early modern race studies’ (2020: 20). Such avenues of investigation set aside concerns about anachronism to consider instead both the continued influence of early modern drama and its potential to offer alternative models about race, gender, sexuality and disability. As Melissa E. Sanchez has argued, ‘[t]he claim that modern theories of identity are anachronistic impositions on texts of the premodern past relieves scholars of thinking about not only the inequalities and violences of the past but also the alternative templates it offers for conceptualizing difference’ (2020: 139). In this volume, we stress that a consideration of these inequalities and alternatives will yield the richest results when it takes a broad and inclusive approach to early modern drama. How does our

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understanding of early modern performance, culture and identity change when we decentre Shakespeare? And, extending our research questions beyond the page to the classroom, how might a more inclusive approach to early modern drama help enable students to discuss topics of great value to them (topics that might include issues of race and gender, for instance) in more productive ways? What emerges in the chapters that follow is a shared, yet still varied, understanding of the discursive and material situatedness of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Methodologically, this volume is deliberately capacious in its approach: our aim is not to prescribe specific practices but instead to model a range of strategies and introduce salient topics within current research that will help readers develop their own questions and analyses. That said, there are some key characteristics that tie together many of the individual chapters. Contributors share a self-consciousness about the field, its scope and its aims  – a self-consciousness that extends to a concern with who is doing this scholarly work, to what ends, and using what resources. Many chapters take an international perspective on early modern drama, and they demonstrate a strong interest in the material world, whether in the form of physical structures, formal institutions or the material realities of lived experience or embodied performance. In addition, our contributors display a willingness to frame and analyse their materials in ways that don’t rely exclusively on authorship; they consider (for instance) how attention to repertory, playhouses, modes of performance (including female performance) and lost plays can productively shape our critical narratives about early modern drama. One result of this shift in focus is increased attention to less-studied plays such as George Peele’s The Famous Chronicle of King Edward the First (in Tracey Hill’s chapter), Thomas Heywood’s Four Prentices of London (in Jane Hwang Degenhardt’s chapter) and Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory (in Clare McManus and Lucy Munro’s chapter). In a similar vein, many of the chapters ask us to question historical assumptions (for instance, about the supposed ‘all-male stage’, the traditional chronology of dramatic activity in the period and the category of ‘early modern drama’ itself). Finally, the individual chapters are connected by a shared awareness of contemporary agendas and concerns that are vital to sustained and engaged research in early modern drama: they explore how race, religion, environment, gender and sexuality animate sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama and, crucially, the questions we collectively bring to that drama as researchers, teachers and students. We have developed this handbook as a research companion  – a helpful guide for those interested in familiarizing themselves with current research topics in Shakespeare and early modern drama studies. It is intended for new scholars in the field, including students and early career researchers, as well as for more advanced researchers who may be seeking a general reference for topics not immediately within their area of expertise. Individual chapters both synthesize existing research and open up questions and challenges for future study. The volume is organized into sections that highlight ‘Research Methods and Problems’, ‘Current Research and Issues’ and ‘New Directions’ in the field of Shakespeare and early modern drama. It also includes an overview of digital resources and an annotated bibliography, materials designed to assist researchers as they pursue their own avenues of

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enquiry. While no volume of this kind can be exhaustive, our aim is to offer a rich and capacious sense of the state of the field and encourage additional research in the future. After this Introduction, our collection proceeds to Ed Gieskes’s A–Z survey of ‘Material and institutional contexts of early modern drama’. Taking as his point of departure Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the ‘field of cultural production’, which situates artworks within a system of relationships between agents and institutions, Gieskes provides introductions to key participants in dramatic culture such as actors, audiences and theatre owners, and surveys institutions ranging from playhouses to court. His account of the material contexts of early modern drama includes both objects such as props, costumes and actors’ parts, and practices such as censorship, patronage and the performance of race and gender. Gieskes’s entries also indicate important critical debates (for example, over audience composition) and direct readers to further resources. The two chapters that follow make up the ‘Research methods and problems’ section and address theoretical questions that are of foundational importance for historicist analysis of early modern drama. In ‘Did early modern drama actually happen?’ Kurt Schreyer examines the discursive and disciplinary construction of periods in dramatic history. He argues that E. K. Chambers’s landmark The Mediaeval Stage (1903) viewed pre-Shakespearean drama in light of the plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries that both grew out of it and superseded it; subsequent twentieth-century discussions of the relationship between late medieval and early modern drama can be regarded as attempts to respond to this teleological construction. Schreyer goes on to consider early modern writers’ own sense of historical periodicity and how it was shaped by humanism, the Reformation and the ongoing life of material artefacts – not least in plays themselves, as with phenomena such as Hell Mouth. Finally, he insists on the need to complicate our sense of chronology with an awareness of geographical difference: attending to drama outside London, whether in the form of Corpus Christi cycles or performances by touring companies, can help correct a tendency to privilege the 1576 building of the theatre in Shoreditch as a watershed date. A comparable preoccupation with the non-Shakespearean informs Jean E. Howard’s chapter, ‘Drama and society in Shakespeare’s England’, which surveys scholarly work going back to L. C. Knights (1937) that has considered the relationship between the early modern theatre and its socio-economic contexts. As she demonstrates, critics have focused on different texts and contexts in line with changing modern priorities, with the final decades of the twentieth century characterized by a burgeoning interest in questions of gender, sexuality and race. The intervening years have seen a belated recognition of the implications of the last of these, in particular, for the field as a whole, as well as a growing concern over how to approach early modern drama in an age of environmental catastrophe. Howard forcefully argues for the avoidance of ‘arid historicism’ in favour of a critical approach that places the past in dialogue with the present. She also shows the importance for this project of engaging with plays by dramatists beyond Shakespeare and the other most canonical figures.

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The next section, ‘Current research and issues’, consists of ten chapters that explore topics that have been especially productive for recent research, as well as setting out potential directions for the future. It begins with ‘Ancient and early modern European contexts of early modern English drama’, by Ton Hoenselaars, which surveys classical and contemporary European influences on the drama of Shakespeare’s time. As Hoenselaars points out, English drama was unusual in the variety of languages, dialects and codes that it incorporated, while attitudes to foreign languages and cultures varied between a sense of inferiority, creative excitement and occasional defiance. However, the cultural traffic was not all one way, and Hoenselaars also notes the impact that those ‘economic migrants’, English travelling players, had on the cultural life of the countries they visited. As he observes, this area of study has garnered increasing interest among anglophone critics, but language barriers can often hinder the kind of intercultural research that it requires. The current introduction is being written at a time when language departments in UK universities are suffering widespread cuts and underinvestment  – not to speak of Brexit – and the need to develop a polyglot (or at least internationalist) approach to literary studies seems more urgent than ever. A similar awareness of the need to situate early modern England in its international context appears in Elizabeth E. Tavares’s contribution, ‘Playing companies and repertories’, which ends by emphasizing the potential insights to be gained through research that goes beyond traditional boundaries  – whether national, disciplinary or generic. Tavares’s chapter focuses on the repertory system, a phenomenon that demands consideration both as a fundamental material context in which plays were produced and consumed and as a framework that can help the modern scholar ask new questions of the drama. Studying playing companies and their repertories  enables us better to position early modern dramatic culture economically, socially and spatially; it also facilitates the analysis of plays in relation to actors, props, playhouses and the many lost plays that have left traces in the theatre-historical record. Playhouses are the specific concern of Laurie Johnson’s chapter, ‘Playhouses and performance’. As Johnson shows, this is a dynamic area in the study of early modern drama, in which recent archaeological and archival discoveries have challenged long-standing assumptions about theatre design as well as calling into question some of the distinctions that have structured approaches to the topic – between purposebuilt playhouses and city inns, for example. Shakespeare occupies a complex position in relation to these theatre-historical debates: on the one hand, the Shakespearecentric nature of much historiography has had a distorting effect on narratives of theatre history, but on the other, the construction of spaces like Shakespeare’s Globe has enabled ‘collaborations between performers, dramaturgs, historians and textual scholars’ that promise to illuminate the way dramatists and performers exploited and developed the conventions of early modern playing spaces. Tracey Hill extends Johnson’s discussion of performance venues beyond the early modern playhouse. In ‘Drama beyond the playhouses’, she contends that performances offered at such venues ‘constituted a formative, widespread and persistent performance tradition in early modern London’. Through an examination

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of a range of urban spaces, including inns, schools, streets and livery company halls, Hill demonstrates the significant connections between the professional stage and other forms of occasional drama that occurred at a variety of different venues, suggesting that the notion of a ‘playhouse’ needs to be more flexible and capacious than the usual narrowly defined concept of a ‘purpose-built’ theatre. She turns to the career of George Peele as a prime example of a dramatist who moved readily between different performance venues and genres. His oeuvre of City pageants as well as plays for both children’s and adult professional companies helps demonstrate the ‘close connections between civic and professional drama in terms of themes and dramatic form’. Hill’s analysis of Peele, which can also help us better understand the work of his contemporaries, including Middleton, Dekker, Munday, Webster, Jonson and Heywood, makes it clear that the idea of a ‘playhouse’ in the period needs to be ‘more flexible and capacious than the usual narrowly defined concept of a “purpose-built” theatre’. Chloe Porter’s chapter, ‘Material culture’, shifts focus from the material spaces in which plays were performed to the material objects that were worn, circulated, depicted and invoked in performance. Her analysis reflects both a growing interest in the role of objects – from props and costumes to cosmetics – in the early modern drama and theoretical work that has been done on the way material things function in relation to humans and each other. Her discussion of Thomas Middleton’s A Game of Chess, in which human actors represent chess pieces that in turn represent the human participants in recent events, reveals a play-world in which people are treated like objects and objects take on a life of their own. At the same time, it is informed by a historicist awareness of how the play’s black/white binary, graphically embodied in the costumes of its performers, is shaped by racist, imperialist and antiCatholic discourses. A different aspect of performance is addressed by Clare McManus and Lucy Munro, who in ‘Engendering the stage: Women and dramatic culture’ question the established notion of the early modern commercial stage being an all-male industry. As well as highlighting women’s role in theatrical performance, finance and spectatorship, they explore theoretical work that has been done to unsettle gender categories in early modern England and its theatres. Jettisoning older critical models that focus on the supposedly ‘all-male stage’, they emphasize the varied roles played by women, girls and gender non-conforming individuals to early modern performance culture. Building on the work of early modern feminist, queer and trans theorists and re-evaluating available archival evidence, they advocate a ‘capacious definition of dramatic culture rather than narrower concepts of theatre, drama or acting’ in order to reconsider four important areas of scholarly enquiry: performance, theatrical labour, spectatorship and dramatic creation. With Jean E. Feerick’s chapter, ‘Matter, nature, cosmos: The scientific art of the early modern English stage’, this collection’s attention moves towards the wider discourses and power relations within which dramatic production took place. Feerick considers the varied understandings of humans’ place in the universe that are in evidence in early modern drama and, taking her cue from recent historians and theorists who have explored the unstable boundaries between early modern

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science and literature, she examines how dramatists registered challenges to the traditional model of the cosmos that arose from the work of Copernicus, Galileo and others. She offers two very different examples: John Lyly’s Endymion, which stages a Neoplatonic progress towards understanding the universe akin to that imagined by Giordano Bruno, and Shakespeare and Middleton’s Timon of Athens, with its vision of alienated humans amid a decentralized cosmos. In depicting Timon’s growing sense of his place in nature’s economy, Feerick argues, the latter play ‘anticipates the insights of posthumanists, new materialists and ecocritics today’. In her chapter, ‘Early modern race-work: History, methodology and politics’, Jane Hwang Degenhardt offers a critical reflection on recent work on race in early modern drama that focuses on three key elements of current scholarship: the nature of the archive, definitions of ‘race’ and intersectionality. After discussing the archival challenges that face scholars interested in pre-modern racial formations, Degenhardt explores the importance of utilizing the full range of early modern dramatic texts (not limited to Shakespeare and canonical drama) in order to study the different kinds of racial constructions operating in the period. Of equal importance is the examination of whiteness as a racial category, a point Degenhardt draws out through a reading of Thomas Heywood’s Four Prentices of London. Moving forward with studies of early modern race, she argues, necessitates innovative, intersectional methodologies such as the study of racial embodiment, race and the posthuman, and transhistorical approaches. But it also requires a willingness to bridge the theoretical and the practical by questioning long-standing scholarly biases and foregrounding the real-world implications of early modern race-work both in scholarship and in the classroom. Holly Dugan, in her chapter on ‘Sexualities, emotions and embodiment’, offers a critical survey of the ‘affective turn’ in early modern studies as it relates to scholarship on sexuality and embodiment in drama of the period. By exploring the language of emotion as related to embodied eroticism in early texts and performances, she demonstrates the interconnectedness of the history of sexuality and the history of emotions. Dugan begins by examining an early record of the performance of a Masque of Virgins at the court of Elizabeth I in order to highlight some key questions of sexuality, emotions and embodiment that are embedded in early modern performances. This example offers strategies for approaching later, more familiar plays such as Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. In her analysis of this comedy, Dugan demonstrates that attending to its staging of embodied emotions enables us to trace the connections between the emotions and other forms of visceral experience, including gender, race and class in addition to sexuality. In doing so, she advocates a critical awareness of our own affective investments in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In ‘Religion and religious cultures’, Benedict Robinson offers an in-depth analysis of the boom in scholarship on religion and early modern drama over the past two decades. As he notes, the turn to religion has often manifested as a set of historicist concerns, but it is equally important to query our ‘received understandings of secularity and modernity’. Recent scholarship has focused on the complexity of

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religion and religious identities in the period, emphasizing surprising divisions as well as connections that define the contours of early modern belief. Studies of early modern drama have connected religion to literary form, gender, race and politics, among other cultural forces. Robinson explores in detail the recent critical focus on political theology before moving to consider how scholarship on early modern drama has extended its analysis beyond the confines of Christianity to examine Judaism and Islam in canonical texts such as Shakespeare’s Othello as well as lesser-known plays such as Philip Massinger’s The Renegado. He concludes with a look forward, suggesting that scholarship on drama and religion might next ‘extend the account of religion beyond the so-called Abrahamic faiths’ and so consider encounters with animist religion, Hinduism, Buddhism or Confucianism. The next section of our volume, ‘New directions’, consists of three chapters that explore especially salient trends in research in the field of early modern drama studies. Each chapter focuses on specific developments and critical methodologies that have garnered particularly robust conversation and debate in recent years. In the first of two chapters on ‘Diversifying early modern drama’, Genevieve Love draws together disability studies and trans studies as two critical approaches preoccupied with the social construction of the body and with the functioning and experience of the non-normative body in society. As ways of reading early modern drama, these approaches can be both historicist and presentist, connecting ‘embodied experience in the present to lived experience in the past’. Without seeking to elide differences between disabled and trans experiences, Love notes parallels between the roles of ‘Cripple’ [sic] in The Fair Maid of the Exchange and Moll Cutpurse in The Roaring Girl, characters simultaneously at odds with the bodily norms of their surrounding societies and capable of navigating and even managing their environments in ways produced by their non-normative identities. In the second chapter in this section, Farah Karim-Cooper considers how the study of race can help to diversify the study and teaching of early modern drama. In ‘Gaining perspective: Race, diversity and early modern studies’, she builds on the insights from Degenhardt’s chapter to explore some of the urgent questions facing the field and to evaluate possible strategies for repositioning the period’s drama in the classroom. She extends Degenhardt’s analysis to consider in detail the current lack of inclusivity within the academy (and, specifically, within the field of early modern drama scholarship), and she argues for the necessity of more equitable practices within the academy more broadly. Advocating for a critical framework that ‘considers race, critical whiteness and historical enquiry’ in relation to early modern plays, Karim-Cooper concludes that such approaches can not only open up the dramatic texts in crucial ways but can also open up opportunities for students who might otherwise ‘feel alienated by or locked out of the advanced study of early modern drama’. In the third chapter of this section, ‘Performing Shakespeare’s contemporaries’, Harry McCarthy considers new approaches to the study of the twenty-first-century performance of non-Shakespearean Renaissance drama. In the first section of the chapter, he discusses the disparity between plays (such as Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi) that have received extensive and varied theatrical treatment and those that

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have a much more limited performance history. McCarthy demonstrates the role of both scholarship and pedagogy in maintaining the contemporary performance tradition of some plays ‘while maintaining the historicity of others’. He then shifts focus to two different models of engagement with non-Shakespearean drama in contemporary performance: (1) ‘historical reconstruction and research-based exercises’ and (2) politically engaged productions that are fully situated in our own contemporary moment. As various experiments by theatrical companies have shown, the drama of Shakespeare’s contemporaries has enormous potential to engage the prevailing discourses and interests of modern-day audiences. He concludes by considering how the increased use of digital performance technologies during and following the Covid-19 pandemic might shape scholarly and theatrical approaches well into the future. In ‘Rethinking the early years of the London playhouses: An essay in chronology’, Andy Kesson offers a provocative reassessment of key dates in the history and historiography of early modern drama such as the ‘opening of the Theatre in 1576, the formation of the Queen’s Men in 1583 and that of the Chamberlain’s Men in 1594’. Not only have historians sometimes been overly confident in their dating of events like these; the prevailing emphasis upon them both derives from and reinforces a Shakespeare-centric narrative of theatre history, diminishing continuities with earlier theatrical cultures. As an example of an alternative model, Kesson offers a chronology based around the figure of John Bale (1495–1563) – a dramatist generally associated with the Henrician period, but who saw out his days in Elizabethan Canterbury, the city that would produce the playwrights Stephen Gosson, John Lyly and Christopher Marlowe. Like other chapters in this collection, Kesson’s contribution imagines a history of the Shakespearean theatre to which Shakespeare is neither conceptually nor chronologically central. In the final chapter of the volume, Catherine Evans and Amy Lidster provide an overview of digital resources for the study of early modern drama, broadly defined. They offer a selective discussion of some core databases and online repositories of particular value to scholars working in Shakespeare and early modern drama. Evans and Lidster draw attention to open-access, online databases in three major categories: (1) platforms that provide access to early playtexts, (2) databases that focus on theatrical and cultural activities in London and surrounding areas and (3) digital resources that emphasize plays as printed books. Additional discussion of important print sources can be found in the Annotated Bibliography that rounds out the volume. It is our hope that this volume will offer a productive jumping-off point for those new to research on Shakespeare and his contemporaries as well as a valuable resource for more seasoned researchers in the field. Our aim is to stimulate future conversations about the period so that we can collectively continue to interrogate what early modern drama was, who it was (and is) for and why it still matters today. Thinking expansively about culture, performance and identity, the chapters collected here challenge us to broaden our frames of critical reference and question received wisdom so as to ensure a vibrant and diverse future for the field.

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REFERENCES Akhimie, P. (2018), Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World, New York: Routledge. Alexander, H. (2021), ‘Revealed: How “Woke” English Teachers Have Cancelled Shakespeare Because of His “White Supremacy, Misogyny, Racism and Classism” – and Are Instead Using His Plays to Lecture in “Toxic Masculinity and Marxism”’, Daily Mail, 16 February. Available online: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ article-9263735/Woke-teachers-cut-Shakespeare-work-white-supremacy-colonization. html (accessed 19 July 2021). Chakravarty, U. (2020), ‘The Renaissance of Race and the Future of Early Modern Race Studies’, English Literary Renaissance, 50 (1): 17–24. Chambers, E. K. (1903), The Mediaeval Stage, Oxford: Oxford University Press. ‘Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects’ (2010), Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2 June. Available online: http://www.corestandards.org/wp-content/uploads/ ELA_Standards1.pdf (accessed 16 July 2021). Depledge, E. (2018), Shakespeare’s Rise to Cultural Prominence: Politics, Print and Alteration, 1642–1700, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dionne, C. (2016), Posthuman Lear: Reading Shakespeare in the Anthropocene, Earth [sic], Punctum Books. Dobson, M. (1992), The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dodsley, R. (1744), ‘Preface’, in R. Dodsley (ed.), A Select Collection of Old Plays, 12 vols, vol. 1, i–xl, London: R. Dodsley. Dollimore, J. and A. Sinfield, eds (1985), Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Drakakis, J., ed. (1985), Alternative Shakespeares, London: Methuen; New York: Routledge. Dugan, H. and K. Raber (2021), The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Animals, New York: Routledge. Egan, G. (2006), Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism, Abingdon: Routledge. Engle, L. and E. Rasmussen (2014), Studying Shakespeare’s Contemporaries, Malden: Wiley. Erne, L., ed. (2021), The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Textual Studies, London: Arden Shakespeare. Estok, S. C. (2011), Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gajowski, L., ed. (2021), The Arden Research Handbook of Contemporary Shakespeare Criticism, London: Arden Shakespeare. Greenblatt, S. (1988), Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, Berkeley: University of California Press. Hawkes, T. (1986), That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process, London: Methuen.

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Hawkes, T. (1992), Meaning by Shakespeare, London: Routledge. Hawkes, T., ed. (1996), Alternative Shakespeares Vol. 2, London: Routledge. Henderson, D. E., ed. (2008), Alternative Shakespeares 3, Abingdon: Routledge. Henderson, D. E. and S. O’Neill, eds (forthcoming), The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Adaptation, London: Arden Shakespeare. Hoenselaars, T., ed. (2012), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Howard, J. E. and M. F. O’Connor, eds (1987), Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, New York: Methuen. Jardine, L. (1983), Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare, Brighton, Harvester. Kinney, A. F. (2012), ‘John Lyly and the University Wits: George Peele, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge and Thomas Nashe’, in T. Hoenselaars (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists, 1–18, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kirwan, P. and K. Prince, eds (2021), The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Contemporary Performance, London: Arden Shakespeare. Knights, L. C. (1937), Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson: The Effects of Society and Economics on Elizabethan-Jacobean Drama, London: Chatto and Windus. Lenz, C. R. S., G. Greene and C. T. Neely, eds (1980), The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Little, A. J., Jr. (2000), Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-imperial Re-visions of Race, Rape, and Sacrifice, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Loomba, A. (1989), Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Loomba, A. (2002), Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lopez, J. (2014), Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama, New York: Cambridge University Press. ‘National Curriculum in England: English Programmes of Study’ (2014), Department for Education, 16 July. Available online: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ national-curriculum-in-england-english-programmes-of-study/national-curriculum-inengland-english-programmes-of-study (accessed 16 July 2021). Olive, S. (2015), Shakespeare Valued: Education Policy and Pedagogy 1989–2009, Bristol: Intellect. Perry, C. (2016), ‘Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 56 (2): 435–83. Reed, I. (1780), ‘Preface’, in I. Reed (ed.), A Select Collection of Old Plays, 2nd edn, 12 vols, vol. 1, v–xxv, London: J. Dodsley. Ritchie, F. and P. Sabor, eds (2012), Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ruiter, D., ed. (2021), The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Social Justice, London: Arden Shakespeare. Sanchez, M. E. (2020), ‘Woke Renaissance Studies?’, English Literary Renaissance, 50 (1): 137–44.

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Sedgwick, E. K. (1985), Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, New York: Columbia University Press. Thompson, A. (2011), Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America, New York: Oxford University Press. Traub, V., ed. (2016), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Turchi, L. and A. Thompson (2013), ‘Shakespeare and the Common Core: An Opportunity to Reboot’, The Phi Delta Kappan, 95 (1), September: 32–7. Viswanathan, G. (1989), Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, New York: Columbia University Press. Waghorn, J. M. (2018), ‘The Bard Is Dead, Long Live the Bard: Celebrations of Shakespeare’s “Corpse” and “Corpus” in 2016’, Shakespeare, 14: 275–90. Wiggins, M. (2000), Shakespeare and the Drama of His Time, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilson, R. (2012), ‘“The Words of Mercury”: Shakespeare and Marlowe’, in T. Hoenselaars (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists, 34–53, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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CHAPTER 2

Material and institutional contexts of early modern drama An A–Z ED GIESKES

In the essays collected in The Field of Cultural Production, Pierre Bourdieu argues that the value of works of art as well as their production should be conceptualized in terms of what he calls ‘the field of production, understood as the system of objective relations between … agents or institutions and as the site of the struggles for the monopoly of the power to consecrate, in which the value of works of art and belief in that value are continuously generated’ (1993: 78). The outlines of this system can only be drawn by attending to the material and institutional contexts within which they work to produce the ‘division of labour of production, reproduction and diffusion of symbolic goods’ (115). I begin with Bourdieu’s work because it provides some of the principles that guide my thinking in compiling this A–Z on the material and institutional contexts for the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. His use of the concept of field is particularly germane to theatre and the multiple institutions, practices and social structures in which the plays of the period were produced. The field of dramatic production, a subfield of the more general field of cultural production, comprises the array of agents (e.g. players, playwrights, audience members, regulators, speculators) as well as the institutions within which the drama of the period was produced, disseminated, reproduced and consecrated as art worth the enduring attention the plays receive. It is a truism still worth repeating that theatre is a social art, depending as it does on a collaboration between large numbers of people, and my goal in this chapter is to offer a general description of the context in which that collaboration took place. No one scholar can pretend to the kind of complete knowledge of all the material and institutional contexts of the early modern theatre suggested by the title of this chapter, and therefore it will offer an overview of these contexts and of the extraordinary range of work discussing these contexts. After this introductory

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section, the rest of the chapter will be organized as a series of entries that cover much, though certainly not all, of the theatrical field in early modern England as both practice and institution. That playing is necessarily both a material and an institutional practice is a central underlying premise of this work. I am construing ‘material’ broadly as including social practices as well as physical objects such as playbooks. In other words, institutions are as material as any object or location related to the stage. Playing operated within a highly complex series of social, financial, legal, political and intellectual contexts and their shaping effects are a primary focus of the entries in this chapter. The contexts of playing are physical – the bodies of actors, playbooks, buildings, props, costumes, etc. – and institutional  – the companies producing plays, the practice of playwriting, the necessity of licensing, etc.  – and all of these physical and institutional contexts are imbricated in complicated ways. Theatrical practices like acting are just as material as any prop used by an actor (see Bruster 2003). In the wake of the New Historicism, with its salutary emphasis on multiple discourses and its broadening of the contexts of cultural production, scholars have turned their attention back to questions of form while retaining an interest in historicizing culture. Douglas Bruster in outlining what he terms a market in representation, for instance, demonstrates links between formal changes and innovations and the material and social contexts that constitute the market in which plays and other symbolic goods circulate (2003, 2013). Major sources for thinking about the early modern dramatic field include the still-important work of E. K. Chambers and G. E. Bentley. Chambers’s The Mediaeval Stage (1903), The Elizabethan Stage (1923) and William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (1930), along with Bentley’s The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (1941–68), collected and organized records regarding the stage, making them more accessible to scholars and, in some ways, setting up strategies for approaching questions about the theatre of the period. Chambers’s four volumes on the Elizabethan stage begin with a discussion of theatre at court and continue with an extended discussion of ‘the control of the stage’ (which includes sections on acting and the economics of acting).1 Subsequent volumes describe the acting companies, the playhouses, staging practices, the printing of plays, playwrights, etc. Bentley’s seven volumes have a similar organization to the later volumes of Chambers’s work, covering companies and players, plays and playwrights, and theatres. Taken together, they offer an overview of playing in the period and remain a significant resource. At the same time, the factual and documentary nature of both works that makes them so useful leaves explicit analysis and synthesis to the side (see the introductions to Gurr (1996) and to Wiggins and Richardson (2012) on this issue). More recently, Glynne Wickham’s Early English Stages, 1300–1660 (1958–2002) is another essential resource with a broader chronological and geographical scope than Chambers or Bentley, both of whom focus primarily on London and its stages. The Records of Early English Drama (REED) project, too, has been locating and publishing records from the rest of the country, expanding our knowledge of playing in the provinces, about touring routes, and about responses to playing outside of

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London, and has vastly expanded the sources scholars have available to work with. The necessity of a broader view of the field is one consequence of this expansion of accessible evidence. Much of the scholarship in the bibliography depends on the work of these scholars, and they have made possible major advances in our knowledge of the period’s drama. By the time the theatres were closed in 1642, playing in early modern England had moved from a more or less occasional practice to a major part of the cultural life of London, if not necessarily the entire country. Large buildings had been erected for the primary purpose of performing plays, court entertainments were more and more commonly drawn from the work of the professional playing companies, and at least some members of the theatrical community had earned a certain degree of fame and notoriety – for good or ill.2 The theatre was necessarily embedded in the social, economic and cultural fabric of London. Of course, playing did take place outside of London, but much of it was performed by London companies or was influenced by those companies. Even the university towns of Cambridge and Oxford, which had their own dramatic traditions and were not always welcoming of touring players, saw performances of London plays performed by London companies. Despite the survival of local and folk dramatic traditions, by the later sixteenth century the structure of the dramatic field was heavily influenced by the materials and institutions of the London theatre (see Norland 1995). Discussed in more detail below, the institutional contexts for the early modern drama range from the acting companies and their practices, practices that shaped both the writing and production of the plays of the period, to the civic and royal authorities that either authorized or constrained playing in London and rest of the country. The stationers who brought plays from stage to page and sometimes back again are part of another crucial institution for the dramatic field, and the printing of plays both gives us much of the material we study and, because of the accidents of survival, shapes what we can know about that field. The theatres themselves and their ownership structures had a powerfully shaping effect on the plays acted in them (as well as those taken on tour). The varied nature of performance spaces and their resources likewise influenced dramaturgy and acting in the period, in many cases necessitating a flexible kind of staging. That flexibility remains a resource for contemporary performance, affording room for widely different interpretations of early modern playtexts. Literary history, book history and theatre history all contribute to a picture of the dramatic field, and much of the most interesting scholarship on the drama of the period combines these approaches. Recent scholars have complemented the New Bibliographers’ interest in textual and editorial problems with work that situates the practices of publishing in economic, literary, theoretical and broadly social contexts in ways that go far beyond establishing texts for plays. Book historians have, for example, expanded our knowledge of the uses to which books were put in the period and about how plays came to be published and marketed (and how plays came to be seen as worth publishing in the first place).3 This work contributes to the development of a clearer sense of the shape of the cultural field in general and

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the theatrical field specifically by offering a clearer view of the production of belief in the value of playtexts and underscores that that value was hardly self-evident or uncontroversial. The letter to the ‘great variety of readers’ in the front matter of the 1623 Shakespeare Folio points to this struggle: buy it first. That doth best commend a Booke, the Stationer saies. Then, how odde soeuer your braines be, or your wisedomes, make your licence the same, and spare not. Judge your sixe-pen’orth, your shillings worth, your fiue shillings worth at a time, or higher, so you rise to the just rates, and welcome. But, what euer you do, Buy. (Shakespeare 1623: sig. A3r) Rather than assuming that the value of the Folio is self-evident, Heminges and Condell’s words recognize, however ironically, that book sales are a significant marker of how much a book is valued and that stationers are a significant part of what Bourdieu calls the market of symbolic goods. While engaged in the ongoing project of gathering records and evidence, both theatre history and book history have been producing, emending and revising narratives about early modern theatre. Data about these contexts continues to develop and, as William Ingram has written, so too have the narratives that scholars have made from data about venues, actors, theatrical economics and a whole array of institutions within which theatre operated. He argues that we must always be sceptical about our data, our evidence and the adequacy of the narratives we produce about the past (2009: 6). The evidence we have, still changing and growing, affords space for a range of possible explanatory narratives, and the power of those narratives depends to a significant extent on how adequately they attend to a broad range of elements of the dramatic field. It is a salutary development that it has come to seem more or less essential to situate arguments about the period’s drama in an array of contexts, attending to the complexity of the field of production (whether scholars use that term or not). Returning to and rephrasing the truism with which I began this chapter, theatre is a material practice, performed on stages by human beings in a social context that inevitably shapes and is shaped by those performances. It has become far more difficult to forget this fact due to the work of theatre historians, book historians, literary historians and critics, and theorists, as well as generations of archivists and antiquarians whose efforts provide much of the evidence on which our knowledge of the period’s drama depends.

THE A–Z These entries cannot pretend to be anything more than indicators of the shape of each topic and are intended to suggest the range of contexts for the drama of the period as well as the range of scholarship about the drama of early modern England. The list of references that follows contains only items cited in this chapter; beyond that, readers are referred to the Annotated Bibliography in this volume and to the bibliographies in Cox and Kastan (1997) and Dutton (2009).

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ACTING COMPANIES The histories of the many acting companies in early modern England have been documented in Chambers (1923), Bentley (1941–68) and by many later scholars. The picture that emerges is one of a dynamic and diverse theatrical world that is difficult to characterize in any straightforward or singular narrative. Certain traditional stories about the structure of the field have come into question (as for example the ‘duopoly’ theory proposed by Andrew Gurr (1996: 68)) offering space for new narratives and new ways of thinking about how acting companies operated. The REED project has greatly expanded our knowledge of playing in the provinces, which helps us better to understand the relationship between touring and playing in London. Gurr’s The Shakespearian Playing Companies (1996) lists close to forty companies operating in London over the course of the eight decades between the 1560s and 1642. Many of these did not endure for long, and some amalgamated (or were amalgated) over time, but this does indicate something of the size of the profession of player in the period. Acting companies emerged and dissolved into new ones frequently in the period, and Shakespeare’s company was unique in both its longevity and relative stability (not to mention its economic model). The entry below on repertory discusses the plays associated with certain companies, and those repertories suggest that companies did have certain specialties, but that they also hedged their bets by keeping a diverse array of plays in their control.

ACTING STYLES alberto

Whom do you personate? piero

Piero, Duke of Venice. alberto

O, ho! Then thus frame your exterior shape To haughty form of elate majesty, As if you held the palsy-shaking head Of reeling chance under your fortune’s belt In strictest vassalage. Grow big in thought, As swoll’n with glory of successful arms. piero

If that be all, fear not, I’ll suit it right. Who cannot be proud, stroke up the hair, and strut? (Antonio and Mellida, Induction, 5–14, in Marston 1997) The players in the induction to Marston’s play describe styles of acting (‘personation’) they think appropriate to the characters they are to portray in the play  – Piero the tyrant, Antonio a Duke’s son but in disguise as an Amazon, etc. – and staged moments like this offer evidence about acting styles. That Marston’s play was written for the Children of Paul’s (a company known for satire) suggests that there

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is an element of parody here, but descriptions of what are elsewhere called ‘huffing parts’ (Beaumont 1984: Induction, 74) like Alberto’s are not uncommon. Jonson’s complaints about the enduring popularity of Titus Andronicus and The Spanish Tragedy in the induction to his play Bartholomew Fair (1614) have much to do with styles of acting associated with those plays as they do with what he argues is their outdated language. If Hamlet’s instructions to the players about speaking his inserted speech can be taken as evidence, tastes had expanded to include a more subtle style of acting than that of the ‘robustious periwig-pated fellow’ who splits ‘the ears of the groundlings’ (3.2.9–10). These and other comments in playtexts indicate the existence of a variety of acting styles that included the bombastic histrionics associated with what Jonson called Marlowe’s ‘mighty line’ (Shakespeare 1623: sig. A4r) as well as quieter styles suited, perhaps, to different plays or playing spaces. Performance theory makes a distinction between a ‘presentational’ style of acting in which characters address the audience about the play’s narrative and a ‘representational’ style that addresses events within that narrative (see for example Elam 1980 and Weimann 1978). Early modern plays deploy both, often in the same play, but it is possible to trace a movement towards an increasingly representational style of acting over the course of the period.

ACTORS While the ‘rude mechanicals’ in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (3.2.9) are not well-prepared actors, they do come from the social stratum from which many early modern actors emerged. To take two well-known examples: Ben Jonson, who was an actor as well as a playwright, was apprenticed as a bricklayer, and Shakespeare’s father was a glover. The social status of actors, other than rare figures like Edward Alleyn, whose wealth was exceptional, remained more like that of the artificer-players of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’. Their training followed the model of apprenticeship in the trades, a pattern that was both familiar and that made sense in practical terms (see Bentley 1984; Kathman 2009). Actors in the adult companies were professionals with specific skills developed through training and practice, and if the profession of acting was never recognized in same way as other trade guilds were, it still occupied an important place in London as a craft, as part of the city’s economy and, of course, in providing entertainment to a growing audience.

ACTORS’ PARTS Rather than referring to the role played by an actor, which is the usual modern sense of what a theatrical part is, ‘part’ has a quite different meaning in the early modern theatre. Early modern actors prepared for performance from parts, which were quite literally only parts of the plays from which they came and consisted of the actor’s speeches framed by cues of various sorts (entries, exits, when to begin a speech, etc.). Our current usage of the term derives at least in part from this theatrical practice. Generally speaking, actors did not receive the entire text of

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the play in the period, even after printing made such a practice possible. Theatre companies limited access to the full script largely to maintain control over the text, both to keep it out of the hands of other companies and to keep it out of the hands of printers. One key effect of this is that actors knew the plays they performed in primarily, if not solely, through these parts and in many cases would not have had a sense of the whole of the play before playing in it (and even then an individual actor would have seen the play from a very particular perspective).4 Tiffany Stern argues that playwrights probably composed knowing that the play would be turned into parts, that audiences would have understood plays as collections of parts, and thus that the ‘part, then, was potentially more than a practical necessity’: it helped structure composition, performance and reception (2009a: 512). Even in the eighteenth century actors still received only parts, suggesting that ‘there was some kind of virtue, some kind of serendipitous potential, in this rather primitive technology. For both the actor and, we believe, the playwright, the handwritten part offered possibilities – a practical facility, a concentration of effect, a communicative economy  – that the full text simply did not’ (Palfrey and Stern 2007: 2). These possibilities were then an accidental product of playhouse practice that subsequently became useful on its own terms.

AUDIENCES By the first decade of the seventeenth century, London theatres offered a wide range of entertainments to a diverse population of auditors. That the audience for drama was substantial is clear from the number of plays, playing companies and theatres, but its exact composition and subdivisions remain a subject of debate. Scholars have postulated multiple and contradictory theories about the social composition of these audiences. We have little in the way of direct evidence about who precisely attended plays in the period, and scholars have had to draw on a variety of evidence ranging from internal references within the plays to what Chambers (1923) would call ‘documents of control’ and to social and economic history. In Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (1952), Alfred Harbage argued that the indoor (‘private’) theatres drew an elite audience, while the outdoor (‘public’) theatres catered to a middle- or working-class audience, asserting a correspondence between venue and the status of its typical clientele. By contrast, Ann Jennalie Cook’s The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London (1981) argues that playgoers were a privileged group and  – from demographic and economic evidence  – that most lower-status Londoners would have been priced out of the theatre. Andrew Gurr’s Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (1987) moves back in the direction of Harbage, while acknowledging the important influence of London’s elites over the theatre world. Evidence from the plays suggests that theatre professionals worked to appeal to the full range of London’s population. Fictionalized audience members appear in a number of the plays of the period, perhaps most interestingly in Francis Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle which places two very vocal citizens on stage among a silent group of ‘gentlemen’ (1984: Induction, 47). The citizens have been interpreted as a satire of bumptious citizen

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audience members misunderstanding plays pitched above their heads, but the play takes care to show that the supposedly sophisticated play they interrupt is quite formulaic itself, while the citizens do have developed theatrical tastes that the playwright at least recognizes and respects. Beaumont associates the citizens’ tastes with specific playhouses (like the Red Bull, in this case). These fictional spectators, whether elite or not, are represented as having specific and realistically portrayed tastes, even as the play satirizes them. Playwrights also wrote prefatory material – choruses, inductions – that appeal to (or, as often with Ben Jonson, complain about) the divergent tastes of segments of the audience. Paratexts also indicate that publishers were aware that the reading audience for plays was distinct from, if overlapping with, the theatrical audience. As early as the 1590 Tamburlaine prefatory materials, publishers can be seen appealing to the tastes of a reading audience (Marlowe 1981: 111–12), while in the seventeenth century Jonson, Chapman and others wrote letters addressed to readers in distinction from the theatre audience. Many of these print dedications and addresses to readers praise the reader as more tasteful, as better able to appreciate the merit of the play, than the mass of the theatre audience. The audience for printed plays was a restricted audience that included only a portion of the theatre audience, and how it related to the more general audience remains an object of research. Moreover, it is worth remembering that much of our knowledge of the plays of the period derives from an archive that is less than complete or fully representative.

AUTHORSHIP AND COLLABORATION Collaboration was a standard method of playwriting in the period, with playwrights sharing in the writing of and compensation for playtexts. Individually celebrated figures like Marlowe, Shakespeare or Jonson were exceptions, and we know that they too collaborated on plays. Establishing which of Marlowe’s plays were soloauthored is a complicated and often controversial proposition. For example, Doctor Faustus exists in several versions, some including scenes that were added (most likely) after Marlowe’s death. His two Tamburlaine plays survive in a text that states that it has been edited to remove comic scenes deemed to be out of keeping with a serious tragedy (see Melnikoff 2005). Shakespeare collaborated with other writers, especially at the beginning and at the end of his career. Jonson was a frequent collaborator at the same time as he was claiming the status of an author. As the norm through most of the period, collaboration was not seen as either a lower or higher form of playwriting; such judgements only emerged later and partly as an effect of the view of Shakespeare as the central figure who had to be the sole begetter of his plays and poems. The emergence of solo authorship was the product of a long series of literary, social and economic struggles only some of which took place in the early modern period. Jeffrey Masten’s 1997 book Textual Intercourse argues that solo authorship emerged out of collaborative practice through complicated interactions between the printing and writing of plays. Critics like Patrick Cheney (2008) and Lukas Erne (2003) have made persuasive cases for what amount to authorial programmes for

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Shakespeare and Marlowe. Jonson’s own assertions about authorship develop out of conflicts with other writers over what counts or doesn’t count as proper language for plays and turns into a more general argument for his title as author.

BOY ACTORS What are they children? Who maintains ’em? How are they escotted? Will they pursue the quality no longer than they can sing? Will they not say afterwards if they should grow themselves to common players – as it is most like, if their means are no better – their writers do them wrong, to make them exclaim against their own succession? (Hamlet, 2.3.343–49) Boys played a variety of roles on the early modern stage, and, probably most strikingly to modern audiences, they played roles like Cleopatra and other female main characters (see ‘Cross-dressing’). Cleopatra’s worry that she will ‘see / Some squeaking Cleopatra boy [her] greatness’ (Antony and Cleopatra, 5.2.218–19; see also Gibson 2000) was warranted by performance practices on the professional stage, and the force of these lines depends on those practices. Hamlet’s questions to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern offer evidence of several aspects of how boy actors appeared on stage. The immediate context for his lines is a conversation about the (fictional) success of boy companies having driven the adult company about to arrive at Elsinore on tour. The London equivalents of the children to whom Hamlet refers were, in some cases, maintained and ‘escotted’ by the operators of child acting companies and in other cases by companies like Shakespeare’s own. Many of them did in fact ‘pursue the quality’ after they lost their youthful singing voices – as actors, playwrights and in other aspects of the theatre business. The actor and playwright Nathan Field’s example might be instructive as a way to show that the boy actors were better served by their writers than Hamlet alleges (and as Shakespeare knew). He lived from 1587 to 1620 and began his theatrical career as a boy actor with the Children of the Queen’s Revels sometime around 1600 and remained in the theatre business for the rest of his life. After 1613 he was part of Lady Elizabeth’s Men, becoming that company’s court payee. Still later he joined the King’s Men as an adult actor. He wrote plays for the Children of the Queen’s Revels as well as both Lady Elizabeth’s Men and the King’s Men. Other boy actors had similar trajectories into the adult companies and to writing, while some appear to have left acting behind. The boys who worked in the child companies were typically indentured for short terms, unlike the boys who were directly employed by the adult companies. The latter were trained as apprentices, moving from playing female roles at the start of their apprenticeships to playing male roles as they aged. Like other actors in the adult companies, apprentices tended to be from London and tended to be from artisanal families (see Kathman 2009). Once these apprentice players had served their term of apprenticeship, they tended to stay with the acting company they had trained in and, according to Kathman, a number of them went on to become sharers. Hamlet’s question, then, is focused narrowly on the boy companies and calls no

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attention to the boy actors in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men who were appearing on stage with him and whose experience was quite different.

CENSORSHIP AND REGULATION Playing was increasingly regulated over the course of the period, both to control potentially unruly mass audiences and to oversee the content of the plays performed. These were related, but not identical, practices and as scholars from Chambers (1923) to Janet Clare (1990) to Richard Dutton (1991) have shown they were also often, but not always, complementary. The Crown’s interests in playing were distinct from – and only sometimes opposed to – those of the City. A licensing system emerged over the course of the Tudor dynasty, beginning as early as the 1540s, and it evolved into a structure that had the Crown-appointed Master of Revels (see ‘Court Performance’) overseeing the approval of plays for performance and for printing. As Dutton has argued, what came to appear as a system for licensing, regulation and censorship emerged less from an articulated plan than as a response to a variety of changing social, economic and political concerns including the growth of professional playing, concerns about public disorder, the desire of the Queen for theatrical entertainments, the burgeoning print market for drama, etc. Edmund Tilney, the Master of the Revels from 1579 to 1610, censored the manuscript of Sir Thomas More, and as Dutton shows his interventions were designed not to suppress the play but to make it playable. Tilney appears to have been less interested in enforcing some kind of ideological conformity than in cutting scenes that might lead to public disorder (like those representing the riots of Ill May Day). His practice of making plays playable by minimizing potential causes for offence to people of importance and limiting potential prompts to disorder appears to have been followed by his successors in the position as well. Some plays were entirely suppressed because of their content and not only for political or religious reasons. One well-known example is Thomas Nashe’s Isle of Dogs (1597). The play was performed, but several actors who played in it were arrested (Robert Shaa, Gabriel Spenser and Ben Jonson) and Nashe’s papers were seized. The play was never published. Censorship also took less severe forms, such as the cutting of lines and the changing of character names to avoid offence (from Oldcastle to Falstaff, for example). Public performances could see thousands of spectators gathered in a small location, and one consistent concern on the part of the authorities was with disorder and with the spread of plague (Freedman 1996; see also ‘Plague’ below).

CIVIC DRAMA Civic drama was an important feature of London life throughout the period and is a sometimes overlooked part of the broader dramatic field (see Tracey Hill’s chapter in this volume and Bergeron 1971). The annual Lord Mayor’s Shows turned the streets of the city (and the waters of the Thames as well) into stages that represented London to itself. The Shows, sponsored by the incoming Mayor’s livery company, showcased both the industry of bourgeois London and the wealth of the citizenry. They were massive productions requiring great technical sophistication, provided

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by craftsmen whose services the companies tended to return to over and over again. The technical skills required were related to those needed for the production of masques at court as much as they were to the costuming, prop-making and stage design of the public theatres. Playwrights like Dekker and Middleton wrote the text for the shows, and the scripts (which contain detailed descriptions of the various stages, boats, fireworks and props) were printed for the companies. For these reasons, the civic drama of the period was a significant part of the theatrical world. It not only represented an important entertainment for Londoners but also had significant economic importance to theatre professionals. Extensive records exist of the details of payment for the scripts, for the actors and choristers involved, as well as the stages and other venues of performance for the Shows.

CLOSET DRAMA Most critical attention has been focused on plays or other theatrical entertainments that were performed in public, but a substantial number of what the DEEP database labels ‘closet/unacted’ plays were written in the period.5 Some were polemical pieces – especially those produced after the closing of the theatres and before the Restoration  – while others are more theatrical. Many of these were translations of classical drama, like those collected in the 1581 collection Seneca His Tenne Tragedies, while others were translations of continental plays like Mary Herbert’s translation of Robert Garnier’s Marc Antoine (printed in 1592) or original works like Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam (printed in 1613). In his 1959 Bibliography of the English Printed Drama, W. W. Greg defines closet drama as ‘plays that were never acted, and were never meant to be’ (1959: 4.xii). This definition still carries some weight but does not acknowledge that some of the writers of closet drama may well have wished their work to be acted but lacked access to the stage. Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam, while apparently never acted in its own day, is nevertheless effective theatre and has been staged on contemporary stages. This suggests that while she may not have expected the play to be acted, she did write it so that it could be, which qualifies Greg’s definition. Thomas Kyd translated Garnier’s closet play Cornélie and also wrote for the public stage, suggesting that he at least did not see writing plays for the page as incompatible with writing for the public playhouses.

CLOWNING From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay, We’ll lead you to the stately tent of War, Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine Threat’ning the world with high astounding terms And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword. (Marlowe 1981, Part 1, Prologue, 1–6)

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Clowning was a typical feature of the early modern stage before the seventeenth century. That this prologue to Tamburlaine specifically disavows the ‘conceits that clownage keeps in pay’ underscores audience expectation of and interest in those conceits; if there were any such conceits in Tamburlaine, the printer Richard Jones purged them as inappropriate to the serious nature of his text of Marlowe’s play (see Marlowe 1981: 111–12). Plays often ended with a jig performed by a company’s clown, who would also play roles within plays (like Touchstone in As You Like It or the Fool in King Lear). Will Kempe and Richard Tarlton were among the most famous clowns of the period and were associated with an improvisational mode of comedy that employed dance and was less dependent on the script of the play than the energy of the clown. Later clowns like Robert Armin were associated more with satire and a more intellectual mode of comedy than what came to be seen as the broader comedy of Kempe and Tarlton. The anarchic energy of the Elizabethan clown appears to have been increasingly constrained by a mode of clowning that stayed closer to the script of the play. Hamlet’s desire that clowns ‘speak no more than is set down for them’ so that the play can consider ‘some necessary question’ (3.2.37–41) appears to have been fulfilled, at least in Shakespeare’s plays which subordinate the clown or fool’s role to the overall plot of the play.

COURT PERFORMANCE By the Kinges Maiesties plaiers … Hallamas Day being the first of: Nouembar A play in the Banketinge: house att Whit Hall Called the Moor of Venis … Shaxberd (Streitberger 1986: 8) This record from the Jacobean Revels Office represents evidence both of Othello’s performance history and about court performance. The play was performed as part of the festive season and in the Whitehall banqueting house on what must have been a temporary stage. Theatre was a regular part of Tudor and Stuart court entertainments, and the Office of the Revels was formally established in 1545 to produce and manage those entertainments. Records transcribed by Albert Feuillerat (1908) and W. R. Streitberger (1986; see also 1994) describe an elaborate production office with a large and regular staff that engaged in costume production, prop and set construction, and transporting the Revels ‘stuffe’ (to use a label common to the transcripts). The records describe elaborate and visually spectacular masques as well as the development of a set of specifically theatrical craft skills (‘propertymaker’ first appears in these records). Later in the period, Masters like Edmund Tilney came to rely increasingly on professional actors for court performances for economic reasons as much as the quality of their performances. Court performances were fairly lucrative and the distinction of being called to perform at court helped support the overall position of theatre in London and enhanced its status (Astington 2009: 321). Elizabeth’s enjoyment of theatre became one of the justifications offered for professional company performances at their own theatres: the actors were asserted to be rehearsing for the possibility of being called to court to entertain the monarch

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and therefore must be allowed to play (see Dutton 1991). Until the construction of the Cockpit-in-Court (1630), the players acted on temporary stages in halls or other spaces at various royal palaces. These playing spaces were generally similar to the halls touring players would have been familiar with, if on a grander scale.

CROSS-DRESSING Cross-dressing was a normal feature of the early modern drama since by custom, if not by law, women did not act in plays on the public stage before the Restoration, although gentlewomen did perform in the court masque (and see Clare McManus and Lucy Munro’s chapter in this volume for other examples of female performance, including in the playhouses). The need to have men and boys play female roles may have contributed to the smaller number of female roles in the plays of the period, a lack often noted by modern audiences and students. The plays of the period make various kinds of use of this fact of playing, a fact that was straightforwardly a part of the theatrical experience. Some plays call no attention to the convention, presenting the male actors playing female characters without overt comment, while others make ironic and comic use of cross-dressing that opens up conversation about gender and gender roles in direct ways. Male actors could play women dressing as women, women dressing as men, men dressing as women, among other permutations. Cross-dressing within the plays, a common feature of comedy in particular, both calls attention to a fundamental artifice of the theatre and makes use of it to enable comic resolutions, to point out the arbitrary nature of gender conventions and to satirize the expectations of both audience and characters. Some cross-dressing works as disguise (Rosalind/Ganymede in Shakespeare’s As You Like It or Viola/ Cesario in Twelfth Night). Antonio, the title character of Marston’s Antonio and Mellida, returns from banishment disguised as an Amazon. In Jonson’s Epicene, Epicene, a ‘young gentleman’, appears as the ‘Silent Woman’ (‘The Persons of the Play’, in Jonson 2012) and when his disguise is removed, it reveals not only the young gentlemen pretending to be a woman but the young actor playing both roles. What might seem like a simpler example, Middleton and Dekker’s Roaring Girl, presents Moll Cutpurse (a character based on a real person) as a woman (played by a man) who is not pretending to be a man but ‘only’ dressing like one. Moll’s role complicates norms in a different way than disguise plays because she isn’t pretending to be male, though she wears men’s clothing. This represents a more direct challenge to gendered expectations about clothing than disguise plots which both use and depend on the stability of those expectations.

DRAMATIC GENRES To say that genre remains a vexed subject in early modern studies will not surprise anyone. From Sidney’s negative comments about the indecorous mixing of kings and clowns in what he calls ‘mongrel tragicomedy’ in the Defense of Poetry (1579, first printed in 1595; Sidney 1996: 43) to recent scholarship on particular

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genres, dramatic categories have been durably interesting and useful as a means of understanding the plays of the period.6 Whether the three used in the 1623 Shakespeare Folio or other categories deriving from the period or developed by the critic, with some notable exceptions (e.g. Cohen 2017, Colie 1973, Danson 2000, Lopez 2003) and for obvious reasons, scholarship has tended to focus on individual genres more than the generic system as a whole. It is also worth remembering that early modern professional playwrights and the acting companies they wrote for were far more pragmatic about genre than later critics have been. That pragmatism is displayed throughout the surviving corpus of early modern plays, even in plays that have consistently been labelled as tragedy or comedy, the two primary classical genres for plays. Generic categories were in flux throughout the period, and definitions were far from stable. Genres were also sometimes represented as being in conflict. In 1599, A Warning for Fair Women’s induction has Tragedy whip both History and Comedy from the stage complaining that both of them have ‘kept the Theatres so long’ while Tragedy is ‘scorned of the multitude’ (sig. A3r). Tragedy goes on to take her turn but expects that Comedy and History will soon return. Beyond these three, plays took a variety of labels: Polonius’s list of hybrid plays in Hamlet, 2.2.334–6 is parodic, but dramatic genres were always hybrid and variety was a key element of the theatre. The list has only expanded with time as critics have explored the shape of the field. Pastoral tragicomedy  – as Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess attests  – was an early modern label as was comical satire, but later labels like ‘romance’ (see Mulready 2013) and even ‘revenge tragedy’ (see Kerrigan 1996) are the products of critical attention rather than early modern taxonomy.

INDOOR VENUES Permanent indoor theatres in London date back at least to 1575, when plays were put on at St Paul’s, and performances began at the first Blackfriars in 1576. These theatres were initially occupied by companies of child actors who also appeared fairly regularly at court. The spaces were significantly smaller than the outdoor theatres and therefore typically more expensive to attend. Unlike the amphitheatres, they required artificial lighting, and they had different seating arrangements. The playing space at St Paul’s was in use on and off until 1606; unlike at the theatre at Blackfriars, performances did not resume there later in the decade. The first iteration of the Children of Paul’s performed plays by Lyly, among others, and as Gurr suggests the construction of the theatre in 1575 indicates that their performances were strong competition for the adult companies (1996: 221). Their theatre was apparently the second playhouse built in London, and after the 1590 closure of the first Paul’s company, it was reopened in 1599 and premiered a number of John Marston’s plays as well as Thomas Middleton’s. Blackfriars hosted two theatres; the first was built by Richard Farrant and was in use until about 1584 by child companies. The second Blackfriars was a separate theatre built by Richard Burbage and housed boy players before the King’s

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Men began performing there in 1609. The indoor stage gave the King’s Men two London venues, and they appear to have used the Globe and Blackfriars more or less interchangeably. Plays were also performed on more impromptu indoor stages – at court, in the Inns of Court, at the halls of livery companies, etc. – and those spaces shared some of the characteristics of the permanent theatres but with different audiences than the commercial theatres.

INNS There were four inns in London that had been modified to serve as playhouses but also continued later as inns. They were in operation from sometime in the 1570s through about 1596. They were the Bel Savage (c. 1575), the Bull (c. 1577), the Cross Keys (1577–8) and the Bell (1577–8). All four were inside the walls of London and thus under the authority of the City of London, unlike the theatres to the north and south of the city or playing places in the liberties inside London. Their two decades or more of performances contradict narratives about players abandoning the city for the suburbs after 1575 (see Kathman 2009). As Herbert Berry writes, ‘virtually nothing is known about either the ownership of these places or what was done to make them playhouses. Nor is much known about how their owners contrived to carry on theatrical enterprises for twenty years and more on the home ground of mayors and aldermen who disapproved of such things’ (Wickham 2000: 295). Plays at the Bel Savage and the Bull were staged in the innyard in the open air and the admission prices were similar to those of the purpose-built theatres that long outlasted them as performance venues – a penny for access, another to go into the ‘scaffold’ and another for more private viewing. Their stages appear to have been platforms around which audiences could stand, much like the amphitheatres of the suburbs. It appears that the Cross Keys and the Bell functioned as indoor playhouses since neither had yards that would easily accommodate stages. Recent work by David Kathman and others suggests that there is much yet to be learned about these theatres and their place in London professional theatre, a place that has been overshadowed by the theatres outside the walls as well as better-known playhouses such as Blackfriars.

INNS OF COURT Like the Universities, the Inns of Court had a long tradition of producing and consuming theatrical performances. Four Inns of Court had the exclusive right to train barristers who could plead in London’s central courts: Gray’s Inn, the Middle Temple, the Inner Temple and Lincoln’s Inn. They had long been established by the sixteenth century, and their population grew substantially over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as legal business in London expanded.

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The Inns functioned both as law schools and as a kind of finishing school for gentlemen who had no intention of advancing to the bar and becoming practising barristers. Some of the entertainments that took place at the Inns were produced by residents, but they included professional performances of plays by Shakespeare, Jonson and others. Jonson dedicated Every Man Out of His Humor to the Inns. The Inns had annual Revels with scripted drama, professional acting companies performed in their halls, and a number of playwrights had some degree of legal training at the Inns: John Marston was a member of the Inner Temple, and John Webster may have been as well, to name two examples. The tragedy Gorboduc, written by two Inner Temple lawyers, was performed there as part of the Revels in 1562, and numerous other plays were put on as part of the annual events at the Inns. Members of the Inns were associated with significant developments in the period’s literature. Many poets and dramatists attended the Inns, and they were an important intellectual centre in addition to functioning as law schools. As Jessica Winston (2016) argues, members of the Inns had a vital role in the development of lyric poetry, tragedy, satire and the masque. Not only did members of the Inns engage in writing poetry and drama, the narrative resources of the law became significant parts of the drama of the period as Lorna Hutson’s work (2007, 2015) has established.

MASQUE Masques combined music, dance and theatre into an elaborate form of entertainment aimed primarily at the monarch and the court. They developed out of entertainments put on in the Tudor court but took their mature form under the Stuarts. The evidence that survives in records from the Office of the Revels describes elaborate sets and costumes and significant expenditures on court performances from the reign of Elizabeth on, and the Stuart masque built on a well-developed tradition (see ‘Court performance’). Published texts describing Jacobean and Caroline masques indicate that they were expensive, visually arresting and complicated shows that made extensive use of stage technology and visual spectacle. The architect Inigo Jones (1573–1652) designed many masques and, among other innovations, was responsible for introducing illusionist settings to the English stage.7 His central role in producing masques brought him into conflict with Ben Jonson who, naturally enough for a playwright and poet, felt that the script should be of primary importance. Much has been written about the masque and politics and about the function of the spectacle in the Jacobean and Caroline court’s self-representation. While much of the purpose of the masque was to praise the monarch, writers like Jonson did attempt to offer criticism or corrective commentary in the scripts (see Lindley 1995: ix–xvii). The masque also made its way into the professional drama in a variety of ways, whether as a vehicle for vengeance in Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge and The Malcontent or more conventionally in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and these inclusions are one way to see how the masque’s innovations had an impact on the dramaturgy of the public stages.

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MUSIC citizen

What stately music have you? You have shawms? prologue

Shawms? No. citizen

No? I’m a thief if my mind did not give me so. Rafe plays a stately part and he must needs have shawms. I’ll be at the charge of them myself, rather than we’ll be without them. (Beaumont 1984: Induction, 98–103) When George the Citizen requests shawms to accompany the appearance of his apprentice Rafe in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, he is calling for an instrument better suited to the outdoor theatres he and his wife are more familiar with, and the Prologue’s ‘No!’ reflects his sense that shawms would be too loud for the enclosed space of the Second Blackfriars theatre. At the same time, the Citizen’s desire for music speaks to the prevalence of music in the theatre of the period. George’s request points to distinctions between the kind of musical accompaniment typical of different performance venues. Many songs are referred to in plays: for example, The Knight of the Burning Pestle is full of all manner of songs, particularly Merrythought’s snatches, and a number of his snatches predate the play, tying his character to the world outside the theatre. Shakespeare’s songs in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Cymbeline and The Tempest are well known outside of their theatrical context. Songs like those Ophelia references in Hamlet or the willow song in Othello are attested to well before the composition of the plays in which they appear. The child companies, based in schools for choristers, used a great deal of music as part of the performance with music between acts as well as in the action proper. Music and dance were central to the masque. David Lindley (2006: 62) describes records for the music in Jonson’s Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly (1611) that list sixty-three musicians who were rewarded for their performances. Beyond the actual performance of vocal or instrumental music, characters often use imagery drawn from music in speeches: to take one example Ulysses uses the image of an untuned string to illustrate the effects of the failure of order in Troilus and Cressida.

OUTDOOR VENUES In London, before the construction of theatre buildings, public playing took place in the yard at inns in the city and its environs. There were four licensed inns between 1575 and 1594: the Bel Savage Inn, the Bull Inn, the Bell Inn and the Cross Keys Inn. The Bel Savage and the Bull Inn offered outdoor performances in the yard, while the Bell Inn and the Cross Keys were indoor venues (see ‘Inns’). David Kathman argues that ‘by the end of Elizabeth’s reign the Bull, Bell, Cross Keys, and Bell Savage had ceased being regular playhouses, though occasional playing in suburban inns continued into the seventeenth century’ (2009: 160).

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The first known theatre in London was the Red Lion in Stepney, outside the jurisdiction of the City of London. The Red Lion was operating in 1567, but we know very little about what plays were performed there. It is not clear how long it remained open, and most scholars assume that it did not endure for long (on scholarly assumptions about the Red Lion, see Andy Kesson’s chapter in this volume). By c. 1576 and 1577 the Theatre and the Curtain in Shoreditch, north of London, and Newington Butts to the south had begun offering plays. These theatres were soon joined by a number of other playhouses of various sizes and shapes on both sides of the Thames. It is hard to generalize about the outdoor theatres because they were built at different times, and later theatres responded to and adapted plans from earlier ones (see Laurie Johnson’s chapter). Moreover, new archaeological discoveries are changing our sense of the shape and dimensions of some of theatres, but they do seem to have shared some common features. The stages typically extended into an open yard for standees which was surrounded by galleries where audience members could sit, at an additional charge. There was no artificial lighting, and playing necessarily had to take place in the daylight hours. These physical features had direct effects on the dramaturgy of the plays, from conventions regarding soliloquies and asides to the use of props or dialogue to let audiences know if a scene was taking place in the day or at night. Of the outdoor theatres, only the Globe was owned by members of the acting company that played in it; the others were operated by a landlord who rented the space to acting companies and the tenants could change. The Lord Chamberlain’s/ King’s Men had stable expectations about the capabilities of their theatre that other companies could not and that almost certainly had subtle effects on plays written for them and for other companies.

PARATEXTS: PROLOGUES, EPILOGUES, EPISTLES The paratexts that appear with printed plays vary enormously in kind and function and change over the course of the period. They can serve more or less simply to frame the play’s action, introducing it and offering some kind of closing remarks, or to offer a claim about the playwright or the acting company’s distinction and the value of the drama about to ensue. Some offer larger arguments about the purpose of playing or stage contests between dramatic kinds. Others present descriptions of the production of the play or imagine its proper reception. Still others make appeals to patrons or defend the value of a play whose stage fortunes may have been disappointing. Paratexts can be rich, if not authoritative, sources of information about individual plays, playwrights, stage practices and many other aspects of the dramatic field. It may be useful to divide them into two large categories: paratexts that appear to have been or are intended for performance and paratexts that are meant for a reading audience. Theatrical paratexts would include inductions, prologues, epilogues and

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choruses that while they stand outside the play proper are nevertheless part of the production. Theatrical paratexts like, for example, the prologues of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine or Doctor Faustus orient the audiences towards the action and set some expectations about the play to come. The induction to the revised version of John Marston’s The Malcontent, by contrast, discusses the acquisition of the playscript and pays less attention to introducing the plot or characters of the play, leaving that to the opening scene proper. Epilogues can have similar functions in reminding audiences of the play’s content, asserting its worth or usefulness or, on occasion, promising more. They also commonly make appeals for the audience’s applause and indulgence for the infelicities of the performance. Read paratexts would include epistles directed to the reader, commendatory poems, letters to patrons and other text not clearly meant for performance. Some of these offer useful evidence for thinking about theatrical authorship and the playwright’s sense of his (mostly) place in the cultural world. Others describe how a play may have come to be printed, offering insight into printing house practices as well as what can be called marketing. ‘Letters of the Author’ locate writers in the field of print as much as they do in theatre and make claims about the value of plays, and the authority or cultural distinction of the author. To take one significant example, while often motivated by a sense of grievance, Jonson’s copious paratexts represent a rich source of evidence about his sense of his career, of the relation between his work for the court and his work for the public stages, and his interest in print.

PATRONAGE Patronage had multiple meanings that operated at the same time in early modern England. Patronage was a major structuring force in the polity and was deployed by the Crown, aristocrats and gentry as a way of maintaining order through links of obligation. The general context of patronage informs other more diffuse meanings of the term, such as referring to audience members or book buyers as patrons of the theatre (see Westfall 2002: 13–42 for discussion of both these senses). Playing companies all needed noble patrons to be able to play, which made patronage an essential aspect of the theatre business from at least 1572, when players not in the service of a ‘baron of the realm’ or licensed by two Justices of the Peace were declared to be ‘rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars’ liable to punishment (Wickham, Berry and Ingram 2000: 62–3). Without the auspices of a patron, players could be prosecuted as vagabonds and denied the opportunity to play. Patronage was also meant to bring acting companies under some measure of control, making them responsible to their patron. Patrons, for their part, benefitted from having their names circulated as their companies toured. This kind of patronage was distinct from the more general kind of literary patronage that remained a part of the cultural field and can be seen in the dedicatory epistles of many printed plays, though, as many characters in the Parnassus Plays lament, an increasingly small one.

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PLAGUE Plague, while intermittent, had profound effects on playing in the capital – closing theatres, possibly inducing companies to go on tour (though companies did tour when there was not plague: see Keenan 2002), and putting the regular business of playing on hiatus for varying lengths of time – and contributed to the precarity of many actors, playwrights and theatre companies without the reserves to weather long periods without work (see Barroll 1991). Long closures, ordered by the Privy Council, took place in 1593–4, 1603–4 and 1608–9. Scott McMillin (1999: 228) calculates that theatres were closed for twenty months in 1593–4 and about 68 months between 1603 and 1611. These are substantial periods without public theatre in London, and while performance did not cease entirely, the closures did keep many plays off the stages until theatres were allowed to reopen. Post-plague repertories may have included older texts that remained new due to the lack of opportunities to perform them and thus shrank the market for genuinely new plays until demand resumed with the continuance of playing: Roslyn Lander Knutson writes that a reason for the King’s Men’s large repertory in 1604–5 was ‘the long period of interrupted playing. Plays new in May 1603, such as The Merry Devil of Edmonton and All’s Well that Ends Well were still new in April 1604’ (1999: 356).

PLAYHOUSE MANUSCRIPTS A variety of playhouse manuscripts survive  – some actors’ parts, some plots for plays, some playscripts, the records in Henslowe’s Diary (Foakes 2002; see also Carson 1988), for example  – though far fewer than scholars would prefer, with very little surviving from either Globe. They offer instructive information about staging (as how cues were managed and the role of a prompter), acting (see ‘Actors’ parts’), censorship and the business of playing. Tiffany Stern’s 2009 Documents of Performance in Early Modern England discusses a broad array of documents that were patched together into plays – some extant, like the seven known plots of plays, and some not, like playbills – and is an important resource for thinking about how plays were constructed out of various kinds of materials. She argues that ‘full printed and manuscript plays contain “shadows” of their patchwork construction’ (253; see also Stern 2020). The diversity of documents patched together into plays represents another aspect of the materiality of theatre in the period.

PLAYING VENUES OUTSIDE LONDON Touring players performed at a variety of venues outside of the metropolis, ranging from improvised outdoor spaces to inns and civic buildings in provincial towns. Siobhan Keenan’s comprehensive and detailed Travelling Players in Shakespeare’s England (2002) usefully divides playing spaces used by touring companies into seven categories: town halls, churches, country houses, inns, schools and universities, markets and ‘game places’, and provincial playhouses. There are surviving records of only three purpose-built (or purpose-renovated) playhouses outside of London: one in Bristol, one in Prescot in Lancashire and one in York,

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though more records may still come to light (Keenan 2002: 144–65). Before the erection of theatres in London, the playing spaces inside or outside of London were far more similar than different in that they were not designed specifically for playing, and even after that, touring would have kept actors well versed in the various kinds of spaces they might encounter outside of London. The variability of these venues would have required touring companies to prepare very flexible stagings of plays and likely influenced the repertory of plays they would have been able to perform while on tour.

PROPS AND COSTUMES The records of the Office of the Revels, Henslowe’s Diary and records of the Lord Mayor’s Shows represent some of the best primary sources regarding props and costumes in the period. Taken together, the documents give a sense of the nature of the props and costumes, their costs (considerable) and, in some cases, details about who produced them. Although the Office of the Works had some revels-related responsibilities, the Revels records are more expansive and offer more detail about the props constructed for various court revels and about the routine practices of caring for the costume and prop inventory of the Office. Every year, the Revels Office held ‘airings’ of the Revels ‘stuffe’ at significant expense during which the ‘stuffe’ was inventoried and maintained. They employed an array of craftspeople engaged in repairing, creating and altering the stock. The Revels records name these craftspeople and allow us to see that, in many cases, working on court entertainments was a regular source of income for tailors, haberdashers, joiners, carpenters, painters, sempsters and many others. Names recur for many years and families appear to have worked for the Office over generations. This suggests the emergence of recognized entertainmentspecific skills among these tradespeople (see Gieskes 2006, esp. chapter 4). In addition, these records offer visual description of large set pieces, like the titular rock in the Knight of the Burning Rock (1579). The existence of these effects (and the skills necessary to create them) had an influence on the imaginations of writers and theatrical professionals. Henslowe’s records include substantial lists of both costumes and props, many of which are associated with specific plays, and give insight into the expense and appearance of those props. He includes some information about costs, but fewer names of the actual craftspeople involved, partly because his interests appear to have been in the inventories more than the craftspeople. Regardless, he describes acting companies well stocked with elaborate costumes and stage properties. The City records – most easily accessed through the publications of the Malone Society – detail the expenses of the Lord Mayor’s Shows and identify the writers, performers and artificers who collaborated in the production of the Shows. Patterns of practice and expectation can be discerned in the records as can the names of craftspeople who contributed to the Shows repeatedly. Garrett Christmas is regularly singled out for praise and gratitude in the records for seventeenth-century Shows, which points to his skill in building the various temporary structures and props required.

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On the professional stages, which tended not to employ such extravagant set pieces, visual effects were created by costume and props. To take a late example, Webster’s Duchess of Malfi includes a shocking display of what are said to be wax figures representing the title character’s dead family. Designed to shock her, the revelation of the tableau likely had similar effects on theatre audiences. Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy employs a ‘bony lady’ (2007: 3.5.121), a skeleton with the skull of one of the villainous Duke’s victims, to accomplish a murder, and its maker tells us that it was not ‘fashioned … only for show / And useless property’ (3.5.100–1) but instead to play an active role. Props such as these were dynamic parts of the representational repertoire of the period’s drama and the plays made sophisticated and increasingly self-aware use of them throughout the period.

PUBLICATION OF PLAYS Plays began to be printed almost as soon as the first printing presses were set up in England, but play publication did not become a significant part of the publishing industry until decades later. There remains argument about just how important the printing of plays was to stationers, but it is clear that after 1598 substantially more plays entered into print than at any point before (see Blayney 1997 and 2005 and Farmer and Lesser 2005). The conventions of the printing of drama evolved over the period, probably the most obvious change being the increasing importance of the playwright’s name on title pages, but there were myriad other conventions that developed over time. Some of the traditional narratives about how playtexts became books have come under question recently. As one example, theories about the piracy of playhouse manuscripts have been qualified, if not outright rejected. Likewise, the distinction between ‘bad’ and ‘good’ quartos like Q1 and Q2 Hamlet has become less about the relative value of the two texts or their authenticity as Shakespearean than about what these different versions of the play might tell us about the theatre and about printing. The recent book-historical turn in early modern studies (e.g. Lesser 2004, Hooks 2016, Bourne 2020) has rejuvenated bibliographic approaches to the drama of the period and has expanded and deepened our knowledge of how plays moved into print and about the complicated relationships between the playwrights, players and printers. It has also helped reveal gaps in our knowledge by reminding scholars about the accidents of textual survival and the significant difference between the number of plays performed in the period, the number of plays printed and the number of those plays printed that survived.

RACE AND NATIONAL IDENTITY Early modern theatre deployed a variety of techniques to represent race and national identities, and these techniques emerged from, participated in and contributed to racial and ethnic stereotypes. Accents (and the speaking of languages other than English) were used to mark national differences throughout the theatre of the period, probably the most often-cited example being the conversation between

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Fluellen, Macmorris, and Gower and the use of French in Shakespeare’s Henry V, and respond to an emerging sense of Englishness as national identity (see for example Helgerson 1992 and Ton Hoenselaars’s chapter in this volume). Accents were likely accompanied by costumes or props (like, to return to Henry V, the leek which was associated with Welshness). Acting companies used various other methods to represent racial difference on stage – black paint being only one – and, as Farah Karim-Cooper suggests in her essay ‘The Materials of Race: Staging the Black and White Binary in Early Modern Theatre’, over the course of the period ‘through costume, makeup, textiles, and fabrics, racial subjectivity became increasingly performable as more plays contained characters from a range of backgrounds’. Karim-Cooper notes that those performances took place before audiences that were not racially homogenous, which ‘should force us to consider more deeply how the performance of race developed over time and how it was received’ (2021: 27). Since at least the publication of Kim F. Hall’s Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (1995), the implications of these staging practices for both early modern English and later periods’ ideas about race have become increasingly important objects of study: see also the chapters by Jane Hwang Degenhardt and Farah Karim-Cooper in this volume.

REPERTORY Based on the records in Henslowe’s Diary, playing companies typically held a significant number of plays (varying considerably in number from company to company) in their repertories and typically staged a number of performances of other plays between repeat performances of a specific play. This suggests that companies saw value in novelty, or at least in not wearing out a play’s welcome, and that in turn drove demand for scripts. In addition, the repertory system made substantial demands on the memories and performance skills of the actors who had to keep a large number of roles distinct in their minds. We have only partial information regarding the repertories of acting companies in early modern England, partly due to the loss of almost all theatrical account books excepting Henslowe’s Diary, partly due to the fact that many plays that were performed were never printed and partly due to the fact that many of the plays that were printed have since been lost. We can reconstruct repertories through the company attributions on printed title pages, from payment records that do exist and from other sources, but such pictures can only ever be partial. The important work of the Lost Plays Database project (https://lostplays.folger.edu) has made significant advances in our knowledge about what is missing, and work like that of Susan Cerasano (2009), Roslyn Knutson (1991, 1999, 2001; also instrumental in the Lost Plays project), Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean (1998) and Lucy Munro (1995) among others has given us a sense of how repertories worked within and between the different acting companies. Repertory-based studies have productively treated a company repertory as a body of work, analogous to the work of a single author, and this approach gives insight into both the plays themselves and the shape of the dramatic field over time.

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SPECIAL EFFECTS Arguably the most infamous special effect in the theatre of the period was the stage cannon that inadvertently burned down the first Globe in 1613, but there were a substantial number of other devices available in early modern theatre, pyrotechnic or otherwise. Ben Jonson’s plea in the prologue to the Folio version of Every Man in His Humour (1616) lists some of them: He rather prays you will be pleased to see One such today, as other plays should be: Where neither Chorus wafts you o’er the seas, Nor creaking throne comes down, the boys to please, Nor nimble squib is seen, to make afeard The gentlewomen, nor rolled bullet heard To say it thunders; nor tempestuous drum Rumbles, to tell you when the storm doth come. (Prologue, 14–20) Stage directions like ‘Storm still’ in King Lear (3.2.0 s.d.) or the deus ex machina in Cymbeline point to the use of some of these tools as do the appearances of ghosts or other supernatural figures. Jonson complains of such artifice in favour of his avowedly more naturalistic theatre, but they remained useful tools for playwrights and acting companies who needed to please the boys and make the gentlewomen afeard. Jonson himself made use of some of these tools. For example, Envy rises to stage from a trapdoor apparently wreathed in snakes at the start of Poetaster, and an offstage explosion is called for in The Alchemist. In Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, characters call ironic attention to the sound of thunder produced by rolled bullets (2007: 5.3.48), claiming they represent the applause of Heaven, indicating the artifice of the convention at the same time that the play deploys it. Court performances as recorded in the Revels Office accounts describe set pieces akin to the ‘creaking throne’ Jonson refers to here and the masque made use of emerging tools of perspective staging that would likely have seemed like special effects to an audience not yet accustomed to them. Civic drama such as the Lord Mayor’s Shows included fireworks (both on land and on the river) as well as set pieces that could evoke surprise and wonder. Fireworks and other pyrotechnics contributed substantially to the cost of the Shows, signalling their importance to the civic drama. Alan Dessen and Leslie Thomson list twenty-two items in a list of special effects in their Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama (1999: 265), including a ‘blazing star’, ‘lightning’, ‘fireball’, etc.

STAGE DIRECTIONS Stage directions range from relatively straightforward markers of entries and exits from the stage to the ‘alarums and excursions’ familiar from Shakespeare’s history plays (among others) to more spectacular suggestions like ‘Exit, pursued by a bear’ in The Winter’s Tale (3.3.57 s.d.). Since we do not have many extended accounts of

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playgoing from contemporary audience members, they are some of the best evidence of stage practices in the period (see Savage 2008; but also Love 2003). Modern editions of plays from the period routinely add (or move) stage directions for the sake of clarity where early printed plays often lack them. For example, a number of Jonson’s plays lack details about entries and exits, preferring a convention deriving from the printing of classical plays where the names of characters appearing in a scene are grouped at the start of a scene (see Dessen and Thompson 1999: xi).8 Alan Dessen and Leslie Thomson’s Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642 draws on a database ‘of over 22,000 entries culled from roughly 500 plays’. Their entries focus on ‘actual stage directions’ found in plays of the period, not on information drawn from dialogue because those directions represent what ‘was or could have been done in the original productions’ (1999: vii–viii). Stage directions provide evidence about conventions (how battles were staged) or about special effects (like figures rising from or descending to the stage) that contribute to our sense of the theatrical language of the period, a language audiences, actors and playwrights alike shared.

THEATRE OWNERSHIP AND THE BUSINESS OF PLAYING The Lord Chamberlain’s/King’s Men were unusual in that members of the company were the owners of the theatre they played in; no other acting company functioned both as actors and theatre owners in the period. Why no other acting company appears to have imitated the successful example of Shakespeare’s company is an open question, since the principal sharers in the company did quite well economically, especially compared to the average player of the period. The typical model was one in which an acting company rented space from a theatre owner like Philip Henslowe or Francis Langley. Henslowe acted as a manager for companies as well as a landlord and, as scholars like William Ingram (1968) have suggested, was a precursor to the theatrical managers who became the norm after the Restoration. Theatres were typically erected by individuals or partnerships and, as Ingram writes, ‘undoubtedly through the borrowing of money’ (1999: 322). Theatre owners thus had an interest in keeping their buildings occupied and in at least attempting to find companies whose repertory suggested profitability. Evidence suggests that rather than charging a flat rent, theatre owners took a share of the leasing company’s income as their fee, which represents another reason that an owner would be invested in the success of his tenant company. The economic practices of acting companies have been well discussed and the general pattern appears to be that patrons of the outdoor theatres paid a basic fee to an employee called a gatherer and then paid more to gain access to seating in the galleries or other seating areas. The indoor spaces seem to have had a flat entrance price. From the take, companies had to pay their rent, their actors (both the sharers and hired men), as well as the playwrights responsible for the plays they performed. In addition, as Henslowe’s records show, they had to pay for costumes and props, and some costumes cost more to acquire than the play they appeared in.

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Bentley’s The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time (1971) and The Profession of Player in Shakespeare’s Time (1984), while their optimism about the fortunes of players and playwrights has been tempered by later scholarship, continue to be important discussions of the business of theatre in the period.

TOURING How chances it they travel? Their residence, both in reputation and profit, was better both ways. (Hamlet, 2.2.293–4) Hamlet’s response to being informed that the ‘tragedians of city’ are about to arrive in Elsinore on tour suggests that touring was both less profitable and less estimable than remaining in the city. His position is contradicted by the fact that even after the advent of purpose-built theatres in London, touring remained a regular aspect of playing in the period and appears only to have declined after the 1620s and 1630s. Some companies, like the Elizabethan Queen’s Men, toured more than they performed in London while other companies toured more infrequently. McMillin and MacLean (1998) have identified a series of regular touring routes that companies used and that could have brought multiple companies to towns, thus broadening the reach of the London professional theatre. The actors likely travelled with fewer props and costumes, and staging was necessarily simpler since the playing spaces available to touring companies varied enormously from place to place.

UNIVERSITIES The Universities were important as sites of performance  – whether of plays from the professional theatre or plays written at university  – and a number of playwrights were educated there as well. There was a rich tradition of neo-Latin drama at both Cambridge and Oxford, a drama that likely had some influence on playwrights like Christopher Marlowe, and touring companies brought contemporary vernacular drama before the students and faculty. Thomas Legge’s Richardus Tertius (1579), performed at Cambridge, may have been seen by Christopher Marlowe and Robert Greene and appears to have been an influence on later writers of historical drama. The neo-Latin drama of William Gager, written in the 1580s and 1590s, for example, dramatized classical narratives in Latin, staying close to a Senecan model but drawing on other writers as sources. The Parnassus Plays, performed by students at Cambridge sometime before 1603, describe a group of graduates who, unable to find work, turn to writing. All three plays show a deep awareness of the London theatre world, make direct references to Marlowe, Jonson and Shakespeare among other writers, and offer suggestive insights into how the London theatre (and literary) world may have appeared to students at the universities. The so-called University Wits – Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, John Lyly, Thomas Lodge and George Peele – were all university-educated

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writers and were an important part of the dramatic world of the 1580s and 1590s.9 Their educations provided them with material for their plays and poetry, and while it is difficult to be certain, it is likely that they saw various kinds of dramatic performance while at university, experience that would have shaped some of their own dramatic and poetic practice.

NOTES 1 Chambers’s ‘Documents of Control’ heading continues to have a structuring effect on later scholarship: Glynne Wickham, Herbert Berry and William Ingram’s collection of documents (2000) uses the phrase as a chapter title. 2 Christopher Marlowe is the most obviously notorious figure, but among playwrights Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Robert Greene had some celebrity as did actors like Edward Alleyn and Richard Burbage. What fame or celebrity meant in this context is a complicated question, but there were theatre professionals who were well known in London. One piece of evidence for this is the use of actors’ names in inductions to plays where they played themselves (see John Marston’s The Malcontent for one example). 3 The New Bibliography’s focus on establishing the best text assumed the value of that text and thus often elided the struggle that went into the production of the belief in the value of the text that drove the effort to find its best version. 4 It has been suggested that some of the strangenesses of playtexts that may have been based on so-called ‘memorial reconstructions’ may be an effect of the reconstructor having better recollections of the parts of the play he was actually in than those he was not. For a cautious discussion of this theory, see Maguire 1996. 5 DEEP (the Database of Early English Playbooks at deep.sas.upenn.edu) lists 106 editions of unacted or closet plays in its database of printed books. Many are reprints of, for example, translations of Seneca from the 1550s and 1560s, but new plays appear throughout. 6 Sidney’s complaint is about indecorous mixing of modes, and he is not hostile to all mixing. 7 In addition to having a major role in designing many masques, Jones held the office of Surveyor of the King’s Works from 1615 forward and designed and built numerous buildings, including the Banqueting Hall where performances took place. 8 Dessen and Thomson make the point that Jonson’s Volpone was first printed without any stage direction at all, and such a busy play as The Alchemist was first printed with only one. The dictionary does not include items before 1581, nor does it include material not connected to the professional theatre. 9 ‘So-called’ because the designation was produced by George Saintsbury (1887: 64) and groups the writers together not because of any clear historical affiliation but because they were all writers educated at the universities who were active at roughly the same time.

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REFERENCES Astington, J. H. (2009), ‘Court Theatre’, in R. Dutton (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, 307–22, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barroll, L. (1991), Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s Theater: The Stuart Years, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Beaumont, F. (1984), The Knight of the Burning Pestle, ed. S. P. Zitner, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bentley, G. E. (1941–68), The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bentley, G. E. (1971), The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bentley, G. E. (1984), The Profession of Player in Shakespeare’s Time, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bergeron, D. (1971), English Civic Pageantry, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Blayney, P. (1997), ‘The Publication of Playbooks’, in J. D. Cox and D. S. Kastan (eds), A New History of Early English Drama, 383–422, New York: Columbia University Press. Blayney, P. (2005), ‘The Alleged Popularity of Playbooks’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 56 (1): 33–50. Bourdieu, P. (1993), The Field of Cultural Production, ed. R. Johnson, New York: Columbia University Press. Bourne, C. M. L. (2020), Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bruster, D. (2003), Shakespeare and the Question of Culture, New York: Palgrave. Bruster, D. (2013), ‘The Representation Market of Early Modern England’, Renaissance Drama, 41: 1–23. Carson, N. (1988), A Companion to Henslowe’s Diary, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cerasano, S. P. (2009), ‘Theater Entrepreneurs and Theatrical Economics’, in R. Dutton (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, 380–95, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chambers, E. K. (1903), The Mediaeval Stage, 2 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Chambers, E. K. (1923), The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Chambers, E. K. (1930), William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cheney, P. (2008), Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clare, J. (1990), ‘Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority’: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cohen, R. (2017), Genre Theory and Historical Change: Theoretical Essays of Ralph Cohen, ed. J. L. Rowlett, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Colie, R. (1973), The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the English Renaissance, Berkeley: University of California Press. Cook, A. J. (1981), The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Cox, J. D. and D. S. Kastan, eds (1997), A New History of Early English Drama, New York: Columbia University Press. Danson, L. (2000), Shakespeare’s Dramatic Genres, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dessen, A. and L. Thomson (1999), A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dutton, R. (1991), Mastering the Revels: The Regulation and Censorship of Early Modern Drama, London: Macmillan; Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Dutton, R., ed. (2009), The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Erne, L. (2003), Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elam, K. (1980), Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, London: Methuen. Farmer, A. B. and Z. Lesser (2005), ‘The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 56 (1): 1–32. Foakes, R. A., ed. (2002), Henslowe’s Diary, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Feuillerat, A. (1908), Documents Relating to the Office of the Revels in the Time of Queen Elizabeth, Louvain: A. Uystpruyst. Freedman, B. (1996), ‘Elizabethan Protest, Plague, and Plays: Rereading the “Documents of Control”’, English Literary Renaissance, 26 (1): 17–45. Gibson, J. L. (2000), Squeaking Cleopatras: The Elizabethan Boy Player, Phoenix Mill: Sutton Publishing. Gieskes, E. (2006), Representing the Professions: Administration, Law, and Theatre in Early Modern England, Newark: University of Delaware Press. Greg, W. W. (1959), Bibliography of the English Printed Drama, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gurr, A. (1987), Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gurr, A. (1996), The Shakespearian Playing Companies, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hall, K. F. (1995), Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Harbage, A. (1952), Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions, New York: Macmillan. Helgerson, R. (1992), Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hooks, A. (2016), Selling Shakespeare, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hutson, L. (2007), The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hutson, L. (2015), Circumstantial Shakespeare, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ingram, W. (1968), A London Life in the Brazen Age: Francis Langley, 1548–1602, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ingram, W. (1999), ‘The Economics of Playing’, in D. Kastan (ed.), A Companion to Shakespeare, 313–27, Oxford: Blackwell. Ingram, W. (2009), ‘Introduction: Early Modern Theatre History: Where We Are Now, How We Got Here, Where We Go Next’, in R. Dutton (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, 1–15, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Jonson, B. (2012), The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, gen. ed. D. Bevington, M. Butler and I. Donaldson, 7 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Karim-Cooper, F. (2021), ‘The Materials of Race: Staging the Black and White Binary in the Early Modern Theatre’, in A. Thompson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race, 17–29, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kathman, D. (2009), ‘Inn-Yard Playhouses’, in R. Dutton (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, 154–68, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Keenan, S. (2002), Travelling Players in Shakespeare’s England, Houndmills: Palgrave. Kerrigan, J. (1996), Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Knutson, R. (1991), The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company, Little Rock: University of Arkansas Press. Knutson, R. (1999), ‘Shakespeare’s Repertory’, in D. Kastan (ed.), A Companion to Shakespeare, 346–61, Oxford: Blackwell. Knutson, R. (2001), Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lesser, Z. (2004), Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lindley, D., ed. (1995), Court Masques, Jacobean and Caroline Entertainments, 1605–1640, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lindley, D. (2006), Shakespeare and Music, London: Arden Shakespeare. Lopez, J. (2003), Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Love, G. (2003), ‘“As from the Waste of Sophonisba”; or, What’s Sexy about Stage Directions’, Renaissance Drama, 32: 3–31. Maguire, L. E. (1996), Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The ‘Bad’ Quartos and Their Contexts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marlowe, C. (1981), Tamburlaine the Great, ed. J. S. Cunningham, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Marston, J. (1997), ‘The Malcontent’ and Other Plays, ed. K. Sturgess, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Masten, J. (1997), Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McMillin, S. and S. MacLean (1998), The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McMillin, S. (1999), ‘Professional Playwrighting’, in D. Kastan (ed.), A Companion to Shakespeare, 225–38, Oxford: Blackwell. Melnikoff, K. (2004), ‘Jones’s Pen and Marlowe’s Socks: Richard Jones, Print Culture, and the Beginnings of English Dramatic Literature’, Studies in Philology, 102 (2): 184–209. Middleton, T. (2007), The Collected Works, gen. ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mulready, C. (2013), Romance on the Early Modern Stage: English Expansion before and after Shakespeare, Houndmills: Palgrave.

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Munro, L. (1995), The Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Norland, H. (1995), Drama in Early Tudor Britain, 1485–1558, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Palfrey, S. and T. Stern (2007), Shakespeare in Parts, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Saintsbury, G. (1887), A History of Elizabethan Literature, London: Appleton. Savage, K. (2008), ‘Stage Directions: Valuable Clues in the Exploration of Elizabethan Performance Practice’, Studies in Theatre and Performance, 28 (2): 161–82. Shakespeare, W. (1623), Mr. VVilliam Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, London. Shakespeare, W. (1995), Antony and Cleopatra, ed. J. Wilders, Arden Shakespeare Third Series, London: Arden Shakespeare. Shakespeare, W. (2005), King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes, Arden Shakespeare Third Series, London: Arden Shakespeare. Shakespeare, W. (2006), Hamlet, ed. A. Thompson and N. Taylor, Arden Shakespeare Third Series, London: Arden Shakespeare. Shakespeare, W. (2010), The Winter’s Tale, ed. J. Pitcher, Arden Shakespeare Third Series, London: Arden Shakespeare. Shakespeare, W. (2017), A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. S. Chaudhuri, Arden Shakespeare Third Series, London: Arden Shakespeare. Sidney, P. (1996), A Defence of Poetry, ed. J. A. Van Dorsten, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stern, T. (2009a), ‘Actors’ Parts’, in R. Dutton (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, 496–512, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stern, T. (2009b), Documents of Performance in Early Modern England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stern, T., ed. (2020), Rethinking Theatrical Documents, London: Arden Shakespeare. Streitberger, W. R. (1986), Jacobean and Caroline Revels Accounts, 1603–1642, Malone Society Collections, vol. 13, Oxford: Malone Society. Streitberger, W. R. (1994), Court Revels, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. A Warning for Fair Women (1599), London. Weimann, R. (1978), Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Westfall, S. (2002), ‘“The Useless Dearness of the Diamond”: Theories of Patronage Theatre’, in P. W. White and S. Westfall (eds), Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England, 13–42, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wickham, G. (1958–2002), Early English Stages, 1300–1660, London: Routledge Kegan Paul. Wickham, G., H. Berry and W. Ingram, eds (2000), English Professional Theatre, 1530–1660, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wiggins, M. and C. Richardson (2012–), British Drama: 1533–1642: A Catalogue, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Winston, J. (2016), Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558–1581, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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PART ONE

Research methods and problems

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CHAPTER 3.1

Did early modern drama actually happen? KURT SCHREYER

Shakespeare’s relationships with his contemporaries and predecessors shape the very way in which we conceive of the early modern period. This chapter will first demonstrate how, in the past century, scholars continually reinvented the history of early English drama and became increasingly sceptical about periodization. It then examines sixteenth- and seventeenth-century accounts of historical continuity and change with particular attention to the modalities of exemplarity, palimpsests and anachronism and how they challenge traditional linear narratives. Turning to the present state of the academy, we’ll see, furthermore, that just as our disciplinary training and institutional politics have shaped our historiography, so too, in turn, do our conceptions of early modernity continue to inform our assumptions about and approaches to this body of drama. Our relatively recent appreciation of provincial touring as a routine practice, for example, not only casts doubt upon the historical significance of the London playhouses (a watershed moment in many twentieth-century narratives) but also reveals that early modern England was not a homogenous historical space. The chapter will conclude, therefore, by proposing that the study of artisan labour and urban identity may offer new directions for future scholarship that will give us a more sophisticated historical understanding of early modern drama. Did early modern drama actually happen? For most of the twentieth century, the answer seemed clear: the history not merely of early modern but of all early English drama began and ended with Shakespeare. In the Preface to his 1903 The Mediaeval Stage, E. K. Chambers stated that the ‘little book’ about Shakespeare that he had intended to write required him ‘to put forth first some short account of the origins of play-acting in England and of its development during the Middle Ages’. In fact, this enormous, multivolume work came, he said, even at the possible expense of Shakespeare, about whom he ‘now may or may not ever get’ the opportunity to write (1903: 1.v). And yet, paradoxically, the flourishing ‘palmy days’ of Shakespeare and his contemporaries that Chambers did not get around to writing about for another twenty years can only be understood in relation to the history of English medieval drama (1923: 1.307).

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From the outset, then, twentieth-century critical study of early English drama was a back-formation off Shakespeare studies. Chambers is now mostly remembered for his secularization thesis, a teleological account of how the professional London stage came about through the gradual, linear progression of popular dramatic forms from the church nave to the marketplace and eventually the Globe itself. In this regard Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy was an important influence. For Burckhardt the period  – which he often refers to as the early modern  – of nascent secularization marked by ruthlessly self-willed individuals begins in fourteenth-century Italy rather than Hegel’s sixteenth-century Germany and marks an epochal break from the past. But in Chambers’s narrative, Burckhardt’s cultural history coincides with a Hegelian notion of ‘revolution’ as ‘chronic recurrence rather than irreversible change’ (de Grazia 1997: 15). For Hegel there are never clean breaks from the past; History, in its dialectical progress, retains something of the previous era. Like a seed that grows into a plant or a phoenix rising from the flames (two of his favourite analogies), Spirit negates itself yet gains ‘a comprehension of the universal element which it involves, and thereby gives new form to its inherent principal’ (Hegel 1991: 78). Chambers’s English Renaissance is therefore both a recursive rebirth of a heretofore submerged spirit of ancient pagan drama and a progressive advance of secularity out of the dark days of repressive ecclesiastical authority. The great paradox of The Mediaeval Stage is that it effectively separated the professional London playhouses from their antecedents. Shakespeare’s fecundity meant the dead end of prior forms of theatrical activity. As Chambers’s work was later challenged, therefore, both Shakespeare’s pre-eminence and the period divide that marked early modernity’s break with ‘primitive’ medievalism became urgent questions. For ‘that secular divide’, as Margreta de Grazia says, ‘works less as a historical marker than a massive value judgment’ such that ‘everything after that divide has relevance to the present; everything before it is irrelevant’ (2007: 453). But in the latter half of the twentieth century, scholars endeavoured to find literary value in a drama which Chambers had reduced to mere ‘pre-existing conditions’ (1903: 2.225). We shall see how their work has shaped our present understanding of early modern drama, but what must be noted at the outset is the utter contingency of all periodizing schemes as well as the powerful attraction of the inaugural claim of the ‘early modern’, for it is a term, de Grazia reminds us, ‘which carries a builtin semantic guarantee of its link to the present’ with the potentially misleading result that ‘whatever the subject in question (subjectivity, representation, racism, nationalism, capitalism, empire, new science) it is readily and commonly supposed that the modern here and now has a special rapport with the early modern there and then’ (2007: 458). Twentieth-century studies of early English drama developed several strategies which, with hindsight, we can now see as attempts to address the legacy of Chambers and the problem of periodization. Some sought for archetypes and universals which spanned the historical divide. Others took a synchronic approach that afforded late medieval drama a privileged historical moment of autonomy. Several highly influential projects took the opposite approach, however, and sought to demonstrate

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the indispensable relation of pre-modern drama and culture to the early modern stage by emphasizing its re-emergence or afterlife in Shakespeare. Most recently, as we’ll see, the early modern period has itself become the inert middle to be overlooked. Harold Gardiner’s Mysteries’ End: An Investigation of the Last Days of the Medieval Religious Stage opened a critical space for later scholars by representing miracle and mystery drama as forms of popular religious expression rather than opposition to religious authority as Chambers supposed (Gardiner 1946).1 A.  P.  Rossiter’s subsequent English Drama from Early Times to the Elizabethans argues that plays produce habits of thought in their audiences, ‘cultural continuities’ and ‘hereditary linkages’ that span historical boundaries (1950: 9). Encouraged, perhaps, by post-war nationalism, he nevertheless views the annus mirabilis year 1588 when the English fleet overcame the Spanish Armada as the line of demarcation between the Renaissance and Middle Ages. Rossiter’s Shakespeare is a full-blooded Englishman largely free from the influence of continental humanism and whose plays rejuvenate the audience’s consciousness of native English dramatic precedents even as they lay hold of the future: ‘Within five years of the Armada, the University wits had come, and almost gone, and the future lay predominantly in the mind of the man from Stratford’ (Rossiter 1950: 161–2). O. B. Hardison’s Christian Rite and Christian Drama marked a watershed moment in the field as it pointedly revisited ‘the history of early medieval drama [which] has retained the basic form established in 1903 by E. K. Chambers’ The Mediaeval Stage’ (1965: 1–2). Periodization itself was called into question. Ignoring the Reformation and other historical markers in Chambers’s account, Hardison turned his attention to the essential forms and patterns of drama that, he argued, transcend enormous spans in time and culture. As opposed to a dark age in which dramatic performance died out until revitalized by humanism, Hardison proposes that the medieval period practically teemed with drama – in the form of religious ritual. In other words, religion did not suppress the popular ludic spirit as Chambers supposed but was itself ludic in many of its rituals. So powerful were the archetypal patterns of orthodox liturgy and, eventually, of mystery and morality plays, that they survived laicization and transmission onto the London stage. Hardison and Rossiter transcend periodization by exploring archetypal themes or the audience’s mindset. Another solution is to set aside consideration of historical legacies, borrowings and influences altogether and study a dramatic genre synchronically. Whereas Hardison asserts that liturgy was the drama of the Middle Ages, V. A. Kolve’s The Play Called Corpus Christi distinguishes drama from liturgy and minimizes the influence of Latin liturgical plays. ‘The Corpus Christi drama’ not only ‘image more vividly and more unforgettably than any other art form of their time’ but also, he concludes, ‘are unlike anything else in the history of English drama’ (Kolve 1966: 5, 272). Rosemary Woolf’s English Mystery Plays uncovers a diachronic century within a larger synchronic moment. Early twelfthcentury composers of Latin liturgical plays wrote religious propaganda, but their successors ‘recognized the nature of the dramatic office and amplified upon tradition with conscious literary awareness’ (R. Woolf 1972: 4). For Woolf, therefore, broad theses about progress and change are misleading; it is nevertheless permissible, and

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indeed fitting, to speak of growth and development within relatively finite historical moments, particularly those exhibiting conscious literary awareness. In the wake of Hardison’s groundbreaking study, some scholars elevated the status of pre-modern drama by emphasizing its re-emergence in Shakespeare. They argued that Shakespeare would not be Shakespeare without his profound contact with medieval culture. Where Chambers had left a dead end, David Bevington’s From Mankind to Marlowe, following Bernard Spivack, inserts a link: a period or phase of ‘hybrid’ morality plays that serve as a crucial bridge in the transformation of characters from personified abstractions of religious plays to real-life persons of secular commercial drama (Bevington 1962; Spivack 1958).2 Robert Weimann’s Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition challenges traditional literary approaches to early English performance. The Renaissance humanist preference for ‘the author’s pen’ was made, he argues, at the expense of the popular medieval ‘performant function’ – the significance of ‘the actor’s voice’, histrionic display and theatricality (Weimann 1978 and 2000 passim). Shakespeare was much more sympathetic to the common players and the medieval traditions of provincial folk performance than any of his contemporaries; however, the generative tension between the two dramatic forces may be glimpsed throughout his works, and nowhere more clearly than in Hamlet’s speech to the players (Weimann 1978: xv). As a result, Shakespeare’s stage represents a profound moment where old and new, high and low, performance and text achieve a singularly striking and highly productive balance. But it could not last. In other words, the very humanist values that Chambers held responsible for the revival of the spirit of antiquity are, according to Weimann, responsible for the eradication of the popular tradition inherited from the Middle Ages. Glynne Wickham also says that ‘the public theatres of Elizabethan London were the crowning glory of mediaeval experiment’ and that ‘for the theatre, the Middle Ages end when vitality departs from the open stage’ (2002: 1.xxvii). In his multivolume Early English Stages, 1300 to 1660, the further one goes from the vibrancy of medieval popular expression, the more culture (drama especially) is subject to decadence and disillusionment. The 1576 construction of the Theatre playhouse represents ‘a climacteric within the subject: a point towards which everything seems inexorably to move and after which those same things are never quite the same again’ (2002: 1.xxix). By 1660, however, cultural contact with the Middle Ages is lost. And so modernity – not ‘Shakespeare and his contemporaries [who] reaped the harvest of the seed, tilth and growth of preceding centuries’ – marks the dead end of both medieval and early modern drama in Wickham’s account (2002: 1.xxi). Also to be included among the scholars who believe that medieval culture bequeathed its riches to early modern drama is Stephen Greenblatt, whose groundbreaking insight is his recognition that the profound social energies invested, for centuries, in orthodox ritual did not suddenly dissipate with the onset of the Reformation but found other outlets of expression  – above all, the public playhouses of Elizabethan London (1988: 7). Thus ‘apparently secular works’ like Hamlet ‘are charged with the language of eucharistic anxiety’ (Greenblatt 1988: 113; 2001b: 151). Institutions like exorcism that ‘before had a literal’ now have a ‘literary use’ (Greenblatt 1988: 126). The vast machinery of purgatory is no

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longer institutionally promulgated in England; nevertheless its ‘poetry’ survives in an early modern world of drama crammed with ghosts, devils and spirits (Greenblatt 2001a: 10–46). And yet for all of his interest in medieval culture broadly speaking, Greenblatt seems ambivalent about the significance of fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury drama for Shakespeare, whose mockery of the ‘rude mechanicals’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream ‘proclaimed the young playwright’s definitive passage from naiveté and homespun amateurism to sophisticated taste and professional skill’ (Greenblatt 2004: 35, 52). Still, it is clear that for Greenblatt no absolute historical barrier exists. There are no dead ends because the dead do not stay dead; the Shakespearean moment he describes is ceaselessly visited by the ghosts of the medieval past. Curtis Perry and John Watkins, co-editors of Shakespeare and the Middle Ages, credit Greenblatt’s cross-period engagement yet question whether the nostalgia some early modernists feel for the ‘paradise lost’ of the ‘sacred, holistic medieval world’ has led us to substitute Chambers’s optimistic Burckhardtian account of triumphant Renaissance subjects with one which casts Shakespeare and his contemporaries ‘in the role of postlapsarian moderns, brilliant, haunted, and skeptical, gathering up the pieces of a broken world’ (Perry and Watkins 2009: 7). Their essay contributors offer accounts of Shakespeare’s ‘debt to the old drama’ where he found ‘not only a model for individual characters but also a structural inspiration for some of his greatest scenes’ (Perry and Watkins 2009: 4). Helen Cooper’s Shakespeare and the Medieval World sees him as a medieval poet and playwright who enjoyed first-hand access to the ‘deep structures’ of that pervasive culture which ‘underlay so much of what we think of as distinctively Elizabethan or Jacobean’ (Cooper 2010: 2, 8). Even Shakespeare’s transformation of, or complete departure from, traditional English dramaturgy bespeaks his indebtedness (Cooper 2010: 169). For Chambers, Shakespeare emancipated the English stage from the Middle Ages; for Cooper, the medieval world was inescapably intertwined with the drama we have mistakenly termed ‘early modern’. Other medievalists, including Lawrence Clopper and the contributors to the collections of essays, Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England (2007), edited by Gordon McMullan and David Matthews, and Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History (2010), edited by Brian Cummings and James Simpson, do what, for Chambers, was unthinkable: offer accounts of medieval culture’s enduring influence in which Shakespeare, if considered at all, is merely one phenomenon among many in a broader history. It is our present modernity, and not early modernity, that serves as the critical point of reference. Keeping the term ‘medieval’ always within quotation marks to remind his readers of the ‘scam’ of teleological histories, Lawrence Clopper’s Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period argues, first, that pre-Reformation English drama was vibrant, diverse and largely secular  – that is, under the authority of lay trade guilds and civic governments rather than the church. Second, claims about a widespread, systematic anti-theatrical movement to destroy traditional drama are largely overstated. Commercially interested yet politically and socially critical, sixteenth-century ‘medieval’ drama has all the marks of modernity and should be recognized as such.

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According to editors Gordon McMullan and David Matthews, Reading the Medieval explores ‘the full range of ways in which the Middle Ages were constructed and reconfigured in the early modern period’ as well as ‘the ways in which the early modern was constructed through or in negotiation with the medieval’ (2007:  6). Brian Cummings and James Simpson’s Cultural Reformations is ‘an exercise in redrawing historical categories, or in the period unbound’ (2010: 2). They share with McMullan and Matthews a keen sensitivity to the asymmetry of the terms ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’, and both collections are interested in cross-period engagements well beyond early drama studies. Reading the Medieval is comprised of five sections spanning topics from print technology and religion to cartography and the construction of the nation. Cultural Reformations is likewise ambitious in the subject matter that its nearly seven hundred pages encompass. No longer preeminent, Shakespeare is one topic in a wide field of considerations. He has been displaced by modernity: ‘it is modernity that we are always half arguing about anyway,’ the editors of Cultural Reformations state, adding that their collection ‘is an ongoing conversation, or debate, between different kinds of modernity in the past, and others still in the future’ (Cummings and Simpson 2010: 8, 9). Reading the Medieval also underscores the relation to our present: ‘we wish to argue that the early modern must be defined not in distinction from the medieval but through it … and that the reading of the medieval in early modern England has in several ways bequeathed to us our understanding of both the medieval and the early modern’ (McMullan and Matthews 2007: 7). The twentieth century may have begun in certainty about whether early modern drama actually happened, but the early twenty-first century has its doubts. Whether in locating archetypes that transcended questions of periodization, genealogy and origin, ignoring such questions altogether, or demonstrating links to the Shakespearean stage, early English drama scholars have felt compelled to overcome Chambers’s denigration of the medieval stage before further critical recuperation could take place. A new trend may be emerging among medievalists whereby the drama of the Elizabethan, Jacobean and Restoration periods is omitted from theatre histories altogether. The challenge for medievalists, therefore, may very well be to maintain this critical affiliation with modernity (one way or another) and not to early modern drama at all, though as Cummings and Simpson note, modernity too can enthral us with the ‘forlorn hope that [our] own object of study … becomes more exciting’ when it is placed in contact with the now (2010: 9). On the other hand, it is undoubtedly worthwhile to explore how, in Cooper’s words, ‘the Middle Ages bequeathed to us things that we think of as distinctive elements of the modern world’ (2010: 5). Early modernists interested in the sixteenth-century antecedents to the London playhouses face a different set of challenges. As we follow the (re-)turn to history, the old problem of synchrony and diachrony obtains: how to explore continuity yet account for change. Unlike medievalists, however, we don’t have the luxury of ignoring Shakespeare and the professional London stage. In fact, we are still learning to read ‘across the divide’ in such a way as to offer balanced accounts that are sensitive to the variety and sophistication of pre-Reformation theatrical activity.

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But if our historiographies have been unable to answer whether early modern drama actually happened, surely sixteenth- and seventeenth-century accounts document the emergence of innovative dramatic forms? Thomas Heywood’s An Apology for Actors offers a history that explicitly omits a benighted age of Catholic drama in order to bestow ancient pagan virtues on modern English players (1612: sig. E4r). Opponents of the public playhouses like the preacher William Crashaw saw a continuous history of corruption and heathen degeneracy dating from antiquity through centuries of papist drama (1607: sig. Z1r). Stephen Gosson’s 1579 Schoole of Abuse urges readers to ‘Compare London to Rome, and England to Italy, you shall finde the Theatres of the one, the abuses of the other, to be rife among us’ (1579: sig. B8r-C1r). A Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theaters (1580), a pamphlet most often attributed to Anthony Munday, warns that just as the Roman empire was overcome with ‘the foraine enimies, the Gothes and Vandales … So we, assuredlie, vnles we listen vnto the dehortations of these good men, and shun plaies, with such like pompes of Satan … shal fal into some one intolerable plague of God or other, into the handes if not of foraine enimies’ (1580: sig. A3r-v). Phillip Stubbes’s 1583 Anatomie of Abuses, as Peter Lake notes, ‘took up where Gosson had left off’ (Lake and Questier 2002: 435). Adding secular authorities, including Scipio and Constantine, to the familiar list of early church fathers who maintain that all forms of theatre have diabolical origins, Stubbes’s history aims to disarm any opponent who holds that plays ‘be as good as sermons, and that many a good Example may be learned out of them’ (Stubbes 1583: sig. L7v). The views of Reformed anti-theatricalists and iconoclasts are to some extent a carryover from medieval clerical apprehension, not necessarily towards theatre per se, but with the various festivities that fill the church calendar. According to Phebe Jensen, ‘the Protestant Reformation explicitly identified the joining of the sacred and profane with Catholic practice’ (Jensen 2008: 28). Clopper’s admonishment against reading ‘Puritan attacks on the [London] stage as the culmination of an anticipatory antitheatricalism from earlier in the [sixteenth] century’ is nevertheless equally important to bear in mind (Clopper 2001: 24). As Paul Whitfield White explains, ‘the Reformation, during its first fifty years in England, did not impose radical changes on English attitudes towards drama’, yet ‘by 1580 or so, the old consensus of opinion among Protestant leaders and writers in supporting or at least tolerating the theatre was over’ (White 1993: 163–4). By 1633 these more extreme views had attained sufficient acceptance for William Prynne’s Histrio-Mastix to further link pre-Reformation liturgy and drama to the London playhouses. Having gathered ‘ancient and moderne testimonies’, Prynne declares that ‘most of our present English Actors’ are ‘professed Papists’ and ‘the Playes which issue from them must needs resemble these their Actors’ (Prynne 1633: fol. 142; sig. T3v). Elsewhere he turns the argument around to claim that ‘Popish Priests and Jesuites in forraigne parts … have likewise trans-formed their Masse it-selfe, together with the whole story of Christs birth, his life, his Passion, and all other parts of their Ecclesiasticall service into Stage-playes’ (Prynne 1633: fol. 112; sig. P4v).3 Beyond dramatic and polemic discourses, there were other historiographies active in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that undermine the concept of

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periodization. The historiographical modalities of exemplarity, palimpsests and anachronism challenge traditional diachronic narratives by preserving rhetorical and cultural contact with the past. Under the humanist paradigm of imitation, early modern readers were encouraged to look to the past for models to guide their present behaviour. While it is true that exemplarity relies on historical difference and may even esteem more ancient texts precisely because of their distance from the present, it is also true that ancient texts – Greek and Latin, certainly, but also the works of medieval poets like Chaucer and Gower – became more familiar and desirable than ever before. ‘Past and present are linked through a relationship of similitude’, writes Timothy Hampton, explaining, ‘the words, deeds, and even the bodies of the illustrious ancients were seen as signs of excellence and patterns of behavior. Without them, and without the theory of history as repetition, the very notion of a cultural rebirth or re-naissance is unthinkable’ (1990: 9). Exemplarity encourages contact and exchange, but not necessarily uncritical conformity. Larry Scanlon proposes that we think of late medieval and early modern literary authority as triangulated. ‘For it involves’, he argues, ‘not just deference to the past but a claim of identification with it and a representation of that identity made by one part of the present to another. In this way the constraint of authority can also be empowering’ (Scanlon 1994: 38). ‘The past was valued’, Alex Davis explains, ‘for its ability to meet contemporary circumstances, not only in the sense of offering ethical inspiration and concrete advice, but also as a resource for contingent argumentation, for or against a given position’ (2011: 23). A palimpsest is a multilayered record, a material surface bearing the traces of several past inscriptions. But for scholars like Jonathan Gil Harris and Julian Yates, who draw inspiration from the work of sociologist Bruno Latour and philosopher Michel Serres, it is also an agent whose partly veiled material histories act upon the viewer (Latour 1993, 2005; Serres 1995; Serres and Latour 1995). As Harris explains, the palimpsest ‘includes a writing surface, whether parchment or vellum, that enables, even as it is transformed by, the writing on it. And this network of agency, of course, presumes yet more actors  – specifically, writers and readers from different times who work upon the palimpsest surface, transforming it but also exposing themselves in the process to the possibility of transformation’ (Harris 2009: 17). According to Yates, traditional materialist approaches to literature tend to conserve the terms ‘subject’ and ‘object’ even as they challenge this Cartesian hierarchy. ‘Network-based models’, by contrast, ‘understand the range of beings that populate its networks’ so that ‘subject’ and ‘object’ are merely ‘grammatical terms that describe momentary positions in the life cycle of a person or thing’ (Yates 2006: 92–3; 2003). Early modern English palimpsests challenge artificial period boundaries and straightforward diachronic models of history. William Sherman argues that contrary to the popular conception of the Reformation as an epochal break in English culture, medieval texts and textual practices acted as palimpsests that shaped early modern printing practices and devotional habits. Whatever the tenets of sola scriptura, for example, Protestant prayer books were not iconoclastically bare but recreate the rich graphic tradition of their orthodox predecessors (Sherman 2008: 108). Alison

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Shell has found palimpsests embedded in the English countryside. Like Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire, monastic ruins and other pre-modern sites inscribed with traces of England’s Roman Catholic past ‘spoke’ to later generations including, eventually, Gothic novelists, of their threatening histories of sacrilege and violence (Nora 1989; Shell 2007; D. Woolf 2003). The professional London playhouses were also, I maintain, palimpsests, but in their case the tension between past and present was not antagonistic but creative. These dedicated performance structures re-presented the three-tiered mise-en-scène of the salvation story – Heaven, Earth and Hell – from biblical drama at great expense of costumes, architecture and stage technology. These investments encouraged playwrights to write plays which featured them and thus showcased the palimpsestic layers of the playhouses. From Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus to Nathanael Richard’s Messallina, plays made regular if not frequent use of the trapdoor Hell Mouth. When Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge collaborated on A Looking-Glass for London (c. 1592), their retelling of the biblical story of Jonah included the figure of the prophet Hosea enthroned on high in a manner reminiscent of Deus in Tudor cycles. In one of the scenes that John Fletcher probably contributed to Henry VIII, angels appear in white robes and gilt masks to the dowager queen Katherine. As late as 1616, Ben Jonson’s The Devil Is an Ass can parody the Harrowing of Hell scenes from Tudor biblical drama and still expect audiences to get the joke (Schreyer 2014: 167–71). This same play, Lucy Munro argues, ‘cannot hide the debt that the city comedy itself owes to the older form of drama’ (Munro 2013: 147). It would seem that 1576 is less of a divide than previously supposed, and well into the seventeenth century London’s palimpsest-playhouses continued to provide old but richly textured dramatic surfaces on which playwrights could inscribe a wide variety of new commercial plays. ‘Anachronism’ is a term that privileges the early modern period over the Middle Ages. According to Erwin Panofsky, ‘the men of the Renaissance were convinced that the period in which they lived was a “new age” as sharply different from the medieval past as the medieval past had been from classical antiquity and marked by a concerted effort to revive the culture of the latter’ (1972: 36). As Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood explain, ‘medieval art, for Panofsky, had been incapable of joining historical subject matter with its proper historical form: Eve was portrayed in the pose of a Venus pudica, for example, and the Trojan priest Laocoön tonsured like a monk’ (2005: 409).4 They re-evaluate the temporalities of a wide range of Renaissance art, arguing that Panofsky’s denigration of an artwork as an anachronism ‘is to say that the work is best grasped not as art, but rather as a witness to its times, or as an inalienable trace of history; it tries to tell us what the artwork really is. To describe the work of art as “anachronic”, by contrast, is to say what the artwork does, qua art’ (Nagel and Wood 2010: 14). While it’s true that some artefacts may conform to the traditional ‘performative’ or authorial model of artistic production whereby the style of a work of art serves as both an index of the artist’s identity and the timestamp of its making, this was only one of the modalities available to early modern artists. Some artworks were instantiations whose ‘substitutional’ mode opened them up to polytemporal interpretation. Such anachronic (as opposed to

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anachronistic) images and artefacts which take the place of a lost original have a ‘direct and time-collapsing power’ that defies straightforward assumptions about its historical place in linear time. ‘Artifacts and monuments configured time differently,’ Nagel and Wood argue. ‘They stitched through time, pulling together different points in the temporal fabric until they met. By means of artifacts, the past participated in the present’ (2005: 408). The notion that the Middle Ages were anachronistic and the early modern period properly historicist is no longer tenable: artists in both epochs explored equally sophisticated historiographies. Whether through exemplarity, palimpsests or anachronism, the past is present: it refuses to stay dead. Obsolescence is not tantamount to supersession. The implications of these modalities for literary historians are staggering, undermining not simply Burckhardtian historicism with its privileging of the autonomous Renaissance subject, but the very notion of linear time. Supposedly dead and superseded artefacts  – medieval as well as ancient  – declare themselves to early modern readers and artists. Period boundaries are as meaningless as the notion of sequential chronology, and the early modern period simply did not and does not exist except as a scholarly construct. While objects may serve as ‘vessels and remembrances of the past’, however, Philip Schwyzer reminds us that they likewise have the capacity to isolate the time segment which has lapsed. He offers a persuasive reading of the untimely objects in Shakespeare’s Richard III which ‘gauge the proximity and the distance between Shakespeare’s era and Richard’s own’ (Schwyzer 2012: 300, 302). There are, in other words, good reasons to think that people in early modern England did, in fact, distinguish themselves from the previous age. But under what circumstances did these discourses emerge? Revisiting F. J. Levy’s influential Tudor Historical Thought as well as the important later work of historian Daniel Woolf, Jesse Lander contends that post-Reformation English polemic fostered not merely a historical sensibility but a particular historiographical consciousness that was keenly attuned to the plurality of contested, and often contradictory, histories that, in effect, ‘made revisionist history mainstream’ (Lander 2010: 64; Levy 2004; D. Woolf 2003). Richard Emmerson has also offered a sophisticated account of synchrony and diachrony in the study of ‘the great complexity of theatrical experience in the century that spans the traditional medieval/Renaissance divide’ (Emmerson 2005: 39). Shakespeare’s plays themselves interrogate conflicting historiographies. While some are drawn directly from chronical history, others, like the late plays for example, feature archaisms that invite us to consider the profound mystery of what Davis has called ‘the omnipresence of the past’, whether in the Romances of Pericles, Cymbeline and The Two Noble Kinsmen, or in the bygone world of Tudor politics in Henry VIII (All Is True) (Davis 2010; Schreyer 2017). In short, while humanist philology has been traditionally credited with the emergence of historical consciousness – and, with it, modernity itself – we need to become more attuned to the variety and complexity (and, yes, the contradiction) in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century historical thought (De Grazia 2010: 21; Lander 2010: 59). Periodization has also fostered geographical bias against provincial dramatic activity. ‘We often label everything we like in the Middle Ages as proto-Renaissance,

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and everything we don’t like in the Renaissance as medieval,’ Cooper observes. ‘Provincial Stratford is allowed to be medieval; the economic powerhouse of London is not’ (2010: 2). The practice of touring, once considered a rare exigency, raises doubts about these assumptions. As Peter Greenfield demonstrates, the Queen’s Men, the Admiral’s Men and the Earl of Leicester’s Men all regularly toured the provinces. Furthermore, even such events as the construction of purpose-built theaters in London (the Red Lion in 1567, the Theatre in 1576), or the great plague of the early 1590s, or James I’s institution of a royal monopoly on patronage in 1603–1604 had little effect on the frequency of touring, which did not begin to decline noticeably until the second decade of the seventeenth century. (Greenfield 1997: 253) As a routine practice touring diminishes the historical significance of 1576 as a period marker and urges us to further explore ties between provincial actors and their counterparts in the City. Thanks to the enormous archival undertakings of the Records of Early English Drama (REED) project which began a painstaking, county-by-county collection and documentation of dramatic records in 1979, much important work has been done which provides us with a more sophisticated understanding of sixteenth-century drama in the provinces and, in recent volumes, of ecclesiastical and civic London as well as the Rose playhouse. Taking aim at the ‘outdated yet tenacious notion’ that ‘there is a recognizable genre called a “Corpus Christi play”’, Alexandra F. Johnston’s essay, ‘The Feast of Corpus Christi in the West Country’, is an excellent primer for those who wish to have a better grasp on revisionist accounts of early English provincial drama (2003: 15). More recently there have been several important book-length studies as well. These include Robert Barrett’s Against All England, which examines the curious but important fact that periodization was not distributed equally ‘across English space’. In other words, ‘the historical changes we identify as period markers do not take place inside a single homogenous space, but within a heterogeneous England divided into an assemblage of “parcellized sovereignties”’ (Barrett 2009: 13). With its particular regional interest in the literary culture of Cheshire, Barrett’s work literally grounds sixteenth-century performances of the Chester Whitsun cycle in the topographical setting in which ‘each performance station … is an urban site with unique cultural resonances and uses’. Consequently, ‘each play takes on different meanings as it moves from station to station’ which, broadly speaking, reflect the long and vexed relationship between the city’s monastic community and its secular authorities (2009: 19). Barrett’s work thus invites scholars of early modern drama to move out of the London playhouses and consider how the plays which the professional acting companies performed there took on new meaning when performed on tour. Another indispensable resource for future work in the field is Nicole R. Rice and Margaret Aziza Pappano’s The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England. Like Barrett, Rice and Pappano conduct a thorough diachronic study of urban identity as it is reflected and produced by the York and Chester

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cycle plays. But rather than opposing artisans and merchants in the manner of most twentieth-century accounts, they read playtexts alongside a wealth of contemporary documents such as guild ordinances and court records and in doing so uncover a wide and complicated field of subjectivities including master craftsmen, city and guild officials, female workers, as well as enfranchised and unenfranchised artisans working as waged labourers or servants. Their study of the final performances of the York cycle in 1569 and of Chester’s in 1575 should draw the particular interest of early modern drama scholars. But the project’s broader thesis that the plays ‘represented collaborative enterprises in which artisans, though neither fully authors nor scribes, created and revised their own self-representations’ encourages us to expand our understanding of authorship in the professional acting companies to encompass artisanry and material making as well as dramatic craft and literary invention (Rice and Pappano 2015: 3). Taken together, the work of Barrett, Johnston, Pappano and Rice raises intriguing questions about the reception of touring London plays in other urban environments and about the relationship between the artisan-actors from the City and their provincial counterparts. At the close of the seventeenth century, in 1693, Thomas Rymer compared the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries to those of the medieval mystery play tradition which were staged by ‘Carpenters, Cobblers and illiterate fellows’ (Rymer 1693: 111 (sig. H8r)). If we can look past Rymer’s Restoration bias, the role that artisan labour and ideology played in early modern drama remains an intriguing topic of study. Yet it may very well be that the question of whether early English drama actually happened will be settled not by scholarship but by institutional exigencies. After all, the periodization of early English drama is as much a result of institutional ideology and disciplinary training as it is methodology. Michael O’Connell and Sarah Beckwith have separately noted that our historical understanding ‘has been most deformed by the academic training and bifurcations of the discipline of English in the “medieval” and “Renaissance” academy’ (Beckwith 2003: 262; O’Connell 1999: 150–1). Periodization is thus partly a result of the field-coverage model of departmental organization. As Gerald Graff explains, ‘for reasons having to do equally with ensuring humanistic breadth and facilitating specialized research, the literature department adopted the assumption that it would consider itself respectably staffed once it had amassed instructors competent to “cover” a more or less balanced spread of literary periods and genres, with a scattering of themes and special topics’ (1987: 6–7). Whether Shakespeare and early modern studies will maintain their hegemony during a period of shrinking academic resources is far from certain. The ability to afford the faculty and curriculum to cover an expanded canon may become a luxury reserved for English departments at flagship universities. If the coverage model is not abandoned altogether, declining enrolments may oblige many departments to ask a single scholar to cover all early British literature before the eighteenth century. Consequently, while she may have been trained in early modern drama, she may have the freedom to teach across the traditional period divisions which circumscribed her

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dissertation field and thus uncover problems and opportunities that have heretofore been hidden. Did early modern drama actually happen? Few questions concerning Shakespeare and his contemporaries may be explored so productively.

NOTES 1 But as Paul Whitfield White has shown, Gardiner was working from the misguided supposition that late medieval religious drama was intrinsically (and, during the Reformation, rather stubbornly) Catholic (1999: 126). 2 John D. Cox explains that Bernard Spivack’s Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (1958) offered an ‘important revision of the critical tradition’ yet ‘retained a strong sense of historical teleology’ (2000: 40). Woolf also speaks of hybridization but as a source of contamination that doomed the mystery plays – an end, not a link. 3 Yet as Michael O’Connell notes, ‘There is, to be sure, a degree of rhetorical play in this defining of theater as false religion; the writers do not appear to mean to make secular theater equivalent to the Mass’ and yet ‘Prynne goes furthest in this direction’ (2000: 33). 4 Panofsky did believe that Renaissance art could be anachronistic, but if so it was the result of the artist’s ‘cognitive distance’ and a deliberate choice to accurately emulate ‘obsolete medieval styles’ (Nagel and Wood 2005: 409).

REFERENCES Barrett, R. W. (2009), Against All England: Regional Identity and Cheshire Writing, 1195–1656, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Beckwith, S. (2003), ‘Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet and the Forms of Oblivion’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 33 (2): 261–80. Bevington, D. M. (1962), From Mankind to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in the Popular Drama of Tudor England, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chambers, E. K. (1903), The Mediaeval Stage, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chambers, E. K. (1923), The Elizabethan Stage, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clopper, L. M. (2001), Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cooper, H. (2010), Shakespeare and the Medieval World, London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare. Cox, J. D. (2000), The Devil and the Sacred in English Drama, 1350–1642, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crashaw, W. (1607), The Sermon Preached at the Crosse, London. Cummings, B. and J. Simpson, eds (2010), Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davis, A. (2010), ‘Living in the Past: Thebes, Periodization, and The Two Noble Kinsmen’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 40 (1): 173–95. Davis, A. (2011), Renaissance Historical Fiction: Sidney, Deloney, Nashe, Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.

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De Grazia, M. (1997), ‘World Pictures, Modern Periods, and the Early Stage’, in J. D. Cox and D. S. Kastan (eds), A New History of Early English Drama, 7–21, New York: Columbia University Press. De Grazia, M. (2007), ‘The Modern Divide: From Either Side’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 37 (3): 453–67. De Grazia, M. (2010), ‘Anachronism’, in Brian Cummings and James Simpson (eds), Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, 13–32, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Emmerson, R. K. (2005), ‘Dramatic History: On the Diachronic and Synchronic in the Study of Early English Drama’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 35 (1): 39–66. Gardiner, H. (1946), Mysteries’ End: An Investigation of the Last Days of the Medieval Religious Stage, New Haven: Yale University Press. Gosson, S. (1579), The Schoole of Abuse, London. Graff, G. (1987), Professing Literature: An Institutional History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Greenblatt, S. (1988), Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, Berkeley: University of California Press. Greenblatt, S. (2001a), Hamlet in Purgatory, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Greenblatt, S. (2001b), ‘The Mousetrap’, in Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt (eds), Practicing New Historicism, 136–62, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Greenblatt, S. (2004), Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, New York: W. W. Norton. Greenfield, P. H. (1997), ‘Touring’, in J. D. Cox and D. S. Kastan (eds), A New History of Early English Drama, 251–68, New York: Columbia University Press. Hampton, T. (1990), Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Hardison, O. B. (1965), Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages: Essays in the Origin and Early History of Modern Drama, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Harris, J. G. (2009), Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hegel, G. (1991), The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree, Amherst: Prometheus Books. Heywood, T. (1612), An Apology for Actors, London. Jensen, P. (2008), Religion and Revelry in Shakespeare’s Festive World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnston, A. F. (2003), ‘The Feast of Corpus Christi in the West Country’, Early Theatre: A Journal Associated with the Records of Early English Drama, 6 (1): 15–34. Kolve, V. A. (1966), The Play Called Corpus Christi, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lake, P. and M. Questier (2002), The Anti-Christ’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England, New Haven: Yale University Press. Lander, J. (2010), ‘Historiography’, in B. Cummings and J. Simpson (eds), Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, 56–74, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, B. (1993), We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Latour, B. (2005), Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levy, F. J. (2004), Tudor Historical Thought, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. McMullan, G. and D. Matthews, eds (2007), Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Munday, A. (1580), A Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theaters, London. Munro, L. (2013), Archaic Style in English Literature, 1590–1674, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nagel, A. and C. S. Wood (2005), ‘Interventions: Toward a New Model of Renaissance Anachronism’, Art Bulletin, 87 (3): 403–15. Nagel, A. and C. S. Wood (2010), Anachronic Renaissance, New York: Zone Books. Nora, P. (1989), ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, trans. M. Roudebush, Representations, 26: 7–24. O’Connell, M. (1999), ‘Vital Cultural Practices: Shakespeare and the Mysteries’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 29 (1): 149–68. O’Connell, M. (2000), The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early-Modern England, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Panofsky, E. (1972), Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, New York: Harper and Row. Perry, C. and J. Watkins, eds (2009), Shakespeare and the Middle Ages, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Prynne, W. (1633), Histrio-Mastix: The Players Scourge, or Actors Tragedie, London. Rice, N. R. and M. A. Pappano (2015), The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Rossiter, A. P. (1950), English Drama from Early Times to the Elizabethans: Its Background, Origins and Developments, New York: Barnes and Noble. Rymer, T. (1693), A Short View of Tragedy, London. Scanlon, L. (1994), Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schreyer, K. A. (2014), Shakespeare’s Medieval Craft: Remnants of the Mysteries on the London Stage, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Schreyer, K. A. (2017), ‘Moldy Pericles’, Exemplaria, 29 (3): 210–33. Schwyzer, P. (2012), ‘Trophies, Traces, Relics, and Props: The Untimely Objects of Richard III’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 63 (3): 297–327. Serres, M. (1995), Angels: A Modern Myth, ed. P. Hurd, trans. F. Cowper, Paris: Flammarion. Serres, M. and B. Latour (1995), Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. R. Lapidus, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Shell, A. (2007), Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sherman, W. H. (2008), Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Spivack, B. (1958), Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil, New York: Columbia University Press. Stubbes, P. (1583), The Anatomie of Abuses, London.

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Weimann, R. (1978), Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. R. Schwarz, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Weimann, R. (2000), Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre, ed. H. Higbee and W. West, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. White, P. W. (1993), Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage and Playing in Tudor England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. White, P. W. (1999), ‘Reforming Mysteries’ End: A New Look at Protestant Intervention in English Provincial Drama’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 29 (1): 121–47. White, P. W. (2004), ‘Holy Robin Hood! Carnival, Parish Guilds, and the Outlaw Tradition’, in L. E. Kermode, J. Scott-Warren, M. Van Elk and P. King (eds), Tudor Drama before Shakespeare, 1485–1590: New Directions for Research, Criticism, and Pedagogy, 67–89, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wickham, G. (2002), Early English Stages 1300–1660, 2nd edn, vol. 1, New York: Routledge. Woolf, D. (2003), The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture, 1500–1730, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Woolf, R. (1972), The English Mystery Plays, Berkeley: University of California Press. Yates, J. (2003), Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Yates, J. (2006), ‘Accidental Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Studies, 34: 90–122.

CHAPTER 3.2

Drama and society in Shakespeare’s England JEAN E. HOWARD

In 1937 L. C. Knights published his influential Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson: The Effects of Society and Economics on Elizabethan-Jacobean Drama. The last eighty years of Shakespeare criticism have expanded and challenged aspects of that groundbreaking and influential book’s attempts to chart the crucial relationships between plays and all those forces that fall within the elastic category of ‘society’. Most critics still agree with Knights that the early modern period saw a profound acceleration of the market economy, of migration within England and across national boundaries, and of the density and complexity of urban life. Focusing on Jonson as exemplar, Knights argued that Jonson’s plays, especially his London comedies, were deeply critical of the acquisitive and individualistic impulses increasingly driving human behaviour; he further argued that Jonson himself was deeply invested in a traditional status-based understanding of social life woven together by communal and religious values and by relations of deference and obligation rather than individualism and greed. As Don E. Wayne long ago noted (1982), however, in making his case Knights failed to register the many ways in which Jonson and other dramatists of the period were thoroughly implicated in the capitalist world against which they sometimes railed. Jonson received patronage from aristocrats and even from the King, but he also made money by selling plays to theatres. Moreover, Jonson cannot necessarily be assumed to represent the views or practices of all Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights. The elusive Shakespeare’s social attitudes are certainly more obliquely registered. Nonetheless, Knights was right that the growing market economy was an important force in early modern society in increasing social mobility, creating tension between old forms of landed wealth and new forms of commercial wealth and normalizing profit-seeking at the expense of other values; and he was right that one can see all these forms of social struggle play out in London comedies, in particular. Though hardly a Marxist, Knights thus shared with a later Marxist critic, Walter Cohen, a concern with how economic life and the transition to capitalism affected the production of plays. In Drama of a Nation (1985) Cohen focused more on Shakespeare than Jonson and argued that collectively the major genres in

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which Shakespeare and his contemporaries wrote expressed aspects of class struggle informing the transition to capitalism. Comedy portrayed the emerging values of the bourgeoisie, for example, and tragedy the crisis of the aristocracy. This focus on economic life as a driving force in early modern and contemporary society and in the reception and production of Shakespeare’s plays persists in recent books such as Shakespeare and the 99%: Literary Studies, the Profession, and the Production of Inequity (O’Dair and Francisco 2019). My chief concern in what follows, however, is not with what persists as a focus of critical interest but with what has emerged as new in the study of drama and society since L. C. Knights wrote his important book. For example, if early modern England has long been regarded as a society in which religion played a central role, the theatre has often been characterized as a secular and secularizing institution. Much lively scholarship in the last several decades has challenged that perception. Critics have argued that some plays evince nostalgia for Catholic thought and rituals. Stephen Greenblatt (2001), for example, has suggested that Hamlet’s ghost evokes the Catholic doctrine of purgatory; other critics have seen in the long-suffering women of Shakespearean romance recollections of the power of medieval Catholic saints or Protestant martyrs (Monta 2005); still others have agreed with John Northbrooke (1579) that the early modern theatre’s investment in spectacle resonates with Catholic ritual and not with Protestant iconoclasm. Moreover, besides Reformation conflicts between Catholic and Protestant world views, the theatre has been implicated in the circulation of anti-Semitic tropes (Heng 2019; Kaplan 2019; Shapiro 1996), in the negative portrayal of Islam in plays such as A Christian Turned Turk (Vitkus 2003) and in the racialization of conversion narratives (Britton 2014; Degenhardt 2010). It no longer seems true that the early modern theatre stood apart from the religious crosscurrents of the period, instead playing a role in shaping how those crosscurrents were understood. I will argue in what follows that much else has changed, especially since 1970, in what critics see as the picture of society promulgated by early modern theatre. But I want to begin with several caveats. First, theatre is an ideological institution. Its fictions do not give access to some ‘real’ towards which plays become progressively more faithful. Rather, a play is a tissue of dreams, projections, fantasies and stories told from a variety of interested perspectives  – all of which have consequential affects upon audiences and readers but do not give unmediated access to the real. This does not mean that the theatre is socially unimportant; I would argue that theatre was, in fact, one of the most influential institutions in early modern English society, especially as part of metropolitan culture. Rather, however, than yield an ‘accurate’ picture of that society, this theatre does something more interesting: it reveals ideological fault lines in the culture of which it is a part, unravels competing accounts of reality, creates affective responses in spectators and readers and forms theatre-going publics. It is active, and its picture of the early modern social world is multifaceted and dynamic, changing as successive critics ask different questions of the archive of extant plays and theatrical records.

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Second, the early modern theatre was not a unified institution. Hall theatres and amphitheatres, plays for boy companies and plays for adult troupes, plays written for court or for the universities, plays written in different genres or in different decades – all these distinctions matter to the visions of the social constructed through a given grouping of theatrical objects. Third, the criticism that addresses the relationship of drama and society is constantly evolving. It has developed in a variety of ways since 1970, and this chapter will tell a story that of necessity will be partial and incomplete. I have chosen to look at systems, beyond the class system, that have become important in thinking about how plays refract social life. The early modern sex/gender system is one such complex structure. This was little talked of in literary scholarship before the 1970s, but it has become an important way of understanding dramatic representations of early modern society. Much too slowly, race has become recognized as another social system structuring early modern society and theatrical representations. I will be arguing that as early modernists have increasingly thought about these interlocking systems, their criticism has of necessity become more intersectional. It has also become more global. It is not possible to analyse early modern race without considering how commercial venturing, early colonialism and the development of the Atlantic slave trade involved England in networks of exchange stretching far beyond its national borders. Consequently, questions of scale constantly haunt discussions of early modern drama and society. When are social structures and systems properly addressed in local, regional or global terms? Ecological enquiry has pushed such questions to a new level as scholars now investigate the impact of planetary changes on human society, querying the sovereign power of earth’s inhabitants to control the course of social life on earth. We are challenged to talk, for example, not only about how the early modern sex/gender system is imbricated with the theatre’s representations of social life but also about how the theatre’s construction of early modern society might be affected by, and shape understandings of, Northern Europe’s Little Ice Age. What follows, then, is a brief history of various ways to understand the relationship of theatre and early modern society since 1970. Examples drawn from different plays will suggest the critical stakes of these changes. This chapter, however, is also an argument for the value of an evolving understanding of the social that actively seeks to meet challenges posed by the changing environment in which academic work proceeds and lives are lived. Since 1970 there has been a gradual loosening of the imperatives of an arid historicism, whether we call it old or new. An arid historicism in my reckoning is any account of past society that admits no connection to the present. We should eschew the fantasy of invariant human nature and a past just like the present, and also the fantasy of accessing the difference and strangeness of the past without doing so from a vantage point in the present. Only a truly dialectical approach to early modern drama and society, one that treads the path between then and now with an ever-expanding sense of the forces that structure social life and cultural production, can avoid a deadening historicism that seals off past cultures from the needs and concerns of the present.

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THE SOCIAL RECONCEIVED, 1970–2000 For the last three decades of the twentieth century, early modern drama studies were on fire. Much of the excitement stemmed from the energetic expansion of ways to analyse social life and the theatre’s role within it as feminism, sexuality studies and race studies substantially remade existing critical frameworks. At the same time anthropologists like Clifford Geertz (1972) and social historians like Keith Wrightson (1982), J. A. Sharpe (1987) and Laura Gowing (1996, 2003) joined political, intellectual and economic historians as the interdisciplinary thought partners of literary critics. Women, commoners and the domain of the domestic and the everyday became as central to the analysis of social life as the more rarefied domains of court, Inns of Court, and universities. Simultaneously, scholars of race drew on colonial history and early modern global studies to show how racial regimes were being remade within local and across oceanic spaces (Loomba 1989, 1998; Hall 1995). This work was accompanied by a vast expansion of the archive of plays used to ask questions of social life in the period. Domestic tragedies, adventure plays, London histories and tragicomedies suddenly made possible new and complex understandings of how early modern theatre constructed its pictures of social life. To chart some of these changes, I begin with a look at Shakespeare’s history plays in post-1970 criticism. Once primarily seen as a vehicle for affirming the justice of a hierarchical social structure (the so-called great chain of being) and of condemning rebellion against that structure and against the monarch at its pinnacle (Tillyard 1943, 1944), these plays increasingly have been mined for their intimations of rebellion and social struggle and for their representation of common people’s role in history (Rackin 1990). At least two developments spurred these changes. One is feminist work on Shakespeare. Feminists have argued that the history plays are not mimetic representations of the early modern world, whether ideal or actual, but help to create ideological understandings of that world. In their analysis of the sex/ gender system, elisions are as significant as foregrounded aspects of plays. While the histories often elide women at the representational level, they nonetheless reveal traces of the crucial social roles they occupy within a patriarchal system of male privilege. For example, if male monarchs sat at the pinnacle of the social hierarchy, they theoretically did so because of the legitimacy of their genealogical line. That legitimacy depended both on the chastity of women and on their capacity to bear children. The history plays’ preoccupation with genealogy thus signals men’s often unacknowledged dependence on female reproductive power (Howard and Rackin 1997). Feminists also have argued that the textual condemnation of aggressively agential women like Margaret of Anjou in the first tetralogy cannot erase such women’s power and skill. Margaret is both a better warrior and battle leader than her husband, Henry VI, and more fiercely loyal to her son Edward’s claims to the throne. Margaret’s demonization elides neither the power she wields nor the challenge she embodies to male privilege. Feminism, then, has identified women as significant players in social life, even in the male-dominated Shakespearean history play. It has also revealed how the sex-gender system structures both domestic and public life in these plays with

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women’s reproductive labour, for example, crucial to structures of inheritance and lineage. Moreover, it has shown how the putative power of men is vulnerable to powerful women like Margaret as well as to contradictions within the sex/gender system. Mistress Quickly is a case in point, a common woman who by virtue of her hazy marital situation has come to preside over something between a tavern and a whorehouse. Though socially marginal, Quickly controls a commercial establishment and exercises her right to call down the law on more powerful men who do not pay their bills. Her language, moreover, a tissue of malapropisms, renders her both comic and also dangerous to the common sense that holds the world in its male-ordered place. In mangling the King’s English, Quickly undermines the power of language to make distinctions between ‘public women’ and chaste wives, honourable men and villains. Feminist critics have shown how Quickly’s uncontrolled speech acts and her unsteady association with unlicensed sexuality in the person of Doll Tearsheet destabilize masculine rationality and the patriarchal control of female sexuality.1 The second factor exploding the field’s ideas about the social world presented through the early modern history play was an expanded archive of plays that have been recognized as part of that genre. Thomas Heywood’s two-part Edward IV, with its double focus on the monarchical transfer of power from Edward IV to Richard III and on the suffering of the commoner, Jane Shore, and her beleaguered husband, Matthew Shore, is not the kind of history play most critics of the genre discuss when they have Shakespeare’s history plays as their model. In one of the two plots a rebellion against the King is put down with the help of the Lord Mayor of London and of Matthew Shore and other citizens. Their success secures the rule of Edward IV until Richard III seizes the throne after Edward’s death. In the other plot Jane Shore is seduced/commanded by Edward IV to abandon her husband Matthew. Jane compensates for that infidelity by performing repeated acts of charity. With Richard’s rise to power, she becomes a martyr to his cruelty, dying as a starving outcast on the margins of London. Edward IV thus presents English society as marked by conflict between citizen values and royal imperiousness and gives as much attention to a woman, Jane Shore, as to either Edward IV or Richard III. In foregrounding the popular Jane Shore story, the play also suggests that theatre-going women had tastes that had to be accommodated if they were to become loyal consumers of dramatic fare (Howard 1994a: 74–93). While the Shakespearean history play often subordinates commoners and women to subplots, Heywood’s Edward IV makes the Jane Shore narrative the dominant or co-equal plot in both of its parts.2 Jane Shore, along with her husband Matthew, also reveals the central paradox surrounding citizens subjected to various forms of unjust monarchical authority. Owing loyalty both to her monarch and to her husband, Jane is torn between both, her happiness and Matthew’s destroyed by Edward’s incursion into her husband’s shop and his abduction of her. The emotional pull of the virtuous woman who nobly suffers becomes a powerful tool for critiquing monarchical tyranny, just as under Richard III Jane’s selfless acts of charity to Richard’s victims implicitly critique his heartless misrule. In theory subordinated both to her husband and to her king, Jane Shore nonetheless transforms her plight into something that looks like resistance. Jane and Matthew become citizen heroes,

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supposedly, but unhistorically, commemorated in the London landscape by the name, Shoreditch, given to the area just outside the city walls where the emaciated Jane dies. By contrast, in Shakespeare’s Richard III, Jane Shore is mentioned only as ‘that harlot, strumpet Shore’ (3.4.70) and given no speaking part. Feminist interest in a character like Heywood’s Shore reveals that even a dramatic genre like the national history play can have a more complex understanding of society and its competing forces than we might have intuited solely from the Shakespearean versions of the genre. Queer studies and race studies have had similarly important effects on how the social forces shaping early modern life have been understood and represented in the drama. One of the great discoveries of 1990s queer scholarship was to reveal the importance of male friendship as a crucial shaping force in early modern society and in the literature of the early modern period, and to see friendship as an elastic continuum that could encompass platonic regard and deeply erotic relationships. To have a friend, a second self, was not only an important affective bond; it also structured social ties among students, soldiers, authors and counsellors, among others (Bray 1982, 2003; Masten 1997; B. Smith 1991; Stewart 1997). Bonds between men took many forms, with varying affective intensities, but they were central to many dramatic representations of early modern society. Coriolanus, for example, has a protagonist who feels comfortable only with men of his social status: the patricians of Rome who dominate the Senate and lead Rome’s armies. Plebeian men, and especially the people’s tribunes, Coriolanus regards us unmanly ‘curs’ (3.3.119). Coriolanus’s admiration for elite martial men extends even across what we would now call national boundaries to encompass Aufidius, the leader of the Volscians and Rome’s sworn enemy. The admiration is mutual and expressed in erotic terms. Coriolanus dreams of grappling in the night with his antagonist, Aufidius, and Aufidius rapturously says to Coriolanus when the latter arrives on his doorstep: Know thou first, I loved the maid I married; never man Sighed truer breath. But that I see thee here, Thou noble thing, more dances my rapt heart Than when I first my wedded mistress saw Bestride my threshold. (4.5.115–20) Aufidius has a wife and presumably legitimate offspring through whom his bloodline  and property will pass, but he speaks of Coriolanus in intensely erotic terms. As critics such as Laurie Shannon (2002) have argued, similitude, the attraction of like to like, was an important early modern pathway for sexual desire and for ties of admiration and regard that bound men together in public and more intimate contexts. The male bonds that suture elite Romans to one another, often to the exclusion of women, are both a source of affective pleasure and the basis for friendships and affiliations that sustain armies and forms of rule; they are also exposed as a source of vulnerability, as when Caesar in Julius Caesar is lured to his

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death by fellow Romans despite Calpurnia’s accurate prediction of what will happen if he goes to the Senate. Both Brutus and Caesar are susceptible to the flattery of other men – at fatal cost to themselves. The drama suggests that bonds between women could be equally important in structuring early modern life (Frye and Robertson 1999). Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream speaks to the depth of friendship of female equals, each mirroring the other: We, Hermia, like two artificial gods Have with our needles created both one flower, Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion, Both warbling of one song, both in one key, As if our hands, our sides, voices, and minds Had been incorporate. (3.2.203–08) In their case, heteroerotic passion shatters this idealized unity. Tragedies often speak, as well, to the deep affective bonds between women, including between mistresses and maids: Desdemona and Emilia in Othello or the Duchess of Malfi and Cariola in The Duchess of Malfi. Women lacking such networks of women friends and companions are frequently depicted as unusually vulnerable once they enter the marriage state. In Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness, Anne Frankford does not have a female friend or intimate servant but is stranded in a household in which Master Frankford, his friend Wendoll and Frankford’s male servants respectively command, seduce and observe Anne, making her tragedy seem in part a tragedy of pure isolation. In Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women an older widow, Livia, feigning friendship, facilitates the sexual downfall of the young wife, Bianca, upon whom the Duke of Florence has sexual designs. In Edward IV Jane Shore is similarly betrayed by a false friend, Mistress Blage; and in the domestic tragedy, A Warning for Fair Women, an honourable housewife, Anne Sanders, is urged to adultery by a female friend, Anne Drury. These negative examples of female relationships are the flip side of the many depictions of them as a sustaining force when they involve the loving care associated with a second self. Even genres like romantic comedy, traditionally seen as valorizing heteroerotic desire and the institution of marriage, are now acknowledged to be shot through with competing homoerotic and homosocial elements. There is no doubt that marriage was central to early modern life. In the upper reaches of society it secured the passage of property to legitimate offspring and cemented alliances between important families or dynasties. Whether such marriages, often arranged by parents, were the site of either partner’s primary erotic investments is unclear. It has long been argued that especially for the emerging middling sort, Protestant theology and marriage manuals worked to make marriage ‘companionate’, that is, less hierarchical and more affectionate, than was the case at earlier historical moments. Protestant household manuals enjoined mutual respect of wife for husband, husband for wife, and stressed both the husband’s and the wife’s right to conjugal intimacy (Gouge 1627). Frequently gentry families, artisans and even yeomen of means saw marriage

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as a practical partnership in which men and women had complementary roles with men’s exercise of authority in the home tempered by affection and a recognition of women’s talents and capabilities. Women were often assigned the care of the rapidly increasing number of household goods that an expanding market economy made available; they also oversaw the education and religious instruction of children and the management of household servants, both male and female; sometimes at local markets they sold eggs and produce they had raised, adding to the family’s resources (Korda 2002, 2011; Wall 2002). Shakespeare’s comedies have often been approached as showing the delights of heterosexual courtship on the way to loving marriages. This view is not so much wrong as incomplete. Since the 1980s and certainly the 1990s, both feminists and queer critics have used plays such as Twelfth Night to argue that the comedies mediate tensions between the social imperative for heteroerotic alliances and the tension and frisson created by the persistent, simultaneous presence of homoerotic desire (Howard 1994a, 94–130; Orgel 1996). In short, these plays suggest not so much the triumph of compulsory heterosexuality as a representational system pulsing with various erotic options, practices and assumptions. When Viola in Twelfth Night is pursued by Olivia, for example, it is not clear whether Olivia desires the man signified by Viola’s clothing or the woman whose ‘small pipe’ like ‘the maiden’s organ, shrill and sound’ (1.4.32–33) belies her femininity. Likewise, it is not clear when Orsino finally settles on Viola as his future wife whether he has fallen in love with the woman under the male clothing or with the young man those clothes signify. These questions are further complicated by the fact that boy actors performed female characters, thus undercutting any certainty about the nature of the desire flowing between characters or between characters and the audience members who beheld them. Viola never assumes her female dress at the end of Twelfth Night, prolonging the audience’s doubts about what erotic possibilities Orsino sees in this man/woman. As Julie Crawford (2011) has argued, we have mistaken heteroerotic marriage as the inevitable telos of romantic comedy. Many of the plays suggest a more fluid erotic landscape and the marriage form as encompassing more than heteroerotic unions. Even more recently, trans criticism has raised further questions about the social significance of cross-dressed figures. While feminist critics often argued that young women assumed men’s clothing to escape the sexual dangers to which unaccompanied single women were vulnerable, trans critics have asked whether cross-dressing might not sometimes have been a choice rather than a necessity and note that the clothing that outwardly signified a gender identity to the world can be read as a declaration of a preferred male identity and not as a veil hiding a feminine ‘truth’ (Kemp 2019). The expansion of the canon to include a consideration of plays such as The Roaring Girl gives such suggestions purchase. Moll, the roaring girl, never seems to adopt male clothing out of a sense of vulnerability; in fact, she flaunts her male clothing as a choice, and she declines heterosexual marriage proposals, no matter who makes them. Moll can thus be read as a trans figure, using clothing to signify a male gender affinity, but the nature of her erotic desires remains opaque. The social world depicted in The Roaring Girl contains a variety of erotic modalities: Sir Beauteous Ganymede and his male friends embrace homoerotic friendships; Moll Cutpurse

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marches to her own drummer, claiming to enjoy lying on both sides of the bed rather than sharing it with a partner of either sex; Mary and Sebastian seemingly follow a path towards heterosexual marriage but with the cross-dressing motif troubling the inevitability of heteroerotic desire (Howard 1992). Cumulatively, early modern drama suggests a social world in which marriage is an important social institution and perhaps increasingly a site for erotic life, but other social alliances, like samesex friendship, also weave together social life and remain sites for other forms of sexual expression.

THE POST-2000 UNDERSTANDING OF EARLY MODERN SOCIAL LIFE The enormous changes in how early modern social life was conceived in the decades before 2000 also saw the beginnings of a consideration of race as a constitutive force, but no development was more contested or slower to find widespread acknowledgement. Consequently, the first tranche of ‘race books’ (Hall 1995; Hendricks and Parker 1994; Loomba 1989, 1998) took almost twenty years fully to be integrated and built upon by others in the field. None of those early books had a simple idea of what ‘race’ meant in the early modern period. Hall, for example, saw it deeply imbricated in ideas of blackness and whiteness inherited from the Middle Ages where it had been associated with moral and religious categories, but that were given new salience in the ‘beauty’ discourse of the early modern period. That discourse permeated the visual arts through depictions of white women and their Black servants and sonnet sequences with their juxtaposition of fair and dark ladies. In an early instance of intersectional analysis, Hall showed how race and gender were interconnected in cultural productions from masques to plays to travel texts. Loomba’s work, by contrast, focused more centrally on the role of religion as a discourse of racial alterity and looked East as well as to the Atlantic world for the varying imperial and colonial histories that from the Middle Ages onwards made race a complicated and varied category. Despite the sophistication of such early books, charges of anachronism dogged these efforts to understand the work of race in the early modern period. Did race mean then what it means now? Weren’t post-Enlightenment categories being imposed on early modern cultures? Rather than understanding race as a fiction capable of taking several different forms within a single historical moment, sceptics simply denied the term’s appropriateness as a category of analysis for early periods.3 Nonetheless, important race-work continued to be done, much of it examining the different terms (of religion, lineage, blood and phenotypical difference) that were woven together in the early modern racial system. By the year 2022 it seems impossible not to see race as one of the central structuring forces of early modern society, central not only to colonial and commercial ventures across the globe but also to consolidating Englishness as a white identity. Some race-work since 2000 has revealed Black subjects as integral parts of early modern society. Just as scholars such as James Shapiro (1996) revealed the presence of Jews in Elizabethan London when for a long time it was believed none remained

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after earlier expulsion orders, so scholars like Imtiaz Habib have carefully documented the presence of people of African descent in England in the sixteenth century and in ever greater numbers in the seventeenth (Habib 2008). Some Africans in England came there as the result of various transcontinental and intercontinental commercial circuits. Spaniards and Portuguese brought enslaved people with them as ‘servants’ when they travelled to the British Isles; early English voyagers like Hawkins carried slaves in English ships as early as the 1570s; some ‘free’ Africans plied trades in urban centres, having fetched up in English cities in not always entirely traceable ways. Habib argues persuasively for the social marginality and precarity of the vast majority of these African figures. Their presence, however, would certainly have been known to urban playwrights like Marlowe and Shakespeare and Webster, each of whom created striking portraits of Black figures such as Ithamore, Aaron, Othello and Zanche. Those racialized characterizations were constructed in part from stereotypes of medieval devils bent on endless, anti-Christian evil; in part from tropes found in travel writings about sexual insatiability and unfamiliar styles of dress and diet; in part, perhaps, from observation of figures as various as the Moroccan ambassador who visited England at the very end of Elizabeth’s reign and the poor Black people who inhabited parishes south of the Thames where several theatres were located and a number of dramatists lived. Documenting the presence of Blacks in early modern England, and in domains of society stretching from the court to poor parishes in London, has helped to affirm that Blacks were not solely figures of the imagination to English playwrights but were visible in certain spheres of daily life. How these figures entered representational regimes is a different matter, however, from assuming that the Jewish, African, Moorish or Indigenous figures in plays were based primarily on observation of members of these groups. Instead, these figures were mobilized in dramatic fictions, often in stereotypical and highly stylized ways, in part to draw customers to the theatre. The spectacle of actors in blackface and of staged depictions of Muslim Turks wearing scimitars and pantoffles, or of Native Americans in feathered costumes, made fantastic versions of racial difference a profitable commodity. Often, these figures also occupied the role of villain. In Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Barabas the Jew vies with his slave, Ithamore, whose value is written on his back in the Maltese slave market, in treachery and mayhem. Peele’s Mully Mohamet in Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar, Mullesheg in Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West and Aaron the Moor in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus are examples in canonical and less canonical plays of African figures who are rendered through tropes of lechery, cruelty and deviousness. Many meet ends that dehumanize them utterly. Aaron is buried in the earth and left to starve; Mully Mohamet is killed in battle, flayed and his skin stuffed with straw and displayed. These demonized depictions of Africans may draw on medieval texts that equate Black figures with the devil, but they anticipate a world in which the European powers will nearly all participate in the Atlantic slave trade, commodifying and dehumanizing Black bodies. Even Othello, the most complex of the African figures on the early modern English stage, does not escape being subjected to the racist language of Iago, despite his accomplishments and his exceptional status as a military commander serving the Venetian state. Nor can he entirely free himself from doubt about the beauty of

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his Blackness, nor accomplish his suicide without describing that act as the excision of that part of himself he identifies with ‘a malignant and a turbaned Turk’, that ‘circumcised dog’ (5.2.351, 53). What remains, presumably, is a Black subject totally identified with the white Venetian state and its imperial ambitions. Even in death Othello thus holds in place a racialized hierarchy that connects criminality and enforced servitude with the non-white, non-Christian subject. The racialized binaries that inform both theatre productions and the visual arts show culture’s role in normalizing an emerging world system in which England and other European nations extracted labour and resources from Africa, the Americas, and the East in part by reliance on a racial system that privileged whiteness. Kim Hall made this point when she showed how discourses of fairness, valorizing the red and white of Petrarchan ladies, depended for their distinction on the contrast with dark ladies and dun skin. The denigration of the later accompanies the elevation of the former. This might seem merely like a point of aesthetics, the way in which visual contrasts set off the equal beauties of opposing entities, but repeatedly in the drama Black and white are not valued equally. The foregrounding of whiteness through recurring keywords such as ‘fair’, ‘sunny’, ‘golden’ or ‘light’ associates whiteness with power and rightful dominion. In The Merchant of Venice, for example, Portia with her golden locks and fair skin disparages foreign suitors with ferocity, especially her dark-skinned Moroccan suitor, settling upon someone of her own ‘kind’, a Venetian whose complexion matches her own. Together they control the spoils flowing not only from Portia’s father’s wealth but from Shylock’s. Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West, Part I is embarrassingly blatant about its triumphant narrative of white over Black. Bess Bridges, the ‘fair’ maid of the title, is a chaste tavern maid who eventually pursues her beloved Spencer to sea in a ship named The Negro. Her sea-going adventures depend on her command of this ship and her symbolic subordination of the racialized group for which it is named. Bess, moreover, is a lower-class avatar of Queen Elizabeth, the monarch associated with the painted face, golden hair and pearl jewellery that signified her white power (Traub 2002: 125–57). Bess herself exercises military power against the Spanish, England’s traditional enemy, and soft power at the court of Mullesheg, where she resists his seductions and completes the rescue of her betrothed. The obvious fantasy embedded in this text is that a northern white power, bodied forth in ‘fair’ Bess, bests Catholic Spain and outwits the lecherous North African, Mullesheg (Howard 1994b). England is constructed as a white nation that through its commercial and military voyages conquers the darker peoples of the Mediterranean world. That historically England was not in any position to do this does not matter. The fantasy articulates the ideological parameters of a racial system that would eventually justify Britain’s participation in the slave trade but here attests to its imagined commercial and military pre-eminence over African states and European rivals. The theatre was a particularly important site for the installation of a racial regime increasingly based on phenotypical differences between white English people and the black, brown and tawny faces of non-English populations, faces that could be artificially created on the stage by various cosmetic enhancements: cork, soot, black and brown fabric (Smith 2016a). To colour was also added costume. The costume

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books of the period suggest that Muslim others sometimes were pictured with dark faces and the thickened lips of African stereotypes but often were primarily distinguished by various modes of exotic dress: pantoffles, robes, scimitars and elaborate turbans (Jones and Stallybrass 2000; Vitkus 2003). But the implicit norm against which these spectacles of difference were displayed was the white European. Whiteness was associated in these stage fictions with rationality, sexual continence and the privilege of being the unmarked category. As a number of critics have by now made clear, Shakespeare’s race plays are not only those with Turkish, African, Egyptian or New World characters; all his plays are race plays in that they produce whiteness as a privileged and often invisible marker. As Ian Smith (2016b) and Peter Erickson (2002) have variously shown, for example, Hamlet has not only historically been performed as a blond, Nordic figure (recall Olivier’s famous enactment) but is also textually constructed as the enlightened, conscience-driven opposite of the hellish revenger, Pyrrhus. He is the anti-revenger, distanced, seemingly against his conscious will, from the language of blackness, blood and cruelty that permeates revenge discourse. In death he is valorized, his story told by Horatio and his body borne aloft by Fortinbras. This is, as Smith suggests, a quite different death than that accorded Othello who dies divided from what he sees as his darker, slavish self with no one to tell his story but himself. Through keywords and narratives patterns, through costume and make-up, the English stage wove race into its presentations of early modern society, helping to lay the groundwork for England’s imperial expansion and involvement in the Atlantic slave trade. The final expansion of the social that I want to deal with in this chapter is perhaps the hardest to grasp, namely the effects of planetary forces on social life. This enormous and abstract idea is, however, powerfully re-orienting analysis away from a solely human-centred conception of the social world (Nardizzi and Werth 2014; Steffen 2019). Rather than seen as shaped solely by religious differences, political systems, class distinctions, economic forces or systems of gender, sexuality and race, society is now also seen as profoundly affected by local and large-scale changes in rainfall, temperature and, as a result, food resources. Scientists have long advocated for this understanding, but it is now entering public consciousness in ways that affect how social life and species distinctions are understood. A traditional way of describing the early modern period was as the historical moment when ‘the individual’ was invented and human ingenuity valorized as the driving force that would, especially in the capitalist and white West, lead to a justified dominion over the globe. The dark side of this pernicious ideology has increasingly been revealed as the twenty-first century has dawned. Humans have over-developed, over-populated, and over-heated the earth on which they depend. As we cast eyes back to the early modern moment, the seeds of that future can be retrospectively discerned, as well as a critique of its governing logic. King Lear offers perhaps the most straightforward opportunity for making this case. At its literal and symbolic centre is a storm so powerful that unaccommodated man cannot endure it. This storm is often read morally, as a rebuke to Lear’s hubris. He has thought himself all-powerful. Both his daughters and the storm teach him

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otherwise. Although for a while Lear sustains the fantasy that he can command the storm, calling on the winds and rain to punish his enemies, the storm’s indifference to his pleas casts an ironic pall over his pretensions to omnipotence. Rather, however, than focusing on the storm solely as a rebuke to Lear’s pride and a further revelation of his individual folly, it may be productive to see the storm as a more general sign of the natural world’s power over humanity. All those unhoused and unprotected creatures stranded outside hovels, houses and stables have their extreme vulnerability revealed by the experience of the storm: Poor Tom, Lear, Lear’s train, the nameless many of whom the King has taken too little care, as well as the nonhuman animals on the heath. An anticipation of this moment occurs, though in narration only, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when Titania recounts how climate events have upset the normal routines and expectations of human society: Therefore the moon, the governess of floods, Pale in her anger, washes all the air That rheumatic diseases do abound. And thorough this distemperature, we see The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose, And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds Is, as in mockery, set. The spring, the summer, The childing autumn, angry winter change Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world By their increase, now knows not which is which. (2.1.103–14) Disease, crop disruptions, unseasonable temperatures – humans are subject to them all. And while Titania attributes these events to her quarrel with Oberon, a less fanciful explanation lies simply in the weather vagaries that produced crop failures and famine all over England in the mid-1590s. Even as the English embarked on ambitious fen-draining and enclosure schemes to increase agricultural productivity and enhance landowner profits, natural events held the power to thwart ‘improving’ sensibilities. The storm in Lear is simply the most sustained of the natural events that manifest the power of planetary forces over human society. Shipwrecks caused by storms at sea are the other frequent manifestation of natural power, present in plays spanning Shakespeare’s whole career from The Comedy of Errors to The Tempest. Storms separate families, threaten dynastic succession, bring death. In King Lear the storm threatens the life and the sanity of the King as well as the well-being of all those who find themselves stranded in unsheltered spaces. In Lear, moreover, the storm forces to consciousness a recognition of the creatureliness of human beings, their proximity to the beasts to which they were frequently assumed to be superior. Throughout the play there are hints that that assumption is unwarranted (Shannon 2013: 165–73). Confronted with Goneril’s refusal to allow him his retinue of knights, Lear says that

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without these knights and other things that exceed mere physical need, ‘[m]an’s life is cheap as beast’s’ (2.2.456). Indeed, stripped of accommodations, many of them, like furred robes, derived from the better-provisioned animal world, humans are hardly distinguishable from other beasts, except perhaps for humans’ unusual vulnerability and lack of natural protection. In his sane insanity on the heath, Lear glimpses this truth when confronted with the nearly naked body of Poor Tom. Lacking what humans borrow from beasts  – silk, hides, wool, perfume  – man is ‘no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art’ (3.4.105–06). The claims to species distinction that have fuelled much of modernity’s disastrous rush to extract and exploit here are exposed for what they are: a hubristic failure to acknowledge the precarious interdependence of man and earth, man and other species. Understood one way, King Lear is a tragedy of species hubris, and not just the tragedy of an individual. It was piercingly perceptive of a director like Peter Brook in his blackand-white film version of the play to stage it in mundanely apocalyptic terms as an end-of-days dwindling away of the earth’s fecundity and human beings’ ability to survive in a ravaged landscape. In Lear, the concept of society is given necessary extension to include a view of the social in which there are more than human players. The earth will have its say on how and in what way human society survives. We have unthinkingly altered conditions on this shared planet, and the planet cannot now be prevented from speaking back. I will conclude with several personal remarks. Ben Jonson, writing in the early days of the capitalist era, was critical of the greed and selfish individualism he saw on display in the urban environment in which he lived. Writing from a vantage point several hundred years further along capitalism’s unfolding trajectory, L. C. Knights resonated with something he saw epitomized in Jonson: a desire to return to less alienated and more communal ways of life. My own life in the academy has spanned the fifty years since 1970, the years I write about here. Personally, I have benefitted enormously from the expanding vision of the social that I have written about in this chapter. Embracing feminism and queer studies, I was empowered by my engagement with early modern drama to imagine not only a more complex and exciting Renaissance than I had inherited but also a more democratic academy and society. The years since 2000 have been more sobering. I am excited that race study is becoming central to the field, but this change has been too long in coming. I recognize, moreover, that the critical movements with which I have been affiliated throughout my career have largely been white movements. With a few notable exceptions, they failed at true intersectionality for an unacceptably long time. It is also humbling to see how the optimism and forward momentum many of us experienced during our careers were accompanied by a catastrophic failure to acknowledge or struggle against the ecological crisis towards which a profoundly racialized capitalism was hurtling us and by a failure to fight hard enough against the marginalization of the humanities in a corporate academy. To say we have taken too little care of these things is a cliché but true enough, nonetheless.

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NOTES 1 One could argue that some forms of feminism thus have a less grim and totalizing view of power than does New Historicism, its near companion and rival. The story of New Historicism has so often been told (as by Howard 1986 or Veeser 1989) that I forgo it here to focus on other factors that have changed our understanding of social life in the early modern period and its imbrication with the drama. 2 For a trenchant discussion of how dual plots are formal mechanisms for the subordination of some stories to the stories of others, see Dolan (1994: 59–88). 3 For an account of the debilitating effect upon race scholars of vehement denials of the applicability of race to early modern studies, see Ian Smith’s (2016b) ‘We Are Othello’, esp. 119–20.

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Wall, W. (2002), Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wayne, D. (1982), ‘Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson: An Alternate View’, Renaissance Drama, 13: 103–29. Wrightson, K. (1982), English Society, 1580–1680, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

PART TWO

Current research and issues

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CHAPTER 4.1

Ancient and early modern European contexts of early modern English drama TON HOENSELAARS

INTRODUCTION This chapter selectively maps the multiple European contexts of early modern English drama in spatial and temporal terms. It serves as an introduction to the recognized cultural, textual and theatrical traditions with which early modern English dramatists were familiar and on which they drew. It acknowledges the range of early modern English drama’s narrative and dramatic sources, which reached the stage through a number of salient national genealogies from the classics to the early seventeenth century, and devotes attention to the added value of intertextual and new historicist readings in a field where tangible evidence may be scarce. Besides charting the early modern stage’s formative and predominantly receptive encounter with ancient classical and early modern European cultures, this chapter explores some of the earliest traces that the London drama itself left on the Continent of Europe in the form of strolling players as well as independently travelling playtexts. It briefly considers the spread of English drama (not necessarily Shakespeare), the early commercial interests of these economic migrants from London, and the value of performance anecdotes, manuscripts and plays which, as rare early translations or adaptations, may still challenge our persistently insular views about the London stage.

LANGUAGE Over the years, English drama written and produced between approximately 1558 and 1642 has been endowed with many epithets, and many of these have, in turn, been challenged. For obvious reasons, critics have rightly frowned on the ‘Age of Shakespeare’ and the ‘Age of Elizabeth’. ‘Early modern English drama’ seems to be a more current alternative than ‘English Renaissance drama’. The period terms have been challenged. At the same time, however, not many theatre historians have problematized or challenged the label ‘English’. One wonders if this is justified.

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Seeking to measure the drama’s Englishness by its language, one notes that there are few plays written for the early modern English stage that do not at some point engage in linguistic code switching. It is part of a creative dynamic that employs the audience’s experience of national differentiation, knowledge or ignorance of foreign tongues (often including the subsequent potential for deceit), dialectical variation, social stratification and specialized vocabularies (like Law French and canting language). Beyond the ‘interlinguicity’ that is naturally inherent to any language or linguistic tradition – and described by Michael Saenger as ‘the cohabitation of languages that have, essentially, never been separate’ (Saenger 2015: 182)  – we recognize the drama’s unusually creative urge to fashion new onstage worlds that are explicitly as well as consciously multilingual. Almost as a matter of course, this consciously pursued hybridity directly extends from language to characterization, especially where it concerns those perceived as non-native nationals by London audiences. Non-native characters speaking their own broken version of English are common. They occur in early interludes, like the anonymous Wealth and Health (1558), or Ulpian Fulwell’s Like Will to Like (1567), but they continue to tread the boards in xenophobic comedies like William Haughton’s Englishmen for My Money (1598), the works of Thomas Dekker (The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599) and Northward Ho! (1605)), John Marston (The Dutch Courtesan (1605)), Ben Jonson (Volpone (1606)), James Shirley (The Ball (1632)) and Thomas Nabbes (The Bride (1638)), in later Stuart drama including Richard Brome’s comedies (including The Damoiselle (1653) and The New Academy (1659)).1 Beyond the characterization of the alien, native knowledge and ignorance are dramatized, as in the language lesson of Henry V. Alternatively, foreign language skills are presented as a useful asset, as in The Shoemaker’s Holiday  – where Sir Thomas Lacy (as Hans) can use the ‘German’ he learnt in Wittenberg to his advantage (‘Goeden dach, meester, end you fro, auch’ (Dekker 1999: 4.77)); Jonson’s Alchemist (1610) demonstrates that the language dynamic is not limited to the stage action. Surly’s onstage disguise as a Spaniard speaking unusually correct Spanish may have worked on a sliding scale of audience intelligibility. Equally, depending on the varying levels of understanding, it may have impressed some of the audience, repelled others and have mystified most of his contemporary London audience, like the other Londoners in the play: surly

Por todos los dioses, la más acabada Hermosura, que he visto en mi vida! face

Is’t not a gallant language that they speak? kastril

An admirable language! Is’t not French? (Jonson 2012: 4.2.57–60) Other languages and dialects often experienced as substandard in the capital, including Cornish, Welsh, Scots and Irish, are imitated in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry V and King Lear, but also across the dramatic genres and across the period, like the south-western dialect in Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister

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(1566), Beaumont and Fletcher’s Women Pleased (1647), Massinger’s Emperor of the East (1632) and Jonson’s Tale of a Tub (1641); the northern dialect in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Cupid’s Revenge (1615) and Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1631); Scots in Nathaniel Wood’s Conflict of Conscience (1581), Robert Greene’s James IV (1598), Edward Sharpham’s The Fleire (1607) and Thomas Middleton’s The Witch (first published 1778); and Cornish as well as other varieties in Richard Brome’s Northern Lass (1632).2 It is rarely noted that none of the Continental European drama of the early modern period – whether German, Dutch, French, Spanish or Italian – was as extensively macaronic as early modern English drama (Delabastita and Hoenselaars 2015: 1–2). No other theatre tradition offers anything equivalent to the wealth of multilingual playtexts seeking to capitalize on what George Puttenham identified primarily as a questionable mode of rhetorical hybridity, called ‘cacozelia’, ‘soraismus’ and ‘mingle mangle’ (Jones 1966: 130). No other stage tradition in Europe managed to absorb and profitably to contain the Babylonian anxiety that was only too real across the entire continent where travel and trade increased mobility and the number of contacts with ‘others’. With its language variety and its speakers, early modern English drama is certainly a hybrid body, but it is uniquely English in that it brilliantly captures the unprecedented impact of the foreign world (both classical and modern), the profound disquiet that this impact produced in the nation’s culture and society, as well as the potential for creativity that was recognized by the dramatists. With their appropriation of the other languages – generating fear or awe, but also confidence, and occasionally also a sense of defiance  – the dramatists masterfully managed to transform a concrete sense of estrangement into one of creativity, leaving an inalienable cosmopolitan achievement.3 The macaronic nature of the drama and the excessive activity that it displays around societal issues such as the Babylonian confusion, the issue of language learning, the experience of defamiliarization, as well as the liberating arts of translation and interpreting, all mark its involvement in a broader process of internationalization in literary and cultural terms. As Steven Mullaney has demonstrated, such widespread collecting and rehearsing of ‘strange tongues’ (heard or suggested) was an intrinsic feature of the early modern drama that flourished in London and ought to be recognized as one of ‘the activities of a culture in the process of extending its boundaries and reformulating itself’ (Mullaney 1983: 59). Naturally, this inclination to engage with the fascinating as well as fearsome ‘other’ languages, which yielded such a cacophony of strange tongues, was not the only means of dramatizing the fissure between the Englishman’s experience of the self as confronted by otherness. Experiments with phenomena such as characterization (from the cruder national stereotyping in William Haughton’s Englishmen for My Money to the explorations of racial complexity in Othello) and location (ranging from city comedy, to travel drama, and to considerably more abstract explorations of global space in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1604), Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Richard Brome’s The Antipodes (1640)), slowly granted the drama its cosmopolitan aura, providing ‘a spectacle of strange cultures’, a persistent and excited negotiation of national, regional, racial and religious identities (Mullaney 1983: 42–3).4 Notably,

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these salient examples only partly capture the nation’s infinitely broader fascination and engagement with non-native traditions on a transnational plane, ranging from the philosophical heritage at one extreme to news and rumour on the other.5

TRANSLATION If early modern English drama creatively profited from the language barrier (which is only the tip of its cosmopolitan iceberg), it remains impossible to minimize the pivotal role of translation itself. This was the practice that most of all furthered the engagement between the multiple linguistic cultures of Europe and beyond, between languages and cultures living as well as dead. In many ways, translation was the core business of the Reformation, with its struggle for a dependable Bible in the newly emancipating vernaculars of Europe. Translation was the driving force behind the more familiar humanist traffic between texts from five millennia, and in its own way, the stage was an avid and omnivorous consumer of translated materials. Already during the 1580s Stephen Gosson remarked that the drama’s use of foreign materials or influences was not limited to the classics but extended beyond into medieval and early modern Europe: ‘I haue seene it, that the Palace of pleasure, the Golden Asse, the AEthiopian historie, Amadis of Fraunce, the Rounde table, baudie Comedies in Latine, French, Italian, and Spanish, haue beene throughly ransackt, to furnish the Playe houses in London’ (Gosson 1582: sig. D5v). Following Peter Burke, the definition of translation should be stretched beyond the traditional ‘intertraffic’ of languages (to use the term coined by Sir Thomas Browne), to include the drive for ‘emulation’ on the part of the translator and cover also the underlying politico-cultural translation of ‘empire’ in the broadest sense of the term (Burke 2015: 28).6 As Burke and R. Po-chia Hsia have rightly argued, no study of the cultural dynamic of the early modern period is complete without reference and attention to the art or craft of translation and to the mediation that this implies; in fact, ‘all major cultural exchanges in history involved translation’, in manuscript, in print, but also beyond these more or less familiar media of intercultural exchange (Burke and Hsia 2007: 1). Finally, beyond the generally acknowledged interlingual, intralingual or intersemiotic process of transfer between languages (Jakobson 1959), and beyond Burke and Hsia’s cultural turn, there is the conviction that in fact, as Jonathan Bate has put it, all ‘art’ is ‘a translation of life into special languages with codes of their own’, a process initiating further translations that ‘take their life from a hermaphroditic mingling of multiple agencies – not only translators in the strict sense of bilingual talents, but also all writers, actors and directors, readers and interpreters, who are bold enough to “in” [sic] the very imagination and the true conceit of the authors they admire’ (Bate 1999: 50–1).

CONTINENTAL IMPACT By far the most pervasive and profound foreign influence on early modern English drama is that represented by classical Greek and Latin materials, affecting, among other things, its subject matter, language and style, plot and characterization, generic

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profiles and social status. Research in this field of domesticating foreign literature and culture, dating back to the self-consciously neoclassical early modern period itself, is predictably vast, and merely to map the territory would be tantamount to a new Herculean labour. Countless attempts have been undertaken to position the role in the English dramatic output of Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Ovid, Plautus, Terence and Seneca, to name only the best known. It involves the Tudor and Stuart grammar school tradition, the area of research that has been effectively mapped by T. W. Baldwin (1944), though not exhaustively, certainly not where dramatists less canonical than Shakespeare, Jonson or Thomas Middleton are concerned. It involves the tradition of university drama based on ancient scripts as it developed from the late fifteenth century onwards (and explains how Polonius could become a ‘capital … calf’ (3.2.101), in the words of Hamlet’s response to his anecdote about playing Caesar at university). It also involves Jonathan Bate’s successful attempts (1994, 2019) to focus on classical learning and the impact of Ovid and the classical heritage at large on the early modern creative imagination. The map of the territory would also reserve a large area for the tragedies of Seneca and the ways in which they nurtured an extraordinary, continent-wide tradition of revenge drama, with England developing one typically its own.7 It would hold a space for Jonson and his preoccupation with Juvenal and Horace  – deftly handled in recent years by Jay Simons (2018)  – if only to help explain the satirical strain of city comedy as exemplified by Jonson himself, John Marston and Middleton.8 Traditional, but also time-worn questions of how much Latin or Greek each playwright knew, or which works were available in translation and which not, are still worth pursuing, but over the past thirty years critics, rather than identifying verbal echoes with any source or listing parallel passages, have developed alternative, intertextual means of establishing new genealogies between the classics and the playtexts. Between direct contact and indirect absorption, the word ‘source’  – as Robert Miola has noted – may now also refer to ‘deep source, resource, influence, confluence, tradition, heritage, origin, antecedent, precursor, background, milieu, subtext, context, intertext, affinity, [and] analogue’ (Miola 1992: 7). The redefinition of the concept of ‘source’ has revolutionized the study of early modern drama as a whole. Yet several decades of research with the wonderfully expanded range of definitions for the interrelation between English drama and cultures from beyond the Channel have also revealed that the majority of critics are inclined to steer clear of the linguistic encounter at its core and instead focus on non-linguistic or broader cultural issues. Critics, as Miola has put it, appear ‘unwilling or unable to hear Seneca in Latin’ (Miola 1992: 6). In a similar way, ‘critics remain generally inattentive to Latin and to the range of Plautus’ and Terence’s plays’ (Miola 1994: 11–12). Pursuing a poetics of early modern culture, then, critics could well be ignoring the resonance of the original tongues at their own peril, as is also suggested by Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy (1592). Here, certainly, the ‘play of Hieronimo in sundry languages was thought good to be set down in English more largely, for the easier understanding to every public reader’ (Kyd 2013: 4.4, between lines 9 and 10). It may not be stated what these ‘sundry languages’ were, but it is worth noting

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that no total translation assistance was deemed necessary for an appreciation of Hieronimo’s multiple quotations from the Bible and the plays of Seneca in the Latin (in Kyd 2013: 3.13). Early modern drama may distinguish itself in its attempt to turn the problem of foreign language skills into a creative device, a decision not to shun but to overcome the language barrier, but how about the critics? Modern critics with ‘small Latin and less Greek’ still seem – as Scott McMillin implied with reference to the so-called Vindicta mihi soliloquy in The Spanish Tragedy – too quick to accept the verdict of others, or suppose that what they do not understand does not exist (McMillin 1974: 201–8). Of course, few if any critics possess sufficient language skills to penetrate the complexities of a century of internationalizing drama, be it Greek, Latin or any of the others. Every critic at some point is up against an unfamiliar language. But let us at least acknowledge this and develop research schemes in order to understand and to bridge the gap. Ironically, the foreign languages are more conspicuous in the text than the debate over classical and Continental (or neoclassical) poetics. Yet the impact of foreign theoretical writings like Aristotle’s Poetics or Horace’s Art of Poetry and its numerous neoclassical commentaries and spin-offs were profound. In comparison with Renaissance Italy (Lodovico Castelvetro, Discorsi del poema eroico) and France (Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetices libri septem), substantial neoclassical theorizing in England was nearly non-existent, and Sir Philip Sidney with his Defence of Poetry remains a rare, if not the only, exception.9 Ben Jonson had his own copy of Aristotle’s Works and several times refers to the Poetics in his Discoveries (1641). (He also translated Horace’s Art of Poetry himself and speaks of Horace in connection with the unity of time (or, rather, Jonson’s own non-observance of it) in the epistle to Sejanus (1605)). With reference to Daniel Heinsius’s Ad Horatij de Plauto & Terentio Judicium (1618), Jonson discusses the extent to which laughter  – as in the Old Comedy tradition of Aristophanes (whom he knew from his own copy of the plays) – might achieve any didactic objective of the genre. The majority of dramatists were familiar with ongoing debates over the philosophy and practice of literature, discussed poetical issues in prologues and prefaces (though rarely in a militant way), or silently absorbed continental theory in their own, admittedly often freethinking manner. There is an obvious familiarity among the dramatists with the classical unities of ‘time’ and ‘action’ and with the neo-classical addition of ‘place’, but the actual lines of transmission appear mainly to have been indirect and to have run via dramatic practice itself. The work of the French dramatist Étienne Jodelle (Cléopâtre captive (1553)) is as likely to have served as a conduit for drama theory to England as the plays of Robert Garnier (1568–1583), whose Marc-Antoine was translated by the Countess of Pembroke. As one of the most classically oriented of the playwrights, Jonson generally followed them, as in Every Man in His Humour, Volpone, Epicene (1616) and The Alchemist, not explicitly, perhaps, but more consistently than in the other plays. The English dramatists most conspicuously engaged with theoretical issues when the debate turned to tragicomedy. With its roots in the Greek and Latin classics (notoriously in Plautus’s Amphitrion), the merits of this fusion of genres were

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first hotly debated in Italy. Castelvetro and Giraldi Cinthio were well ahead of Giambattista Guarini who published his poetical manifesto devoted to the creative unfixing of classical genre distinctions and who in this hybrid mode wrote his own Pastor fido (1590), rivalled one year later by Torquato Tasso’s Aminta (1591) (Henke 1997). This unleashed a genuine culture debate (if not ‘war’) across Europe; in England, where the question of generic decorum had already been discussed by Sir Philip Sidney and George Puttenham, Ben Jonson (whose Lady Politic Would-be incidentally produces her own copy of Il Pastor fido in Volpone) and John Fletcher were vocal early theorists. The debate over tragicomedy – even though it gradually came to be a popular commonplace – provides an unusually sophisticated framework for our appreciation of – among many plays – Shakespeare’s late comedies, the drama of John Marston, Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher (whose Faithful Shepherdess (1607) failed dismally on the London stage) and Philip Massinger.10 The debate over tragicomedy during the period may be one of the clearest signs of Italian literature modelling a range of national theatre traditions as the Renaissance swept across Europe. But the impact of Italy on English drama also involved the spread of the Petrarchan sonnet, cultivated and reset in Romeo and Juliet. It included the ubiquitous traces of the commedia dell’arte in characterization and plot.11 Within its range, however, we also find Ludovico Ariosto’s epic Orlando Furioso (trans. John Harington, 1591) and the popular chivalric and romance traditions. It included Ariosto’s comedy I suppositi (1509) that fed directly into George Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), as well as the translation of Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (trans. Sir Thomas Hoby, 1561), without which one could not fully appreciate the ludic elegance of John Lyly’s exquisite comedies. And beyond the purely literary impact, there were also the political and historical writings that left their stamp, like those of Francesco Guicciardini and Niccolò Machiavelli. Despite much serious research across academic disciplines, Machiavelli’s early modern popularity and the vast range of intertextual echoes that it now enables across English drama continue to be inversely proportional to our knowledge and understanding of the bibliographical or indeed biographical trajectory that would have led from Florence to the London stage.12 We may be on relatively safe ground with Machiavelli’s novella entitled ‘The Devil Takes a Wife, or The Tale of Belfagor’ (1515–20), but the trajectory that his political ideas would have taken remains as elusive as it is real (Hoenselaars 1996, 1998). Marlowe’s representation of Machiavelli is as a fictional character who prepares us for the stage entry of Barabbas in The Jew of Malta (1633), and Machiavelli informs his depiction of the Duke of Guise (whose unfortunate name Machiavelli himself might have invented) in The Massacre at Paris (c. 1596). It includes multiple Shakespearean villains, from the early Richard of Gloucester in 3 Henry VI (‘I can set … the murderous Machiavel to school’ (3.2.191–3)) to the incorrigible, power-hungry schemers in The Tempest (Antonio: ‘the occasion speaks thee’ but ‘[t]hou let’st thy fortune sleep’ (2.1.205–14)), and it may be detected across the work of Jonson, from the early comedies to Volpone and The Magnetic Lady (1641) (Praz 1973: 168–85) as well as the Italian or Italianate tragedies of Webster, Ford and Massinger (R. C. Jones 1970).13

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Machiavelli comes in many guises, only the most recognizable being Make-evil, Hatch-evil, Match-evil, Match-i-vile and Machavilion. Machiavelli’s name and the variations on it are as commonplace as the fingerprint nexus of the lion and the fox, the concern with policy and ragione di stato, with biases and stratagems, with male-gendered virtue (virtù deriving from the Latin vir, ‘man’) and female fortune (Fortuna), with occasion, conscience and atheism. However enigmatic Machiavelli’s presence may appear, it is also profoundly ambivalent. As David Bevington has put it, ‘No figure equals Machiavelli in the English imagination of the period as it confronts and demonizes a cultural influence increasingly blamed for much that was thought to be amiss in English culture itself’ (1998: 30). Italy represents a massive challenge to early modern English drama studies situated in the immense field of Anglo-Italian exchange and creativity, which have much benefitted from the work of Louise George Clubb. In response to the intertextual challenge of the 1970s and 1980s, she developed the notion of theatregrams  – a series of more or less cross-cultural and recognizable dramatic sequences, situations, episodes, conventions, character traits and gestures, in short ‘migratory motifs and structures’ on which a dramatist may and would be likely to improvise (or ‘riff’), generating a cross-cultural dynamic that the critic may discuss without direct reference to any specific source text (1998: 183).14 In the footsteps of Clubb, Michele Marrapodi – both as author and as one of the major forces behind Routledge’s Anglo-Italian Renaissance Studies book series – has worked to foster and further intercultural research into the stunning dramatic relations between England and Italy.15 In many ways, England’s relationship with France  – with its geographical proximity and intimately shared past, both peaceful and warlike  – was radically different from that with Italy, and the much-studied impact of France on the drama differed accordingly. The English theatre tradition is familiar with its French theatrical antecedents, whether it concerns John Heywood and the French farce tradition that extended to Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1575) and beyond, or the continental Senecan work of playwrights like Étienne Jodelle and Robert Garnier that eventually yielded Thomas Kyd’s translation of Garnier’s Cornélie (1574), the Countess of Pembroke’s English rendering (1595) of Garnier’s Marc-Antoine and, by indirection, also Samuel Daniel’s Cleopatra (1594).16 The impact of Anglo-French history on French historiography and the popular English history play is too well known to require much space in its own right, but Richard Hillman’s voluminous reader-oriented, intertextual work on the literary and cultural connections between the two nations is certainly chastening, including, among other contributions, an original interpretation of Pierre Matthieu’s tragedy La Guisiade (1589) as a relevant intertext to Richard II (Hillman 2010: 16–32). Hillman’s research into the Machiavellian Duke of Guise also deftly involves the work of Christopher Marlowe, including The Massacre at Paris and Edward II (1594), leaving ample room for innovative research into George Chapman’s two Bussy d’Ambois plays (1607, 1613) as well as The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Byron (1608) (Hillman 2002: 72–111). The fact that these plays were not only about the dynastic-cum-religious wars in France but also about history still very much in the making demonstrates the perceived urgency of France and the political events across the Channel for the drama.17

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Over the years we have moved beyond calling France the nation’s ‘sweet enemy’ (as Sir Philip Sidney termed it) and come to accept that for a proper appreciation of the drama we need to acknowledge the bi-directional closeness of the relationship. On the one hand, this is aptly demonstrated with reference to one of the most illustrious statements of English national self-identity, John of Gaunt’s ‘This England’ speech from Richard II. As cross-border research makes clear, the image of England that the dying Gaunt evokes is a translation (in more ways than one) of Guillaume du Bartas’s chauvinistic and anti-English creation poem, La Seconde Sepmaine (1584), which was itself inspired by the French recovery of Calais shortly after the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558 (Hoenselaars and Calvo 2010: 147–53). On the other hand, as Deanne Williams has demonstrated (2004), the sense that England’s literary and cultural identity was generated in part by the French language and by the idea of Frenchness itself is stamped on the drama as an almost post-colonial trauma.18 The impact of Spain and Spanish literature and culture on early modern English drama is vast and profound. It began with Francesco de Rojas’s dramatic novel Celestina (c. 1499), which became the model for the early Tudor interlude of Calisto and Melibea (c. 1525). Later influences include the representation of Spanish and pseudo-Spanish history in Robert Greene’s Alphonsus, King of Aragon (1599) and George Peele’s Battle of Alcazar (1594), as well as in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (1590) was indebted to Pedro Mexia’s Silva de Varia Leccion (translated into English in 1573). The picaresque hero, of the Lazarillo de Tormes type, found fertile ground in the drama, including Beaumont’s The Woman Hater (1607), Dekker’s Blurt Master Constable (1602) and his Match-me in London (1631) (Samson 2013).19 Also, some fifteen plays by Beaumont and Fletcher have their beginnings in Spanish prose sources, including Cervantes’s Exemplary Novellas: Love’s Pilgrimage (1615), The Chances (1617), The Custom of the Country (with Philip Massinger, 1620) and The Fair Maid of the Inn (1625). And, as Randall and Jackson have demonstrated, the impact of Don Quixote (Madrid, 1605) and the novel’s challenge to the entire chivalric romance tradition – including the Spanish Palmerin de Oliva (which Anthony Munday had Englished using Italian and French translations (2 vols. 1588))  – was almost instantaneous, as it began to spread across England before it appeared in John Shelton’s translation of part 1 in 1612 (Randall and Boswell 2009).20 Multiple stage characters speak of fighting windmills or compare others to Cervantes’s eponymous knight, but the Don Quixote novel speaks substantially through The Second Maiden’s Tragedy (whose subplot derives from the El curioso impertinente novella reworked in Cervantes’s great novel), as well as the (debate over) the enigmatic History of Cardenio. The most explicit early engagement with the novel is Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607). Curiously, such cultural appropriation took place as relations between England and Spain were highly strained due to momentous dynastic, political and religious discord. The conflict also explains the negative stereotyping of Spain as a cruel and intolerant nation on the London stage, and the concomitant emergence in the drama, but also in contemporary and more recent Protestant historiography, of what was later termed the ‘Black Legend’ (or Leyenda Nera). Research into the formidable dramatic traditions of the two nations has long been of a comparative nature, assuming a certain distance between their two cultures,

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not proximity. In the 1980s, for example, John Loftis admirably reconstructed the impact of the political-religious rivalry between England and Spain on the history plays, masques and spectacles in each country. His aim, however, was emphatically to study the ‘independent development of the two national dramas’, hoping in this way to re-asses then-existing fears and accusations, and reconstruct a dialogue that the ‘dramatists unknowingly carried on’, but which is ‘now audible to us’ (Loftis 1986: original dust jacket). Walter Cohen’s Drama of a Nation (1985)  – which focuses on the public theatre tradition of England and Spain and which admirably does so within the broader European context of Italy, France and the Netherlands – essentially adopts a similar dual perspective. In recent years, the approach has shifted and has yielded valuable new ways of looking at the curious early modern fusion of cultures between England and Spain. Eric Griffin (2009) has studied the process whereby the Hispanophobic myth became part of English cultural memory. His deftly contextualized rereading of the work of Kyd, Marlowe and Shakespeare reveals that this harsh othering was only one form of public discourse to be identified alongside Hispanophilic attempts to emulate Spain and its shared vision of empire. The demonization of Spain (in the broadest sense of the term) must be understood as an integral part of England’s assertion of its own national identity, an attempt to emulate the imperial power of Spain and its concomitant mercantile success. In this connection, Barbara Fuchs (2013) has compellingly shown how vis-à-vis Spanish culture the London dramatists were continually engaged in a process of translation, appropriation and domestication whose dynamic is best understood via the widespread use of the ‘piracy’ metaphor.

IMPACTING THE EUROPEAN CONTINENT In its contacts with the European Continent, early modern English drama did not only appropriate and emulate the cultures that it found but also crossed the Channel with the strolling players. There, from the mid-1580s onwards, we find records of performances at the courts of northern and central Europe and in marketplaces. The earliest recorded Continental productions of the itinerant actors date from the mid1580s when a number of (unidentified) English players performed what appear to have been circus acts at the Danish town of Elsinore and in the city of Leipzig. There is greater certainty about the players in the train of Queen Elizabeth I’s viceroy in the Low Countries during the war against Spain, the Earl of Leicester. On 23 April 1586 a company of actors visited the garrison town of Utrecht, and treated the authorities to what has become known as The Forces of Hercules, a more or less acrobatic show of strength involving the construction of a human pyramid (Chambers 1923: 2.272). Leicester must have realized that on the day which until the Reformation had been commemorated as St. George’s Day, it was more appropriate in the Protestant Low Countries to celebrate England’s military strength by way of the achievements of a classical hero like Hercules than a challenged Catholic saint. In the course of the years, many troupes followed with dramatic performances of their own. Performance records, playtexts, or traces of them across Europe are legion. Early Shakespearean connections include Hamlet, Titus Andronicus,

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Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew, Henry IV, Julius Caesar, Richard III and The Winter’s Tale. Non-Shakespearean texts and traces include Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta, Nobody and Somebody (1606), Old Fortunatus (1600), Soliman and Perseda (1592), The Black Man (from The Wits, or Sport upon Sport (1662)), John Mason’s The Turk (1610), Thomas Randolph’s Amyntas, or the Impossible Dowry (1638), James Shirley’s Love’s Cruelty (1640) and Thomas Tomkis’s Lingua, or the Combat of the Tongue (1607).21 The most conspicuous and hence also most frequently studied materials concern the genre of revenge tragedy. In this area, the earliest adaptation of The Spanish Tragedy is likely to have been produced in or even before 1605, and its success in the years that follow is stunning. As Frederick Boas has demonstrated (1901: xcixciii, 348–98), a Tragedia von dem griechischen Keyser zu Constantinopel vnnd seiner Tochter Pelimperia mit met Gehengten Horatio (Tragedy of the Greek emperor at Constantinople and his daughter Pelimperia, with the hanged Horatio) was produced by that prolific playwright Jakob Ayrer (1543–1605), more or less at the time when waves of English acting companies were evident across northern Europe.22 Also, the strolling players gave performances of an ‘erschröckliche Spanische Tragoedia’ at Frankfurt (1601), as well as Dresden where a Comoedia vom König in Spanien vnd dem Viceroy in Portugal was put on, on 6 and 19 June 1626, and a Tragoedia von Hieronymo Marschall von Spanien almost a week later (28 June 1626). Printed translations (adapted and bearing the marks of theatrical production) appeared in the Netherlands with Adriaen van den Bergh’s Ieronimo (Utrecht 1621) and the anonymous Don Ieronimo, Marschalk von Spanje (Amsterdam 1638) and in Germany (Kasper Stieler, Bellemperie (Jena 1680)). The earliest Elizabethan play to appear in the Low Countries was also a revenge play, a Dutch version (1618) of Thomas Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy (1608). This play did not arrive with the strolling players. It was the property of diplomat and writer Theodore Rodenburgh, who, for a number of years, was a resident agent in London on behalf of the imperial Hanseatic towns and of Emden. He displayed a serious interest in the host country’s literary culture and translated much into Dutch, including The Revenger’s Tragedy, which was also performed in Amsterdam several times (Hoenselaars and Abrahamse 1996).23 Incidentally, Rodenburgh also produced a Dutch version of Guarini’s Pastor fido  – Loyal Batavian (orig. Anna Rodenburghs trouwen Batavier, 1617)  – using neither the Italian original on which it claimed to be based, nor Roland Brisset’s French translation (Le berger fidelle, 1593). His source happened to be the first English translation of the play, the Il pastor fido, or Faithfull Shepheard (1602), which had appeared anonymously when Rodenburgh was resident in London.24 Guarini’s play did not reach the Low Countries via Italy, then, but via the London theatre world. For many years, the records of Continental productions by the strolling players from London, who sought to internationalize their scene, have been studied by international, multilingual theatre historians and translation specialists. They may

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not have affected the core business of early modern English drama much, but there seems to be a growing interest from the anglophone world, ‘outward’ towards the international playwrights and travelling players of the seventeenth century. If they are recognized, Anston Bosman argues (2004), as a group of ‘mobile and marginal agents’ who together make up a ‘Renaissance intertheater’, they could challenge and transform the study of early modern English drama.25 The domestication of the new historicist approach and the refined focus on the cultural mobility of texts have already led to the preliminary conclusion that, for example, the translation from English into Dutch and German of revenge tragedies such as The Revenger’s Tragedy and, most notably, Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, can only be understood in the light of an intense political interest in the question of which form of government was best suited to uphold the law, contain disruptive energies and prevent power moving elsewhere. (Helmers 2016: 349)26 Theoretical developments may have created new opportunities, but few are likely to challenge the conviction that traditional philological research will continue to be the sine qua non of any reliable edition of the playtext and that the editor who prefers to neglect the existence of textual variants – in whichever language of the period – does so at their own peril. Finally, it seems appropriate to recall that the strolling players were aware of the potential of America as a market for their productions, but due to a religiously fuelled anti-theatrical prejudice in trade circles, it was problematic even to obtain permission to travel there. By the early 1610s, William Crashaw addressed Lord Delaware, then Governor and Captain General of Virginia, in a sermon. He spoke of the players in the same breath as the Devil and the Catholics: ‘We confesse this action [= the colonization of America] hath three great enemies: but who be they? euen the Diuell, Papists, and Players.’ To send actors across the Atlantic might reduce their number in England (suffering a glut of thespians) and even benefit the remaining companies (‘they that remaine would gaine the more at home’). This was bad enough. So the real solution, as Crashaw saw it, was to secure an entirely new start in the new world and ‘resolue to suffer no Idle persons in Virginea’. Stephen Greenblatt has rightly noted that as a ‘mode of entertainment’ the drama ‘itself was the enemy of the colonial plantation’ (1988: 158), and this attitude lingered for more than a century.27

CONCLUSION This survey of the international relations of early modern English drama began with reference to the challenged status of English in relation to other languages printed or spoken during the early modern period. In little time, the dramatists succeeded in overcoming these language barriers and managed to benefit from the Babylonian confusion that remained. Against this background, it seems fair to observe that no such creative solution has yet been found to sustain research into the international contexts of the London drama. The tradition of historians

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whom Richard Evans has described as the ‘cosmopolitan islanders’ (multilingual British scholars controlling research in major areas across Europe) appears to have come under serious threat. The current language barrier between England and the Continent of Europe with its multiple languages still hinders multilateral research that is vital for an appreciation of early modern English drama in its proper cultural and historical contexts (Evans 2009). Fortunately, meaningful initiatives are constantly being developed to make more widely available the nonEnglish sources. In the footsteps of Ludwig Tieck, Albert Cohn, H. H. Furness and Geoffrey Bullough, theatre historians continue to make more widely available reliable editions and translations of key texts and to offer these for discussion (Brandt ed. 1993). Lukas Erne and Kareen Seidler, for example, have developed a deft new way for the Arden series to present up-to-date editions and translations of key texts including the early German Hamlet adaptation known as Der bestrafte Brudermord and Romio und Julieta (2020).28 In her research, Barbara Fuchs admirably counters the Anglo- and Shakespeare-centred nature of early modern theatre research by representing the popular Comedia in English translation and performance. And the Theatre Without Borders research group has also achieved fascinating results via the pursuit of interdisciplinary research that seeks to enlarge and refine a common cultural space, ‘rather than attempting’, as Richard Hillman has put it (2010), ‘to prove relationships of source and influence according to quasijudicial principles’. Similar cosmopolitan motives drive the ‘Polyglot Encounters in early modern Britain’ research project and book series.29 The European continent that had so much to offer early modern English drama is for that same reason still one of its richest research fonts today.

NOTES 1 Dating the plays I follow the dates of printing, rather than those of first performance. 2 See Blank (1996). There is no comparative study of the incidence of the foreignlanguage or broken-English device across the literary genres during the period. 3 Challenging, original research into this field has recently been initiated in Keener (2018). 4 See also Vitkus (2003), Dimmock (2005, 2013), Hutchings (2017), Barbour (2003), McJannet (2006) and Floyd-Wilson (2003). Indispensable, too, are Hall (1995) and Akhimie (2018). 5 A valuable account of the imaginative fusion of the Renaissance sense of geography and the drama of the period is Gillies (1994). See also Bartels (1993), Matei-Chesnoiu (2012) and McInnis (2013). A standard reference work here continues to be Sugden (1925). 6 The concept of translatio is pivotal to Fuchs’s revision of the representation of Spain in the drama in Fuchs (2013). See Newman and Tylus eds (2015). 7 Work on Seneca and the usual suspects of early modern English drama abounds. Daniel Cadman’s timely work (2015) sheds new light on the marginalized closet drama of Mary Sidney, Samuel Daniel, Samuel Brandon, Fulke Greville, Sir William Alexander and Elizabeth Cary.

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8 See Gibbons (1980). Jonson is also part of an Aristophanic and a Lucianic tradition. 9 For a succinct survey, see Alexander (2015). See also Norton ed. (1999). 10 See Bliss (1990). Other useful introductions to the genre of tragicomedy are Pollard (2015) and Foster (2004: 35–95). Waith (1952) remains indispensable. 11 See Smith (1912) and Lea (1934). See also Robert Henke (2002 and 2008). Katritzky’s work (2006) on the visual resources deserves greater recognition than it has received so far. 12 Praz (1958: 90–145) is still valuable, as is recent work on Machiavelli and/in translation that has not yet filtered down to the study of the early modern drama. This includes Anglo (2005), Petrina (2009 and 2018) and De Pol ed. (2010). 13 See also Miola’s introduction to Jonson (2008) and Camard (2008). Still valuable is the section devoted to Jonson’s masques, the representations of Venice and the Aretino connection in Mulryne and Shewring eds (1991: 73–137). 14 See also Clubb (1989, esp. 205–29). Anston Bosman has sought to adapt the term to ‘culturegram’ to discuss the imperial theme in classical, early modern Dutch and early modern English literature; see Bosman (2006). 15 Renaissance Drama 36/37 (2010) is a themed issue devoted to ‘Italy in the Drama of Europe’ and pays tribute to Clubb’s pioneering work. 16 The traditional story has recently been reviewed and expanded by Richard Hillman (2012: 94–149). 17 It may also explain how it seems to have been precisely plays that reflected on more or less current international events that became causes célèbres in the discussion over early modern theatre censorship: Chapman’s Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois, as well as Sir Thomas More, Sir John van Olden Barnavelt and A Game at Chess. 18 See also Kirk (1997). 19 The search for ‘Lazarillo’ in the drama was one of the reasons to compile An Index of Characters in Early Modern English Drama: Printed Plays, 1500–1660 (Berger, Bradfield and Sondergard eds 1998: 1). 20 See also Ardila ed. (2009). 21 See Wikland (1971), Hilton (1983), Limon (1985) and Schrickx (1986). 22 Jakob Ayrer also represents a vital connection in the continental genealogy of Much Ado About Nothing, The Tempest and many other plays; see Cohn (1865: lxi–lxxv). Ayrer’s Comedia von der schönen Sidea (c. 1600) reveals intriguing resemblances with The Tempest, which it predates by roughly a decade. 23 See also Abrahamse (1997). 24 The translation includes a dedication to the translator’s kinsman Sir Edward Dymock. Rodenburgh takes idiosyncratic imagery from the English version of the play, and in a number of places the Dutch play contains telling Anglicisms. 25 Bosman’s fine article has gained the status of a manifesto for internationalizing early modern English drama studies.

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26 See also Hoenselaars and Helmers (2016). 27 See also Vaughan and Vaughan (2012: 8–10). 28 See also Seidler (2013: xvii). 29 The ‘Polyglot Encounters’ book series, initiated by Ladan Niayesh (Université de Paris) and Laetitia Sansonetti (Université Paris Nanterre), appears with Brepols.

REFERENCES Abrahamse, W. (1997), Het toneel van Theodore Rodenburgh (1574–1644), Amsterdam: AD&L. Akhimie, P. (2018), Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World, New York: Routledge. Alexander, G. (2015), ‘The Classics in Literary Criticism’, in P. Cheney and P. Hardie (eds), The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature: Volume 2 (1558–1660), 87–101, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Anglo, S. (2005), Machiavelli-The First Century: Studies in Enthusiasm, Hostility, and Irrelevance, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ardila, J. A. G., ed. (2009), The Cervantean Heritage: Reception and Influence of Cervantes in Britain, Abingdon and New York: Legenda. Baldwin, T. W. (1944), William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, vol. 2, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Barbour, R. (2003), Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bartels, E. C. (1993), Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bate, J. (1994), Shakespeare and Ovid, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bate, J. (1999), ‘Elizabethan Translation: The Art of the Hermaphrodite’, in S. Chew and A. Stead (eds), Translating Life: Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics, 33–51, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Bate, J. (2019), How the Classics Made Shakespeare, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Berger, T. L., W. C. Bradfield and S. L. Sondergard, eds (1998), An Index of Characters in Early Modern English Drama: Printed Plays, 1500–1660, rev. edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bevington, D. (1998), ‘Cultural Exchange: Gascoigne and Ariosto at Gray’s Inn in 1566’, in M. Marrapodi (ed.), The Italian World of English Renaissance Drama, 25–40, Delaware: University of Delaware Press. Blake, N. (1981), Non-standard Language in English Literature, London: Deutsch. Blank, P. (1996), Broken English: Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings, London: Routledge. Bliss, L. (1990), ‘Pastiche, Burlesque, Tragicomedy’, in A. R. Braunmuller and M. Hattaway (eds), The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, 237–61, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Boas, F. S., ed. (1901), The Works of Thomas Kyd, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bosman, A. (2004), ‘Renaissance Intertheater and the Staging of Nobody’, English Literary History, 71 (3): 559–85. Bosman, A. (2006), ‘“Best Play with Mardian”: Eunuch and Blackamoor as Imperial Culturegram’, Shakespeare Studies, 34 (2006): 123–57. Brandt, G. H., ed. (1993), German and Dutch Theatre, 1600–1848, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burke, P. (2005), ‘The Renaissance Translator as Go-Between’, in A. Höfele and W. von Koppenfels (eds), Renaissance Go-Betweens: Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe, 17–31, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Burke, P. and R. Po-chia Hsia, eds (2007), Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cadman, D. (2015), Sovereigns and Subjects in Early Modern Neo-Senecan Drama: Republicanism, Stoicism and Authority, Farnham: Ashgate. Camard, C. (2008), ‘L’Italie selon Shakespeare et Ben Jonson: l’altérité dans un théâtre sans décor’, Revue LISA, 6 (3): 246–61. Chambers, E. K. (1923), The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clubb, L. G. (1989), Italian Drama in Shakespeare’s Time, New Haven: Yale University Press. Clubb, L. G. (1998), ‘Intertextualities: Some Questions’, in M. Marrapodi (ed.), The Italian World of English Renaissance Drama, 179–89, Delaware: University of Delaware Press. Cohen, W. (1985), Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Cohn, A. (1865), Shakespeare in Germany in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: An Account of English Actors in Germany and the Netherlands and of the Plays Performed by Them during the Same Period, London: Asher. De Pol, R., ed. (2010), The First Translations of Machiavelli’s ‘Prince’ from the Sixteenth to the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Dekker, T. (1979), The Shoemaker’s Holiday, ed. R. L. Smallwood and S. Wells, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Delabastita, D. and T. Hoenselaars (2015), ‘“If but as Well I Other Accents Borrow, That Can My Speech Diffuse”: Multilingual Perspectives on English Renaissance Drama’, in D. Delabastita and T. Hoenselaars (eds), Multilingualism in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Dimmock, M. (2005), New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England, Aldershot: Ashgate. Dimmock, M. (2013), Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern English Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eckhardt, E. (1910–11), Die Dialekt- und Ausländertypen des älteren Englischen Dramas, Materialien zur Kunde des älteren Dramas, nos. 27 and 32, Louvain: A. Uystpruyst. Erne, L. and K. Seidler, eds (2020), ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Romeo and Juliet’: ‘Der Bestrafte Brudermord’ and ‘Romio und Julieta’ in Translation, London: Arden Shakespeare.

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Evans, R. J. (2009), Cosmopolitan Islanders: British Historians and the European Continent, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Floyd-Wilson, M. (2003), English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foster, V. A. (2004), The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy, London: Routledge. Fuchs, B. (2013), The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Gibbons, B. (1980), Jacobean City Comedy: A Study of Satiric Plays by Jonson, Marston and Middleton, 2nd edn, London: Methuen. Gillies, J. (1994), Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gosson, S. (1582), Playes Confuted in Fiue Actions, London. Greenblatt, S. (1988), Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Griffin, E. J. (2009), English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain: Ethnopoetics and Empire, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hall, K. F. (1995), Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Helmers, H. (2016), ‘The Politics of Mobility: Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Jan Vos’s Aran en Titus and the Poetics of Empire’, in J. Bloemendal and N. Smith (eds), Politics and Aesthetics in European Baroque and Classicist Tragedy, 344–72, Leiden: Brill. Henke, R. (1997), Pastoral Transformations: Italian Tragicomedy and Shakespeare’s Late Plays, London: Associated University Presses. Henke, R. (2002), Performance and Literature in the Commedia dell’Arte, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Henke, R. (2008), ‘Border-Crossing in the Commedia dell’Arte’, in R. Henke and E. Nicholson (eds), Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater, 19–34, Aldershot: Ashgate. Henke, R. and E. Nicholson, eds (2008), Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater, Aldershot: Ashgate. Henke, R. and E. Nicholson, eds (2014), Transnational Mobilities in Early Modern Theater, Farnham: Ashgate. Hillman, R. (2002), Shakespeare, Marlowe and the Politics of France, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Hillman, R. (2010), French Origins of English Tragedy, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hillman, R. (2012), French Reflections in the Shakespearean Tragic: Three Case Studies, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hilton, J. (1988), ‘The “Englische Komedianten” in German-Speaking States, 1592–1620: A Generation of Touring Performers as Mediators between English and German Cultures’, PhD diss., University of Oxford. Hoenselaars, T. (1996), ‘Machiavelli and “Belfagor” in Seventeenth-Century English Drama’, in J. Leerssen and M. Spiering (eds), Machiavelli: Figure-Reputation, 111–30, Amsterdam: Rodopi.

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Hoenselaars, T. (1998), ‘The Politics of Prose and Drama: The Case of Machiavelli’s “Belfagor”’, in M. Marrapodi (ed.), The Italian World of English Renaissance Drama, 106–21, Delaware: University of Delaware Press. Hoenselaars, T. and W. Abrahamse (1996), ‘Theodore Rodenburgh and English Studies’, in J. Roding and L. Heerma van Voss (eds), The North Sea and Culture (1550–1800), 324–39, Hilversum: Verloren. Hoenselaars, T. and C. Calvo (2010), ‘Shakespeare Eurostar: Calais, the Continent, and the Operatic Fortunes of Ambroise Thomas’, in W. Maley and M. Tudeau-Clayton (eds), Shakespeare and Englishness: New Angles on Englishness and the Bard, 147–64, London: Ashgate. Hoenselaars, T. and H. Helmers (2016), ‘The Spanish Tragedy and Its Continental Contexts’, in N. Cinpous (ed.), Doing Kyd, 144–70, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hutchings, M. (2017), Turks, Repertories, and the Early Modern Stage, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jakobson, R. (1959), ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’, in R. A. Brower (ed.), On Translation, 232–9, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jones, R. F. (1966), The Triumph of the English Language: A Survey of Opinions Concerning the Vernacular from the Introduction of Printing to the Restoration, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Jones, R. C. (1970), ‘Italian Settings and the “World” of Elizabethan Tragedy’, Studies in English Literature, 10 (2): 251–68. Jonson, B. (2012), The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, gen. eds D. Bevington, M. Butler and I. Donaldson, 7 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Katritzky, M. A. (2006), The Art of Commedia: A Study in the Commedia dell’Arte (1560–1620). With Special Reference to the Visual Records, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Keener, A. S. (2018), ‘Printed Plays and Polyglot Books: The Multilingual Textures of Early Modern English Drama’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 112 (4): 481–511. Keener, A. S. (2020), ‘Samuel Daniel’s The Queenes Arcadia and the Translation of Italian Pastoral Tragicomedy in Renaissance England’, Shakespeare Studies, 48: 74–9. Kirk, A. M. (1997), The ‘Mirror of Confusion’: The Representation of French History in English Renaissance Drama, New York: Routledge. Kyd, T. (2013), The Spanish Tragedy, ed. Clara Calvo and Jesús Tronch Perez, London: Arden Shakespeare. Lea, K. M. (1934), Italian Popular Comedy: A Study in the Commedia dell’arte, 1560–1620, with Special Reference to the English Stage, 2 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Limon, J. (1985), Gentlemen of a Company: English Players in Central and Eastern Europe, 1590–1660, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Loftis, J. (1986), Renaissance Drama in England and Spain: Topical Allusion and History Plays, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Matei-Chesnoiu, M. (2012), Re-Imagining Western European Geography in English Renaissance Drama, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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McInnis, D. (2013), Mind-Travelling and Voyage Drama in Early Modern England, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. McJannet, L. (2006), The Sultan Speaks: Dialogue in English Plays and Histories about the Ottoman Turks, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. McMillin, S. (1974), ‘The Book of Seneca in The Spanish Tragedy’, Studies in English Literature, 14 (2): 201–8. Miola, R. S. (1994), Shakespeare and Classical Comedy: The Influence of Plautus and Terence, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miola, R. S. (1992), Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Seneca, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mullaney, S. (1983), ‘Strange Things, Gross Terms, Curious Customs: The Rehearsal of Cultures in the Late Renaissance’, Representations, 3: 40–67. Mulryne, J. R. and M. Shewring, eds (1991), Theatre of the English and Italian Renaissance, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Newman, K. and J. Tylus, eds (2015), Early Modern Cultures of Translation, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Norton, G., ed. (1999), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 3: The Renaissance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Il pastor fido: or The Faithfull Shepheard. Translated out of Italian into English (1602), London. Petrina, A. (2009), Machiavelli in the British Isles: Two Early Modern Translations of ‘The Prince’, Farnham: Ashgate. Petrina, A. (2018), ‘Translating Machiavelli’s Prince in Early Modern England: New Manuscript Evidence’, Manuscript Studies, 3 (2): 302–33. Praz, M. ([1958] 1973), The Flaming Heart: Essays on Crashaw, Machiavelli, and Other Studies in the Relations between Italian and English Literature from Chaucer to T. S. Eliot, 90–145, New York: Norton. Randall, D. B. J. and J. C. Boswell (2009), Cervantes in Seventeenth-Century England: The Tapestry Turned, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Saenger, M. (2015), Interlinguicity, Internationality, and Shakespeare, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Samson, A. (2013), ‘Lazarillo de Tormes and the Picaresque in Early Modern England’, in A. Hadfield (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1550–1640, 121–36, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schrickx, W. (1986), Foreign Envoys and Travelling Players in the Age of Shakespeare and Jonson, Wetteren: Universa. Seidler, K. (2013), ‘Shakespeare on the German Wanderbühne in the Seventeenth Century: Romio und Julieta and Der Bestrafte Brudermord’, PhD diss., University of Geneva. Shakespeare, W. (2001), King Henry VI Part Three, ed. J. D. Cox and E. Rasmussen, Arden Shakespeare Third Series, London: Arden Shakespeare. Shakespeare, W. (2011), The Tempest, ed. A. T. Vaughan and V. M. Vaughan, Arden Shakespeare Third Series, London: Arden Shakespeare. Shakespeare, W. (2016), Hamlet, rev. edn, ed. A. Thompson and N. Taylor, Arden Shakespeare Third Series, London: Arden Shakespeare.

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Simons, J. (2018), Jonson, the Poetomachia, and the Reformation of Renaissance Satire: Purging Satire, London: Routledge. Smith, W. (1912), The Commedia dell’Arte: A Study in Italian Popular Comedy, New York: Columbia University Press. Sugden, E. H. (1925), A Topographical Dictionary to the Works of Shakespeare and His Fellow Dramatists, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Vaughan, A. and V. Mason Vaughan (2012), Shakespeare in America, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vitkus, D. J. (2003), Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Waith, E. M. (1952), The Pattern of Tragicomedy in Beaumont and Fletcher, New Haven: Yale University Press. Wikland, E. (1971), Elizabethan Players in Sweden, 1591–92, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. Williams, D. (2004), The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 4.2

Playing companies and repertories ELIZABETH E. TAVARES

On a trip to England in autumn 1599, Thomas Platter recorded attending two performances and capturing the hallmarks of play-going at the end of the sixteenth century: the wherry across the Thames, the thatch of an outdoor playhouse, the early afternoon curtain time, cross-dressing, a substantial cast and a jig. After lunch, Platter and his fellows took in ‘the tragedy of the first Emperor Julius Caesar’, possibly by William Shakespeare or one of his contemporaries (1937: 166–7). So taken by the experience, ‘on another occasion’ in the ‘suburb of Bishopsgate, if I remember’ they again took in a meal and play: ‘thus daily at two in the afternoon, London has two, sometimes three plays running in different places, competing with each other, and those which play best obtain most spectators … How much time then they may merrily spend daily at the play everyone knows who has ever seen them play or act’. That he offers two examples of plays seen is purposeful rather than haphazard recollection, providing a summation of what it was usually like to see theatre in this particular country. Theatre operates as a memory machine here, to use Marvin Carlson’s phrase (2003), organizing Platter’s personal history of watching wherein play-going experiences make meaning by comparison to one another. In early modern England at court, the Inns of Court and for the public, theatregoing experiences like that of Platter were structured by means of the repertory system, which influenced the composition of plays, spurred innovation in stage technology and mitigated financial risk. Performing a different play up to six afternoons a week, early modern players might have had upwards of twenty different parts in hand at a given moment. Playing companies typically rented playhouses in one-week to six-month periods, during which time one might attend a performance by the Lord Strange’s troupe to see spectacular pyrotechnics or a Lord Admiral’s play for narratives of the ancient world requiring props of epic scale (Manley 2001: 115–29; Tavares 2016: 393–6). By contrast, travelling around the country the Queen’s players offered historical fictions trimmed with tumbling, specialized sound effects and metonymic blocking to effect compelling battle scenes (Calore 2003: 398). The repertory system thus enabled troupes to vary their plays, distributing the labour of performance among their members while capitalizing on

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playgoers’ personal genealogies of watching. As an invitation to those interested in pursuing the study of repertories, this chapter offers a brief overview of the system’s development from court and civic performance practices, a survey of the working conditions employed by playing companies, and five theses from which to foray into the field of repertory study. Interspersed with choral interludes on terms, the extant archive, and that archive’s limitations, it concludes with recommendations of databases from which new work might spring and essential reading from which to intervene, thus gesturing towards avenues yet to be explored. Emphasized in genealogies of repertory’s origins in England has been the assumption that this system arose out of playing companies’ need to offer a changing diet of plays to a relatively stable population. A recent example typifies the usual narrative: ‘The large numbers of Londoners and visitors to the city who flocked to this novel entertainment of professionally staged plays developed an appetite which demanded constant change’, presuming one ‘could not run a play for long without losing your audiences’ (Gurr and Ichikawa 2000: 15). Under-appreciated has been the ways in which this repertory system may have also been shaped by the revels calendar and changes to the Revels Office purview. The essential function of the Revels Office was to devise and produce occasional entertainment for the court. From masques and plays to dances and tumbling feats, the court revel shaped the artistic agenda of religious holidays, such as the twelve days of Christmastide and at Shrovetide, as well as dynastic or diplomatic occasions. Significantly, ‘by longestablished precedent, revels held on state occasions were connected thematically to the substance of the negotiations then in hand’ (Streitberger 2016: 23). Religious and state occasions for revels were typically multi-day to multi-week affairs, requiring the Revels Office to develop a diverse portfolio of artistic experiences. Scheduling of public playing using the repertory system echoes this initial curating of performance for political ends as relied upon in other long-standing civic performance traditions such as medieval religious pageant wagons and Lord Mayor’s shows. The expansion of the Revels Office commission in 1581 (granting the then Master Edmund Tilney both the right to acquire goods and services under the royal right of purveyance and to license playing companies and venues) brought the curated structure of revels performance to the public playhouses, contributing to a spike in the number of playing companies (Wickham et al. 2000: 70–1). In effect, with the new prerogative to use professional playing companies, paid through a system of ‘rewards’ rather than year-long salaried ‘servants’, the Master of the Revels Office’s ‘traditional function as deviser and producer of in-house entertainment’ was moved ‘out of court and into a quasi-commercial environment’ (Streitberger 2016: 154). The different aristocratic titles by which playing companies came to be known in civic records as ‘servants’, ‘players’ and ‘men’ may thus have had legal implications for their relative status. More importantly, however, the Revels Office was now able to outsource the labour of devising, purchasing costumes and props, and the performance of plays to independent playing companies, ensuring the control of production costs by off-loading the risks of developing new work outside the court budget. Preparing plays for a court season provided a homologous framework within which to perform a rotating repertory of plays for the public. This labour

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redistribution produced new problems for the companies, however, specifically in sourcing materials for the production of theatre such as props, personnel, costumes and other materials necessary for storytelling. The Revels Office had come to comprise a large staff, including two to three dozen Yeomen of the Revels, including ‘karvers’ or property-makers, and benefitted from networked relationships between the Great Wardrobe and the Office of the Works. The primary role of a Yeoman was to design and oversee the fabrication of the costumes and headpieces essential to the Tudor masque and to recycle by way of tailoring and embroidery from the sovereign’s standing wardrobe, availed by exclusive contracts with London mercers and milliners (Streitberger 2016: 27–8). While the Office of the Works dealt with the needs for seating arrangements and stages, property-makers were subcontracted for a range of scenery and specialized props. With the move towards outsourcing the work of revels development to playing companies, there was no centralized system for procuring the basic materials of play production beyond playtexts and players hitherto supplied by the highly skilled Revels Office yeomanry. Understanding the development of the repertory system for public performance as responding not only to playgoers’ presumed desire for variety but also the changing fiscal purview of the Revels Office recasts the unique role of these companies as a privatized solution to civic budget constraints. For example, rather than the Yeomen, playhouse landlord Philip Henslowe indicates the coachman Symes, Steven the ‘tyerman’, and ‘hime wch made ther propertyes’ managed the fundamental gear of their respective troupes (Henslowe 2002: 130, 50, 203; Korda 2011: 32–7, 93–143). While unknown in all other aspects of their lives except for in the passing reference in Henslowe’s diary as contributing artisans to the work of theatre, the tailors Radford and Dover became the go-to craftsmen for specialty needlework, such as the ‘payer of hosse for [Nick] to tvmbell in be fore the quen’ when Goody Watson’s voluminous store of cast-off clothes came up short (Henslowe 2002: 169, 180–1, 186, 160–1). Theatre wives and widows were a cornerstone of the English entertainment industry, as Natasha Korda has shown, owning three of the four major inn-yards that were sites for performance activity (2002: 26–7, 54–92; Kathman 2009: 144–78). Likewise, a Southwark silk weaver, John Reasonable, a ‘blacman’, may have similarly contributed to the costuming of plays at the Rose theatre (Habib  2015: 140). In 1599, Platter encountered a robust public theatre industry re-aligned as a distributed network of contributing artists within and without the walls of the playhouses and relying on its repertory system to bring those labours under one roof.

CHORUS: ON TERMS To understand its influence on the composition of plays, on the innovation in stage technology and as a strategy for mitigating financial risk, it is useful to think of the repertory system as twofold. First, repertory refers to the day-to-day rotation of different plays performed by the same stable of actors, referred to as a ‘company in stocke generall’ or ‘stock company’ (Henslowe 2002: 210). Individual plays were rarely performed twice in the same week, and available records show no signs that organization, regularity or pre-determined scheduling were thematically derived.

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Recent work by Holger Schott Syme suggests that companies may have alternated between comedies (ensemble-driven) and tragedies (lead player- or sharer-driven) in their scheduling in order to equitably distribute labour and stave off physical exhaustion (2019: 43). Mounting a new play could take from a few days up to three weeks, with rehearsals largely untaken in private study (Stern 2000: 46–73). Repertoire, on the other hand, refers to the skills of individual actors, such as being able to play an instrument, fight or dance, and other forms of kinetic intelligence. Evelyn Tribble positions actors’ skills within a framework of cognitive ecology wherein ‘skilled practices are inseparable from expert viewing … built through the reciprocal and recursive relationships among skill-building, display, competition, and evaluation’ (2015: 20). For example, knowing that one always entered stageleft and exited stage-right would mean one less bit of blocking to memorize, offloading into the playhouse architecture itself cognitive labour. This terminological distinction between ‘repertory’ and ‘repertoire’ is crucial in order to mark the aesthetic choices made by individuals (the players) as opposed to financial choices made as a collective (the troupe). Scholars have offered a range of labels to clarify the agency of playing companies, such as ‘actor-collectives’, ‘syndicates’ and ‘weak fellowships’, to better characterize this dynamic marketplace (Hirschfeld 2004: 17; Keenan 2014: 17; van Es 2013: 106). While few habits of rehearsal, performance or playhouse design can be considered formalized, collaboration is evident from the Elizabethan period through the long eighteenth century. Writing teams could comprise up to four or more contributors, and playing companies averaged between fourteen and twenty players. Within the troupe was usually a three-part hierarchy comprising sharers (actors with a financial stake in the company), hired men (workers bound to a company for a temporary period including actors, musicians, stage-keepers and other theatre-makers) and apprentices or boy actors. It was this ensemble, with their varying repertoires of skills and type-cast specialties, that was recycled through a great variety of new, revised or revived plays. Companies used the repertory system to construct diverse portfolios of dramatic properties in order to manage the risks of innovation, in topic and in staging, against the safety of adapting, revising and reviving old playtexts.

WORKING CONDITIONS In March 1598, at the north throat of London Bridge, the Sun Tavern in New Fish Street played host to a flurry of theatrical activity. There the theatre company known as the Lord Admiral’s players borrowed five shillings ‘to spend at the Readyng’ of a new playbook they were considering adding to their stock of plays, the now lost ‘Famous Wars of Henry I and the Prince of Wales’ (Henslowe 2002: 88). A product of a playwriting team comprising Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker and Michael Drayton, the play had been developed through a collaborative process Heather Hirschfeld has demonstrated was typical of English Renaissance drama (2004). In addition to the reading of the newly purchased play, either on the same day or later that month, the company bought a play called ‘Earl Godwin and His Three Sons’ from Drayton, Dekker, Chettle and Robert Wilson, at which time additional funds

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were spent at the ‘tavarn in fyshstreate for good cheare’. Another instance of group reading at the Sun suggests that companies may have read plays while in process: ‘layd owt for the companye when they Read the playe of Jeffa for wine at the tavern dd vnto thomas downton’ (Henslowe 2002: 201). Note that by the time Admiral’s read the play Jephthah as a group, they had only made a small payment ‘in earnest’ for the work and not for the book in full (Teramura 2016). The business in the Sun that March shines a rare ray of light on the ways in which playing companies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries developed their stock of plays. Compelling about these two meetings is that the company (or at least some part of it) came together to read the play rather than appoint an individual to vet it on their behalf. While it is unclear the degree to which this was a formal activity or if the sharers read in unison or independently, it is unlikely that it would have looked like today’s table- or staged-readings that are now codified aspects of the play development process. As playbooks were not inexpensive items, it seems unlikely that multiple copies would have been dispersed or that cue scripts had already been produced at this stage. An informal public reading around a pub table, where parts were read over shoulders and the book handed back and forth, seems a plausible scenario, although tavern layouts varied widely. It would provide opportunities for members to comment on the complexity of specific staging requirements as they encountered them such as casting and doubling capabilities, consider specialty expenses and artistically respond to the craft of a given scene, act or speech. This might mean, however, that members of the public would have access to this advance content, which might explain why the companies used a variety of spaces for business, including the Queen’s Head, the Mermaid and the Red Cross (Henslowe 2002: 175, 178, 184–5, 214). The agenda of company meetings included other business as well, destabilizing the assumption that a de facto individual served the function of an artistic director commonplace today. When ‘reckneyd to geather[,] the company’ seems to have carried out decisions and were perhaps also ‘payd wages’ (Henslowe 2002: 191). Nothing seemed to better lubricate the work of playing than food. In addition to the wine and drink that was a part of readings, company meetings were routinely held over meals: Layd owt at the A poyntment of the company toward ther supe to mr mason at the quenes head Lent vnto the company the 29 of auguste 1601 to paye the Jewrey […] [and] the clarke of the [assizes] […] [and] ower diner Layd owt for the company the 21 of septmbʒ 1601 for ower metynge at the tavern when we did eatte ower vensone Layd owt for the company at the mermayd when we weare at owre a grement the 21 of auguste 1602 toward our supe (Henslowe 2002: 178, 180, 182, 214) In all cases, ‘the company’ borrowed money to fund the work of the meeting, suggested by the absolute possessive pronouns of ‘their’ and ‘our’. In another such meeting at ‘the eagell & the chillde’, Chettle borrowed money for a partial payment ‘of A Boocke called the Rissynge of carnoll wollsey’, and Henslowe purchased either

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a play called ‘holberd[es]’ or, more likely, halberds – props frequently called for in military plays (Dessen and Thomson 1999: 107–8; Henslowe 2002: 184–5). References to the Sun not only suggest the site was closely affiliated with the playhouse industry, but curated together the allusions create a little repertory of their own. In the Prince’s Men play No Wit/Help Like a Woman’s (Middleton 1657), Master Weatherwise exclaims the ‘Sun’s in New Fishstreet’ after a pageant of the signs of the zodiac (2.1.483–4). The clown Peccadill threads puns about going to the sun to get dry, a euphemism for sobriety, throughout and eventually accuses others of stealing a ‘Sun-cup … out o’th’Sun-Tavern’ (2.1.377–78). Allusions to bull and bear gardens in the same scene reinforce a connection between the variety of entertainment venues in the parish and the Sun Tavern. John Lyly’s Galatea (1592) likewise relies on the topographic allusion in order to undermine the supposed expertise of the Astronomer mid-instruction to one of three boys in search of a profession: astronomer

I can tell the minute of thy byrth, the moment of thy death, and the manner […] When I list I can sette a trap for the Sunne, catch the Moone with lyme-twigges, and goe a batfowling for starres […] Nothing can happen which I fore-see not, nothing shall. rafe

I hope sir you are no more then a God. astronomer

I can bring the twelue signes out of theyr Zodiacks, and hang them vp at Tauerns. (sig. E1v) The Sun offers a snapshot of not only how a repertory was developed but also the way in which mnemonic repertories might be demarcated. While No Wit and Galatea were never performed in a dedicated repertory together, that they both reference the same locale gestures towards a cultural repertory. For example, Robert Herrick conveys the sense of convivial composition in tavern spaces, described as ‘Lyrick Feasts, / Made at the Sun, / The Dog, the Triple Tunne’ where verse derived from poets working in ‘clusters’ to out-do one another (1648: 342–3). Repertory functions here as a cognitive device, activating memory in the context of re-performance, re-hearsal and re-writing both literally in the scheduling of plays, but also in organizing an individual’s interpretation of that drama.

ESSENTIAL KIT: FIVE THESES As the examples above suggest, available for study are both literal repertory lists of plays as well as more figurative, mnemonic repertories activated by the repetition of other material aspects of the performance event. Studying a repertory requires a middle-distant stance that simultaneously takes in a group of playtexts  – an

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ecosystem of mutually inflecting art objects  – while attending to the narrative, character, and dramaturgy specific to each. In light of this double vision, I offer a set of breakable postulates towards a repertory study methodology, sitting as it does at the intersection of literary study, book history and performance theory. 1. Repertory relies on the primacy of recyclability. From building construction to paper-making, early modern culture relied on habits of up- and re-cycling. In demonstrating the reuse of altar scenes in the repertory of the King’s Men  – in Sejanus, Bonduca and The Sea Voyage, among others  – John Kuhn argues that ‘suggested homologies between different pagan sites are only visible when we think across swathes of texts, as the theatre produced this not just within individual plays but also through accumulation and repetition across many plays’ (2017: 92). As a cultural priority, recycling materials, plots, costume and even bodies through the use of what we would now call typecasting affords opportunities to consider the ways in which playwrights might have written with specific companies in mind, as well as to consider how repertory activates memory in ways similar to and different from the ‘piquancy of surprise’ that is adaptation (Hutcheon 2006: 4). Habits of recycling can also be understood as extending outside the set of plays owned by a single company and into other repertories, as Mark Hutchings has shown of the sociopolitical construction of the ‘Turk’ play (2017: 19). 2. Repertory is a by-product of collective decision-making for ends economic and aesthetic. Between 1592 and 1600, eight of the 117 plays recorded by title in Henslowe’s papers were performed by three or more separate companies, including The Jew of Malta, Titus Andronicus and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. While this percentage may seem small, it is difficult to tell how widespread this practice of buying and selling, revising and reviving plays was because Henslowe’s records capture, presumably, such a small segment of the marketplace. Negotiating this lostness does not negate the endeavour but rather suggests the field can be better served by strategies familiar to micro-historians focusing on specific events, locations and other small units of research that resist the longue durée meta-narratives to which Shakespeare studies is predisposed. As Lucy Munro has argued, focusing on the repertory context in which plays were written cannot account for every aspect of dramatic creation – no one approach can possibly do this – but it enables a critic to allow for the input of a far greater range of agents[,] to consider companies and audiences in terms other than those of impediments to authorial genius, and[, r]ather than focusing on the individual voice, … pay attention to the full choir. (2003: 28) In allowing a repertory to define the parameters of study, freed from the bands of playwright or back-projected genre ascription, critics can ask new kinds of questions that engage the many lives lived by a play in performance and print.

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3. Repertory is a synchronic phenomenon both culturally specific and historically contingent. Considering a play within the context of its immediate repertory schedule captures a snapshot of the work in a particular moment in time as well as how it might have been relationally understood in that moment. Repertories uniquely allow scholars to construct what Susan Bennett calls the horizon of expectation established for playgoers who not only attended but returned to theatres (1997: 113, 55). For example, regulars to the Whitefriars would have been cued to anticipate boy company plays deeply invested in homoerotic puns, proto-dramatic irony and a self-aware queer politics (Bly 2000). Long-running collaborative habits of the Lord Strange’s players facilitated the staging of human immolation, cuing playgoers to anticipate pyrotechnics ‘to represent acts of cruelty and judicial punishment that had an edge of topical relevance to English history and politics’ (Manley 2001: 115). Repertory studies offers a mountain path into the study of early modern audiences by way of the expectations established by the plays themselves within groups. 4. Repertory is part of the blueprint to the irrecoverable performance event. It has become commonplace in the field of Renaissance studies to acknowledge that print captures, to varying degrees, a theatrical experience facilitated by a playtext. Performance studies relies on the proposition that the performance event is a priori lost because it is an embodied experience conditioned by the specific ensemble members and audiences, changed by the slightest unexpected sneeze or forthcoming political sea change. A study of repertory thus enables scholars to ask questions about the phenomenology afforded by a play in its repertorial context or, to put it another way, enable them to ask what these plays, curated in this sequence or ecosystem of performance, make available. For example, in her study of the affordances of the Globe and Blackfriars playing spaces and their reconstructed kin, Shakespeare’s Globe and the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, Sarah Dustagheer traces ‘a dynamic and interactive relationship between the playhouse and the body of plays performed within it’, specifically in the ways in which they capitalized on their respective urban locations, responded to their specific acoustic and visual environments, and activated topical resonances of the quickly dissipating communal memory of the Protestant Reformation (2017: 170). Repertories and the spaces they envision for the production of the performance event both organize and transmit what Diana Taylor describes as ‘embodied memory: performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing – in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge’ (2003: 20). Repertory was one way the population of early modern England developed to view, live with, retell, recycle and ultimately transmit culturally specific knowledge not easily contained to the page. 5. Repertory is polysemous, revealing affordances of theatre rather than its certainties. A theatre historical approach to the study of repertories allows scholars to identify and put in place delimiting parameters from which to draw generically and culturally specific implications. For example, one such parameter is that of typecasting and part-learning (Palfrey and Stern 2007: 40–9). Parts seemed to have

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been written with specific actors and their ensembles in mind, as evidenced by an elegy for the player Richard Burbage: Hee’s gone and with him what a world are dead. Which he reviv’d, to be revived soe, No more young Hamlett, ould Heironymoe, Kind Leer, the Greved Moore, and more beside, That lived in him; have now for ever dy’de. (Nungezer 1929: 74) The poem, surviving in various versions and personal commonplace books, curates a little repertory of Burbage’s most memorable parts. The repertory system was ideal for cultivating, as Paul Menzer argues, a regular theatre-going public seeing in play after play a somewhat stable body of actors, particularly the sharers and master players by virtue of their financial stake in the company (2011). The repeated use of the body of Burbage threads together Hamlet, The Spanish Tragedy, King Lear and Othello and serves as the recycled feature by which these plays can be interpreted in relation to one another. It likewise attests, just as Platter, to the fact that plays were experienced and remembered in sets. As parts were written with specific bodies in mind, so too may plays have been written with specific properties in mind; without a substantially sized yet moveable cauldron, a company would not be capable of executing the basic requirements of Macbeth or The Jew of Malta, for example. Such requirements alongside their repetitions facilitate a mnemonic phenomenon that Carlson argues is specific to theatre as an embodied, temporally constrained genre: Ghosting presents the identical thing [playgoers] have encountered before, although now in a somewhat different context … Because every physical element of the production can be and often is used over and over again in subsequent productions, the opportunities for an audience to bring memories of previous uses to new productions are enormous. (2003: 7–8) The commemorated body of Burbage gestures to a ‘fairly stable ongoing collection of theatregoers, who singly and collectively carry to each new theatre experience a substantial memory of previous experience’, including their favourite players, parts, props and speeches (Carlson 2003: 63). To track the materiality of these repetitions of the company and their stuffs, the study of repertorial patterns and trends enriches rather than forecloses consideration of how theatre participated in the construction of early modern dramatic aesthetics.

CHORUS: ON SURVIVAL The study of repertories relies to some extent on counting  – number of plays, afternoons shillings. While such numbers appeal to a sense of representativeness, they ultimately unveil just how unrepresentative the surviving repertory of early modern drama is, to say nothing of Shakespeare’s oeuvre. Of the estimated three

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thousand plays written or staged before the English civil wars, only approximately 18 per cent, or one in five, survive (Steggle 2015: 8). Another 25 per cent are identifiably ‘lost plays’, where some record exists besides the playtext itself. Not to be understood as an occasion for dismissing the study of repertories altogether, lost play studies has developed a paleontological vocabulary to cope: extant materials are understood as fossils and thus ‘inherently proxies for a missing original’ performance, or, ‘in the language of literary criticism, they are metaphors’ (Steggle 2020: 175). Distinguishing between the hard and soft parts of the fossil record (those documents most and least likely to survive), Matthew Steggle demonstrates the usefulness in thinking of titles as teeth, dialogue bones and playing companies as mudslides, preserving a record synchronically. By taking stock of the extant archive and its blanks, repertory provides a framework within which to consider anew what is meant by ‘representative’. For example, if Shakespeare had a hand in only 0.1 per cent of all the plays staged in early modern England, to say that Romeo and Juliet tells us something normative about early modern visions of amorous love or procreative suitability is problematic. By placing the first performances of that play in the first season after a balcony was installed in the Rose theatre according to recent archaeological finds, and by placing it within a group of plays featuring balconies that season such as The Jew of Malta and The Spanish Tragedy, Romeo and Juliet might perhaps instead say something representative about the visual hierarchies of gender and sexuality in early modern England. In this vein, repertory studies and dramaturgically sympathetic readings have the potential to productively upset narratives about Shakespeare, his contemporaries and the theatre.

PROVISIONS Baked into the early modern repertory system is a logic of seasonality, in part borrowed from the court revels tradition where a sequence of plays was curated during the Christmas holidays. Diaries such as those of Platter, Henslowe and later Samuel Pepys and Gordon Crosse indicate playing troupes likewise curated their plays within a stable set of parameters to better leverage specific expertise and thus accrue returner audiences. By the late sixteenth century there were over a hundred different licensed itinerant entertainers – named as individuals, such as bearwards, and as troupes, such as musicians – active in England, according to the Records of Early English Drama (REED) so far collected. Only fifty-one of these were theatrical troupes, the most of which have not enjoyed the benefit of sustained study. While there are traditional avenues by which to approach the archive of English repertory practices, there remains a great deal of work to be done by expanding our definition of playing spaces and entertainer ensembles. The widespread digitizing efforts of major research libraries, REED and Early English Books Online (EEBO), have excitingly expanded the study of English Renaissance theatre repertories. The cornerstone documents for embarking on such endeavours remain the accounts of the Revels Office for productions by various companies at court, the book of accounts and other manuscripts kept by Henslowe

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for the Rose and Fortune playhouses and the office-book of Sir Henry Herbert when he was Master of the Revels (Knutson 2004: 180–92). It was not uncommon to include a playing company attribution on the title page of a play printed in quarto, which has helped to supplement these lists. It should be noted, however, that the distance between known performance run and extant printing varies widely, from a few years to several decades, so a print date should not be understood to have a consistent bearing on the period when playgoers engaged its performance. Likewise, as plays were frequently traded between companies, such title-page attribution best serves as a snapshot or commemorative souvenir of the play ‘as it was acted’ by that company. These traditional repertory lists are only the most ready-made, and they can benefit from further study. For example, in an effort to uncover the location of the lost Playhouse at Newington Butts, Laurie Johnson framed the eleven days of playing there kept as part of Henslowe’s Rose records as a discrete repertory (2017). If one approaches the study of repertory as place-based, that makes possible the study of repertories specific to the different Inns of Court – law student performances typically grouped together as one unit and in need of differentiation. Future critical editions of plays might experiment with a framework that captures a play for a specific troupe and venue, such as Sonia Massai’s Arden edition of ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore, specifically framed in the context of Queen Henrietta’s troupe and the Cockpit venue (2011). Following the work of David Kathman (2004, 2009), establishing the repertories circulating at inn-yards such as The Bel Savage, Bell, Boar’s Head, Bull, Cross Keys, Saracen’s Head, the recently excavated Red Lion and possibly The George and Tabard inns has also yet to be undertaken. Repertory offers a dynamic framework to explore other kinds of early modern entertainments beyond these venues. Following the example set by Tracey Hill’s groundbreaking work, the Lord Mayor’s shows, annual civic pageants dating back to the sixteenth century and possibly earlier, offer a rich source: each of the major livery companies, from fishmongers and salters to vintners and goldsmiths, yearly devised performances and pageants within the city and on the Thames (2010). As there was no livery company to administer quality control for the profession of player, actors and their apprentices typically kept membership with one of the established livery companies, such as Ben Jonson’s intermittent quarterage as a member of the Worshipful Company of Tylers and Bricklayers (Kathman 2004). There are at least three other avenues of future research in repertory studies ripe for attention. First is the study of the relationship between the post-Protestant Reformation repertory of music for boy choristers and the extant dramatic canon. William Byrd and other composers were under pressure to meet the demand of a new soundscape to replace that of the Catholic mass. Following the work of Tribble (2011 and 2017), Tiffany Stern (2000) and others on training and rehearsal of actors, it seems necessary for theatre historians to better compare notes with musicologists such as Linda Austern (1992) and Ross Duffin (2021) in this area. It seems particularly crucial to particularize the strategies by which boy actors and apprentices developed either niche or a broad array of skills, as recently considered of the present-day all-male Edward’s Boys (McCarthy 2020). Second is the study of

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repertories of other kinds of entertainers that travelled in troupes throughout early modern England and to which REED and work by Siobhan Keenan (2002, 2014) are invaluable. Tumblers, bearwards, puppeteers, jesters, minstrels, harpers, trumpeters and a variety of other entertainers travelled throughout England carrying with them the license of named patrons, including dukes and duchesses, counts and countesses, earls, abbots and other lords. That women could and did patronize companies long before the well-documented Queen’s players seems a crucial next consideration following the work of Korda (2011) and Clare McManus (2002) on women’s labour and performance in the early modern theatre industry. Third, comparison to other repertory practices in use in the seventeenth century by Madrid licensed companies, Venetian opera and German wanderbühne would clarify to what extent repertory was an indicative feature of the European Renaissance experience and how different repertory models framed specific cultures’ engagement with live performance. To these ends, what follows is offered as a primer of scholarship, databases and other resources to fuel new torches in repertory study. 1. Company biographies. A cornerstone genre in the field of repertory study is the company biography. In part due to their clearly constrained timelines and playsets, biographies of boy companies offer a path into this area of study (Austern 1992; Bly 2000; Gair 1982; Hillebrand 1926; McCarthy 2017; Munro 2005; Shapiro 1977). For the adult troupes – perhaps an unnecessary binary that segments the industry in ways early modern playgoers may not have adopted – multiple biographies consider the Admiral’s (Gurr 2009; Rutter 2017), King’s (Aaron 2005; Beckerman 1962; Knutson 1991, 2001; Marino 2011; Munro 2019), and Queen’s (McMillin and MacLean 1998; Ostovich 2014; Ostovich et al. 2009; Walsh 2009) troupes. Two studies of later seventeenth-century companies continue to focus on royal women’s patronage (Collins 2016; Griffith 2014), with further sixteenth-century studies currently in development to accompany the single Strange’s survey (Manley and MacLean 2014). 2. Primary sources. These biographies suture the texts of plays as art objects with archival materials that attest to their stage lives. While there is a wealth of archival materials in terms of manuscripts, printed books and paratexts, without a practised palaeographic eye and healthy travel budget these primary sources can be challenging to encounter. Fortunately, repertory study benefits from a variety of carefully curated and evolving online databases. Critical editions of Henslowe’s diary (1904, 2002, Carson 2005) sit alongside the high-resolution facsimile of the Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project (Ioppolo et  al. 2020). Specialized encyclopaedias such as the Lost Plays Database (McInnis et al. 2009), London Stage Database, 1660–1800 (2020), Shakespeare Documented (Wolfe et al. 2016), Early Modern London Theatres and the suite of online databases linked with the Records of Early English Drama (MacLean 2009) can be supplemented with searches in larger clearing houses such as British History Online (2003), State Papers Online, 1509– 1714 (2020) and Internet Archive, which is particularly useful for locating rare, outof-print and copyright sources. Desk references are the necessary twin to these databases. Transcribed collections of documents typically offer editorial apparatus and descriptive headnotes that

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position the works within their theatre historical contexts (e.g., Greg 1969; Salgado 1975; Milhous and Hume 1991; Evans 1997; Rutter 1999; Wickham et al. 2000; Archer et al. 2014; Wolfe et al. 2016; Shakespeare’s Globe 2020). E. K. Chambers’s four-volume The Elizabethan Stage (1964) is a central text that offers a wealth of archival breadcrumbs and essential postulates to which scholars still regularly return. Several publications from the Museum of London Archaeology are crucial to understanding how these spaces shaped play, as Johnson’s contribution to this volume attests (Bowsher 2012; Bowsher and Miller 2009; Mackinder et al. 2013). When thinking of plays in sets and groups, reference lists can quickly and invaluably make legible unexpected kinships, such as in playing calendars (Harbage and Schoenbaum 1964; Kawachi 1986), annotated maps and topographic indices (Dustagheer 2021; Jenstad 2020; Prockter and Taylor 1979; Sugden 1925). Like the Lost Plays Database, other print and digital encyclopaedias continue to expand our sense of what texts were part of this theatre landscape (Archer et al. 2014; Grantley 2004), perhaps no more so than the magisterial multivolume British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue (Wiggins and Richardson 2012). Targeted volumes such as An Index of Characters in Early Modern English Drama: Printed Plays, 1500–1660 (Berger et  al. 1998) and A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642 (Dessen and Thomson 1999) provide productive pathways to identify trends within, between and across companies. 3. Secondary sources. Additional reading in the discipline takes many forms, with new discoveries and approaches typically appearing in their initial stages by way of edited collections (recently Douglas and MacLean 2006; Kanelos and Kuzusko 2010; McInnis and Steggle 2014; Knutson et al. 2020; Stern 2020), special issues and forums (Cerasano et  al. 2005; McMillin 2001; Munro 2006; Rutter 2010; Tavares and Johnson 2022) frequently deriving from the theatre history seminars held at the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America. Tom Rutter’s historiographic assessment of the field is a crucial guide (2008). Like Knutson’s copious and invaluable articles and monographs, it is hard to overstate the contributions of Richard Dutton between the innovative handbooks (2011), introductory guidebooks (2018) and monographs (2016) he has helmed. Over the last three decades the study of repertory has invested its energies in questions of theatre economics (Astington 1999; Ingram 1992; Syme 2010 and 2012) and company personnel (Baldwin 1961; Bradbrook 1962; Chambers 1963; Craig and Greatley-Hirsch 2017; Matusiak 2014; Murray 1910; Potter 2014; Schlueter 1998, 1999; Schoone-Jongen 2008). Critical race studies should not be overlooked as a necessary component of this area and a great more work to be done (Alsop 1980; Habib 2008; Matar 2005). For methodological complexities, best consulted in addition to Knutson’s work is that of McMillin (1987 and 1989) and Erika T. Lin (2012).

REFERENCES Aaron, M. (2005), Global Economics: A History of the Theater Business, the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men, and Their Plays, 1599–1642, Newark: University of Delaware Press.

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Alsop, J. D. (1980), ‘A Moorish Playing Company in Elizabethan England’, Notes and Queries, 27 (2): 135. Archer, J., E. Clarke and E. Goldring, eds (2014), John Nichols’s The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth: A New Edition of the Early Modern Sources, 5 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Astington, J. H. (1999), English Court Theatre, 1558–1642, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Austern, L. (1992), Music in English Children’s Drama of the Later Renaissance, London: Gordon and Breach. Baldwin, T. W. (1961), The Organization and Personnel of the Shakespearean Company, New York: Russell and Russell. Beckerman, B. (1962), Shakespeare at the Globe, 1599–1609, New York: Macmillan. Bennett, S. (1990), Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, 2nd edn, New York: Routledge. Berger, T. L., W. C, Bradford and S. L. Sondergard, eds (1998), An Index of Characters in Early Modern English Drama: Printed Plays, 1500–1660, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bly, M. (2000), Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans on the Early Modern Stage, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bowsher, J. (2012), Shakespeare’s London Theatreland: Archaeology, History and Drama, London: MOLA. Bowsher, J. and P. Miller (2009), The Rose and the Globe – Playhouses of Shakespeare’s Bankside, Southwark: Excavations 1988–90, London: MOLA. Bradbrook, M. C. (1962), The Rise of the Common Player: A Study of Actor and Society in Shakespeare’s England, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. British History Online (2003), british-history.ac.uk, London: Institute of Historical Research/University of London. Calore, M. (2003), ‘Battle Scenes in the Queen’s Men’s Repertoire’, Notes and Queries, 50 (4): 394–9. Carlson, M. (2003), The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Carson, N. (2005), A Companion to Henslowe’s Diary, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cerasano, S. P., B. D. Palmer and P. Yachnin (2005), ‘Special Issue: Theatrical Movements’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 56 (3): iii–x, 259–353. Chambers, E. K. (1963), ‘Shakespeare and His Company’, in William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 3rd edn, vol. 1, 57–91, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Craig, H. and B. Greatley-Hirsch (2017), ‘Authorship, Company Style, and Horror Vacui’, in Style, Computers, and Early Modern Drama: Beyond Authorship, 164–201, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collins, E. (2016), Queen Henrietta’s Men and the Cockpit Repertory: Drama on the Drury Lane Stage, 1625–1637, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Clubb, L. G. (1989), Italian Drama in Shakespeare’s Time, New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Dessen, A. C. and L. Thomson (1999), A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Douglas, A. and S. MacLean, eds (2006), REED in Review: Essays in Celebration of the First Twenty-Five Years, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Duffin, R. W. (2021), ‘Hidden Music in Early Elizabethan Tragedy’, Early Theatre, 24 (1): 11–61. Dustagheer, S. (2017), Shakespeare’s Two Playhouses: Repertory and Theatre Space at the Globe and the Blackfriars, 1599–1613, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dustagheer, S. (2021), Shakespeare and London: A Dictionary, London: Bloomsbury. Dutton, R., ed. (2011), The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dutton, R. (2016), Shakespeare, Court Dramatist, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dutton, R. (2018), Shakespeare’s Theatre: A History, New York: Wiley Blackwell. Evans, G. B. (1997), Shakespearean Prompt-Books of the Seventeenth Century, bsuva.org/ bsuva/promptbook, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center. Ford, J. (2011), ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, ed. S. Massai, London: Bloomsbury. Gair, W. R. (1982), The Children of Paul’s: The Story of a Theatre Company, 1553–1608, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grantley, D. (2004), English Dramatic Interludes 1300–1580: A Reference Guide, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Greg, W. W. (1969), Dramatic Documents from the Elizabethan Playhouses, 2nd edn, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Griffith, E. (2014), A Jacobean Company and Its Playhouse: The Queen’s Servants at the Red Bull Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gurr, A. (2009), Shakespeare’s Opposites: The Admiral’s Company, 1594–1625, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gurr, A. and M. Ichikawa (2000), Staging in Shakespeare’s Theatres, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Habib, I. (2008), Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677: Imprints of the Invisible, Burlington: Ashgate. Habib, I. (2015), ‘The Resonables of Boroughside, Southwark: An Elizabethan Black Family near the Rose Theatre’, Shakespeare, 11 (2): 135–56. Harbage, A. and S. Schoenbaum (1964), Annals of English Drama, 975–1700, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Henslowe, P. (1904), Henslowe’s Diary, ed. W. W. Greg, 2 vols, London: A. H. Bullen. Henslowe, P. (2002), Henslowe’s Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herrick, R. (1648), Hesperides, London: J. Williams and F. Eglesfield. Hill, T. (2010), Pageantry and Power: A Cultural History of the Early Modern Lord Mayor’s Show, 1585–1639, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hillebrand, H. (1926), The Child Actors: A Chapter in Elizabethan Stage History, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Hirschfeld, H. (2004), Joint Enterprises: Collaborative Drama and the Institutionalization of the English Renaissance Theatre, Boston: University of Massachusetts Press.

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Hutcheon, L. (2006), A Theory of Adaptation, New York: Routledge. Hutchings, M. (2017), Turks, Repertories, and the Early Modern English Stage, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ingram, W. (1992), The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of the Adult Professional Theater in Elizabethan London, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Ioppolo, G., D. Cooper and P. Vetch, eds (2020), Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project, henslowe-alleyn.org.uk, London: Dulwich College. Jenstad, J., ed. (2020), Map of Early Modern London, mapoflondon.uvic.ca, Victoria: University of Victoria. Johnson, L. (2017), Shakespeare’s Lost Playhouse: Eleven Days at Newington Butts, New York: Routledge. Kanelos, P. and M. Kozusko, eds (2010), Thunder at a Playhouse: Essaying Shakespeare and the Early Modern Stage, Selingsgrove: Susquehanna University Press. Kathman, D. (2004), ‘Grocers, Goldsmiths, and Drapers: Freemen and Apprentices in the Elizabethan Theater’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 55 (1): 1–49. Kathman, D. (2009), ‘Alice Layston and the Cross Keys’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 22: 144–78. Kawachi, Y., ed. (1986), Calendar of English Renaissance Drama 1558–1642, New York: Garland Reference Library of the Humanities. Keenan, S. (2002), Travelling Players in Shakespeare’s England, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Keenan, S. (2014), Acting Companies and Their Plays in Shakespeare’s London, London: Bloomsbury. Knutson, R. (1991), The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company, 1594–1613, Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press. Knutson, R. (2001), Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Knutson, R. (2004), ‘Playing Companies and Repertory’, in A. Kinney (ed.), A Companion to Renaissance Drama, 180–92, Malden: Blackwell. Knutson, R., D. McInnis and M. Steggle, eds (2020), Loss and the Literary Culture of Shakespeare’s Time, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Korda, N. (2011), Labours Lost: Women’s Work and the Early Modern English Stage, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kuhn, J. (2017), ‘Sejanus, the King’s Men Altar Scenes, and the Theatrical Production of Paganism’, Early Theatre 20 (2): 77–98. Lin, E. T. (2012), Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. London Stage Database, 1660–1800 (2020), eighteenthcenturydrama.amdigital.co.uk/ LondonStage, Marlborough: Adam Matthew. Lyly, J. (1592), Gallathea, London: I. Charlwoode and W. Broome. Mackinder, A., L. Blackmore, J. Bowsher and C. Phillpotts (2013), The Hope Playhouse, Animal Baiting and Later Industrial Activity at Bear Gardens on Bankside: Excavations at Riverside House and New Globe Walk, Southwark, 1999–2000, London: MOLA.

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MacLean, S., ed. (1979–), Records of Early English Drama, 28+ vols, reed.utoronto.ca/ print-collections-2/print-collections, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. MacLean, S., ed. (2009–), Early Modern London Theatres, emlot.library.utoronto.ca, University of Toronto/Kings College London/University of Southampton. MacLean S., ed. (2016–), Records of Early English Drama Online, ereed.library.utoronto. ca, Toronto: University of Toronto Libraries. MacLean S., ed. (2016–), Records of Early English Drama: Patrons and Performances, reed.library.utoronto.ca, Toronto: University of Toronto Libraries. Manley, L. (2001), ‘Playing with Fire: Immolation in the Repertory of Strange’s Men’, Early Theatre, 4: 115–29. Manley, L. and S. MacLean (2014), The Lord Strange’s Men and Their Plays, New Haven: Yale University Press. Marino, J. J. (2011), Owning William Shakespeare: The King’s Men and Their Intellectual Property, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Matar, N. (2005), Britain and Barbary, 1589–1689, Gainesville: University of Florida Press. Matusiak, C. (2014), ‘Elizabeth Beeston, Sir Lewis Kirke, and the Cockpit’s Management during the English Civil Wars’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 27: 161–91. McCarthy, H. R. (2020), Performing Early Modern Drama beyond Shakespeare: Edward’s Boys, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCarthy, J. H. (2017), The Children’s Troupes and the Transformation of English Theater 1509–1608: Pedagogue, Playwrights, Playbooks, and Play-Boys, New York: Routledge. McInnis, D. and M. Steggle, eds (2014), Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England, London: Palgrave Macmillan. McInnis, D. and M. Steggle, eds (2021), Shakespeare and Lost Plays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McInnis, D., M. Steggle and M. Teramura, eds (2009–), Lost Plays Database, lostplays. folger.edu, Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library. McManus, C. (2002), Women on the Renaissance Stage: Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing in the Stuart Court, Manchester: Manchester University Press. McMillin, S. (1987), The Elizabethan Theatre and The Book of Sir Thomas More, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. McMillin, S. (1989), ‘Building Stories: Greg, Fleay, and the Plot of 2 “Seven Deadly Sins”’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 4: 53–62. McMillin, S., ed. (2001), ‘Issues in Review: Reading Acting Companies’, Early Theatre, 4 (1): 111–48. McMillin, S. and S. MacLean (1998), The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Menzer, Paul. (2011), ‘Crowd Control’, in J. A. Low and N. Myhill (eds), Imagining the Audience in Early Modern Drama, 1558–1642, 19–36, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Middleton, T. (1657), No Wit/Help Like a Woman’s, London: H. Moseley.

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Milhous, J. and R. D. Hume, eds (1991), A Register of English Theatrical Documents, 1660–1737, 2 vols, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Munro, L. (2003), ‘Early Modern Drama and the Repertory Approach’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 42: 1–33. Munro, L. (2005), Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Munro, L., ed. (2006), ‘Issues in Review: Popular Theatre and the Red Bull’, Early Theatre, 9 (2): 99–156. Munro, L. (2019), Shakespeare in the Theatre: The King’s Men, London: Bloomsbury. Murray, J. T. (1910), English Dramatic Companies, 1558–1642, 2 vols, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Nungezer, E. (1929), A Dictionary of Actors, New Haven: Yale University Press. Ostovich, H. (2014), ‘Knights and Daze: The Place of Romance in the Queen’s Men’s Repertory’, in S. Bennett and M. Polito (eds), Performing Environments: Site-Specificity in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama, 100–18, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ostovich, H., H. S. Syme and A. Griffin, eds (2009), Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603: Material Practices and Conditions of Playing, Burlington: Ashgate. Palfrey, S. and T. Stern (2007), Shakespeare in Parts, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Platter, T. (1937), Thomas Platter’s Travels in England: 1599, trans. C. Williams, London: Jonathan Cape. Potter, L. (2014), ‘Shakespeare and Other Men of the Theater’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 65 (4): 455–69. Prockter, A. and R. Taylor, eds (1979), The A to Z of Elizabethan London, London: London Topographical Society. Rutter, C. C., ed. (1999), Documents of the Rose Playhouse, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Rutter, T. (2008), ‘Repertory Studies: A Survey’, Shakespeare, 4 (3): 352–66. Rutter, T., ed. (2010), ‘Issues in Review: Dramatists, Playing Companies, and Repertories’, Early Theatre, 13 (2): 121–89. Rutter, T. (2017), Shakespeare and the Admiral’s Men: Reading across Repertories on the London Stage, 1594–1600, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Salgado, G., ed. (1975), Eyewitnesses of Shakespeare: First Hand Accounts of Performances 1590–1890, London: Cox and Wyman. Schlueter, J. (1998), ‘English Actors in Kassel, Germany, during Shakespeare’s Time’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 10: 238–61. Schlueter, J. (1999), ‘Rereading the Peacham Drawing’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 50 (2): 171–84. Schoone-Jongen, T. G. (2008), Shakespeare’s Companies: William Shakespeare’s Early Career and the Acting Companies, 1577–1594, Burlington: Ashgate. Shakespeare’s Globe (2020), Shakespeare’s Globe Archive: Theatres, Players & Performance, shakespearesglobearchive.amdigital.co.uk, Marlborough: Adam Matthew. Shapiro, M. (1977), Children of the Revels: The Boy Companies of Shakespeare’s Time and Their Plays, New York: Columbia University Press.

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State Papers Online, 1509–1714 (2020), gale.com/primary-sources/state-papers-online, Kew: National Archives. Steggle, M. (2015), Digital Humanities and the Lost Drama of Early Modern England: Ten Case Studies, Burlington: Ashgate. Steggle, M. (2020), ‘They Are All Fossils: A Paleontology of Early Modern Drama’, in R. Knutson, D. McInnis and M. Steggle (eds), Loss and the Literary Culture of Shakespeare’s Time, 173–90, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Stern, T. (2000), Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stern, T. (2009), Documents of Performance in Early Modern England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stern, T., ed. (2020), Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare’s England, London: Bloomsbury. Streitberger, W. R. (2016), The Masters of the Revels and Elizabeth I’s Court Theatre, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sugden, E. H. (1925), A Topographical Dictionary to the Works of Shakespeare and His Fellow Dramatists, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Syme, H. S. (2010), ‘The Meaning of Success: Stories of 1594 and Its Aftermath’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 61 (4): 490–525. Syme, H. S. (2012), ‘Three’s Company: Alternative Histories of London’s Theatres in the 1590s’, Shakespeare Survey, 65: 269–89. Syme, H. S. (2020), ‘A Sharer’s Repertory’, in T. Stern (ed.), Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare’s England, 33–51, London: Bloomsbury. Tavares, E. E. (2016), ‘The Chariot in II Tamburlaine, The Wounds of Civil War or Marius and Scilla, and The Reign of King Edward III’, Notes and Queries, 63 (3): 393–6. Tavares, E. E. and L. Johnson, eds (2022), ‘Issues in Review: Playing in Repertory’, Early Theatre, 25 (2): forthcoming. Taylor, D. (2003), The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Durham: Duke University Press. Teramura, M. (2016), ‘Jephthah’, in D. McInnis, M. Steggle and M. Teramura (eds), Lost Plays Database. Available online: https://lostplays.folger.edu/Jephthah. Tribble, E. (2011), Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Tribble, E. (2015), ‘Introduction’, Shakespeare Studies, 43: 17–26. Tribble, E. (2017), Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare’s Theatre: Thinking with the Body, London: Bloomsbury. van Es, B. (2013), Shakespeare in Company, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walsh, B. (2009), Shakespeare, The Queen’s Men, and the Elizabethan Performance of History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wickham, G., H. Berry and W. Ingram, eds (2000), English Professional Theatre, 1530–1660, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wiggins, M. and C. Richardson, eds (2012–), British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wolfe, H., ed. (2016–), Shakespeare Documented, shakespearedocumented.folger.edu, Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library.

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CHAPTER 4.3

Playhouses and performance LAURIE JOHNSON

INTRODUCTION It is a mixed blessing for the study of the early modern playhouses that the field has for over two centuries been viewed largely as a subset of Shakespeare studies. A common experience for researchers into the playhouses of Elizabethan and Jacobean England is the moment of being asked to justify their research in terms of its relevance to Shakespeare and his plays. Thus, the student of this field will find the great playwright’s name adorning the covers of books or in the titles of conferences and projects that are at best only tangentially related to his work  – indeed, the present author’s own Shakespeare’s Lost Playhouse: Eleven Days at Newington Butts is an example of this phenomenon. Yet this association does mean that theatre history enjoys occasional waves of intense public interest that it might otherwise not have attracted, with arguably the greatest peak being experienced during the past three decades, focused on archaeological excavations at major playhouses including the Rose (in 1989), the Globe (1989–90), the Hope (2000), the Theatre (2008), the Curtain (2012) and the Red Lion (2020), and on the reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe (completed by 1997). As we learn more about the size, shape and features of these playhouses in which early modern plays were performed, we must also continually revise conventional ways of thinking about the relationship between text and performance by considering the impact of playhouse space on both plays and playing. Rather than enumerating the early modern playhouses or offering a snapshot of the current accepted ‘facts’ about their size, shape or features, I offer instead a picture of a dynamic and contested field within which playhouse research continues to evolve along with insights into the ways that the plays of Shakespeare and his near contemporaries may help us to recover the history of the playhouses when read in conjunction with official documents and archaeological evidence.

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SETTING THE SCENE: THE HISTORY OF PLAYHOUSE HISTORY In his edition of John Stow’s Annales, or a Generall Chronicle of England (1631), Edmond Howes inserted a brief description of seventeen playhouses ‘purposely built’ in London and the suburbs during the previous sixty years, which included ‘Five Innes, or common Osteryes turned to Play-houses, one Cockpit, S. Paules singing Schoole, one in the Black-fryers, and one in the White-fryers’, the last of which had been completed as recently as 1629 (104). It may come as a surprise to many scholars that a contemporary describes inns, hostelries and even the singing school at St. Paul’s in these terms, since ‘purpose-built’ has in the past four decades come to be used among Shakespeare scholars and theatre historians to refer mainly to the openair amphitheatres such as the Theatre and the Globe, constructed specifically for the purpose of housing plays. Samuel Schoenbaum referred to James Burbage’s Theatre in Shoreditch as ‘the first purpose-built playhouse’ in his William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life (1977: 131), after which Cyril Walter Hodges (1980: 118) and others then followed suit in using the same term to describe the open-air playhouses built by actors using the example of the Theatre. In recent years, the term has come to signify opposition between playhouses and inns or halls, such as observations that all the ‘purpose-built playhouses were erected on the outskirts of London’, thus excluding the intramural inns and halls (Keenan 2008: 63), or that until 1594 the professional companies ‘used the city inns for playing just as much as, if not more frequently than, the purpose-built playhouses’ (Gurr 2017: 31). The newcomer to the study of early modern playhouses and performance should thus be prepared to read the scholarship with a degree of caution about the extent to which matters of interpretation ossify into statements of fact. The present volume replicates this distinction between playhouses and other kinds of performance spaces by including a chapter on each  – no doubt because the distinction does indeed dominate current theatre history  – but readers will find in both chapters evidence that some of the long-standing facts of theatre history are coming under scrutiny as more research is undertaken into the wider range of playing spaces used in early modern England. That this field has taken so long to revisit some of this evidence is partly due to the focus on Shakespeare’s life and writing among the antiquarian scholars of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The great editorial tradition that saw editions of Shakespeare’s works produced by Nicolas Rowe (1709), Alexander Pope (1725), Lewis Theobald (1733), Samuel Johnson (1765), Edward Capell (1767), George Steevens (1773) and others who reprinted or amended these editions was also frequently coupled to a renewed biographical interest in the playwright as suitable to rank among England’s ‘Men of Letters’ (Rowe 1709: 1.1) or ‘the Most Eminent English Poets’ (Johnson 1779). That the same bookseller, Jacob Tonson, was responsible for the publication of the first three of these editions – clearly profiting from a very public spat between Pope and Theobald – and then his sons’ business produced the fourth and fifth must not be understated in terms of the potential orchestration of this interest in a relatively combative editorial tradition.

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Although now generally considered the foundational work of Elizabethan theatre history, Edmond Malone’s ‘An Historical Account of the English Stage’ (1821) was initially published in 1790 to accompany his own edition of Shakespeare’s complete works. Apart from brief accounts of the playhouses based on details provided by Howes, ‘the continuator of Stowe’ (58), Malone focuses his playhouse history on just those venues where he believed the plays of Shakespeare were played. Based on the office books of Master of Revels Sir Henry Herbert, recorded after 1622, Malone observed that Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, were in possession of two venues and he delimits his study accordingly: ‘All the plays of Shakespeare appear to have been performed either at The Globe, or the theatre in Blackfriars. I shall therefore confine my enquiries principally to those two’ (60). This myopic focus even clouded Malone’s judgement upon the discovery of the account books of Phillip Henslowe at Dulwich College just as the first edition of his Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare was ‘issuing from the press’ (295). While these accounts contain an abundance of information about the establishment, construction, expansion, and management of the Rose playhouse, Malone included in the ‘Additions’ to the next edition of his ‘Historical Account’ only a selection of transcriptions of the first record Henslowe made of each play and the inventories of costumes, properties and playbooks; that is, only ‘all such notices as appear to me worthy of preservation’ (296). For Malone, then, the Rose playhouse itself was inconsequential in comparison with the names of the plays that might throw extra light on his essay ‘on the order of time in which Shakespeare’s plays were written’ (296) and the inventories that were illustrative of how his plays were most likely staged. Malone’s work laid out a platform for Elizabethan theatre history, but I suspect the real impetus for increased interest in playhouse history, in particular, came secondarily as a consequence of his rivalry with George Chalmers. This rivalry was sparked at first over the forgery of documents relating to Shakespeare’s life and work by William Henry Ireland, in response to which Malone published his Inquiry (1796), containing 424 pages of arguments and evidence against their authenticity. Chalmers, an antiquarian with an interest in literary biography, took umbrage at Malone’s attack being aimed not just at the forger but at all who had believed the documents to be genuine and published his Apology for the Believers in the Shakespeare Papers (1797), offering 610 pages of reproofs and newly documented evidence of errors in Malone’s Inquiry and other published work. During the next few years, the pair then traded blows via supplementary publications, each supported by archival or manuscript discoveries. One of the key pillars of Malone’s case against Ireland was his critique of a letter referring to both the Earl of Leicester (who died in 1588) and the Globe. Malone argued that a contract for the Fortune (dated 8 January 1600, mentioning the ‘late-erected’ Globe) and an agreement dated 22 December 1593 between Richard Burbage and the builder of the Fortune, Peter Street, ‘may fix the building of the Globe Theatre to the year 1594’ (Malone 1796: 86–7). Chalmers disregarded Malone’s evidence on the basis that his interpretations ‘do not prove enough’ (1797: 113), and he argued instead that given the known locations of several other playhouses, John Norden’s 1593 map of London established the presence of

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the Globe on the Bankside before 1593. Of course, both Chalmers and Malone were wrong, but between them they had established the premise that knowledge about other playhouses was necessary even when one is only interested in determining the date and location of the Globe. The stage was thus set for an upsurge of nineteenth-century antiquarian interest in the discovery of documents related to the playhouse industry, although in the case of two of the most prominent exponents of this activity, their endeavours ultimately remained focused on the greater goal of finding authentic Shakespeare documents – a goal that saw each of them resort to detestable practices. John Payne Collier’s reputation as an editor, biographer and historian of Shakespeare and his ‘dramatic poetry’ was second to none for twenty years from the early 1830s until a raft of new documents he claimed to have discovered were exposed as forgeries in the early 1850s. One of those responsible for exposing the forgeries was James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps (Halliwell 1853: 21–30), a renowned bibliomaniac who also dedicated much of his later life to finding an authentic Shakespeare signature, but whose obsessive passion for collection saw him steal books from libraries and cut up sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books and papers to fill the pages of hundreds of scrapbooks – these are available in the Folger Shakespeare Library. It was this ‘biographical urge’ (Somerset 2012: 382) that drove Halliwell-Phillipps to lengths that now cause us despair while also leaving his life’s ambition ultimately unfulfilled. Quite possibly aware that his mentor had suffered under the strain of this obsession, Thomas Fairman Ordish set about preparing a study that would ‘cast the story of the Shakespeare stage into a narrative of the playhouses’ (1899: vii) and therefore rescue from oblivion some other playhouses neglected by former scholars due to ‘enthusiastic investigation inspired by the name of Shakespeare’ (viii). His narrative, which incorporated studies of six other playhouses – ‘The Theatre, the Curtain, Newington Butts, the Rose, the Hope, the Swan’ (viii) – was the first to propose an origin story based on the earliest playhouses being erected ‘in the fields’ outside London and contributed claims that the playhouses were the source of regular conflict between the Corporation of London and the Privy Council. Shakespearean Playhouses was written by Joseph Quincy Adams (1917) with the goal of bringing together into a single volume extant information relating to the ‘seventeen regular, and five temporary or projected, theatres’ (viii) known to have existed in the time of Shakespeare. Yet in his choice of title and in the focus of many of the essays, Adams also reveals his intention of reinscribing Shakespeare into as many corners of this history of the playhouses as he could find – the playwright’s name appears on no fewer than fifty-seven occasions, distributed liberally across most of the chapters. Adams also repeats Ordish’s main narrative, pointing out for example that the actors built their playhouses in the liberties, outside the city walls, to ‘entertain the public without fear of the ordinances of the Corporation, and without danger of interruption by puritanical Lord Mayors’ (1917: 135). Importantly, he reinforced a distinction that Ordish had slavishly argued: the major playhouses were amphitheatres based on the model of those represented in maps of London circa 1560 as being used for bear- and bull-baiting, and these were to be distinguished in type from the inns in which playing took place within the city walls. In the interests

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of being more comprehensive, Adams included chapters on those playhouses that were established later within the city walls or to the west on built-up routes towards Westminster, where the built environment dictated the use of smaller rectangular structures, as at the Blackfriars, Salisbury Court or Whitefriars. For Adams, then, the map of playhouses in and around London demonstrated a clear pattern, which if the map was divided into three equal sections from top to bottom would appear as concentrating the polygonal or amphitheatre playhouses in both the top and bottom thirds and the rectangular playhouses (and, by extension, the inns not shown on the map) in the middle section – and Adams commissioned C. W. Redwood to produce just such a map (Figure 4.3.1). The influence of Adams on subsequent generations of scholars cannot be understated, and his work carried with it the authority of being informed by the research of luminaries like Edmund Kerchever Chambers, Walter Wilson Greg and Charles William Wallace. His bibliography of 316 items represents an excellent starting point for any researcher interested in the history of playhouse scholarship up to 1917. His efforts to use Shakespeare’s name so liberally in the broader narrative of playhouse history were quite possibly the main reason scholars in this field are able to still trade on the term ‘Shakespearean’ even when dealing with playhouses that operated long before or after Shakespeare’s career in London. Many of his claims based on ‘independent interpretation of the historical evidence’ (viii) either still hold sway or have only relatively recently been questioned. Perhaps the most stunning recent example of this is the discovery of the Curtain by the Museum

Figure 4.3.1  ‘Map of London Showing the Playhouses’, by C. W. Redwood. J. Q. Adams (1917), Shakespearean Playhouses: A History of English Theatres from the Beginning to the Restoration, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, front inset. Source: Wikimedia Commons/ public domain.

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of London Archaeology team in 2012, with the archaeological evidence revealing that the structure was in fact rectangular despite the established belief by theatre historians that it was polygonal. As news of the find made its way through the theatre history community, few were prepared to countenance the prospect without further scrutiny of the evidence, and some dismissed the claims outright. It is worth recalling, however, that Adams had argued for the Curtain to be a polygon based only on one foreign traveller’s recollections of the playhouses and mentions of the Curtain and Theatre together in Privy Council documents, from which Adams observed that the pair are ‘usually mentioned together, and in such a way as to suggest similarity of shape as well as of purpose. We may, I think, reasonably suppose that the Curtain was in all essential details a copy of Burbage’s Theatre’ (1917: 77). What began as suggestion and supposition had over the course of almost a century rigidified into unshakeable belief. In a similar vein, archaeological evidence from excavations on Bankside has been able to confirm Oscar Brownstein’s suspicion that the animal-baiting rings were small arenas and not the grand amphitheatres on which James Burbage modelled his Theatre and that the Bear Garden was only remodelled as an amphitheatre after the original structure collapsed in 1583 (Mackinder, Blackmore, Bowsher and Phillpotts 2013: 21). Piece by piece, the story of the origins of the playhouses which remained relatively intact for most of the last century has begun to crumble in the face of evidence, both archaeological and archival, that shows the rise of the playhouses was in all likelihood a more complex series of developments over time. My sense of the widespread use of ‘purpose-built’ is that it replaces ‘amphitheatre’ while still resisting the total erasure of a narrative upon which theatre history has relied for so long. The recollections of Howes with which I opened this section might serve instead as a reminder that we have a way to go to more faithfully capture the early modern sense of how and why these structures emerged as they did in the categories we adopt and the stories we tell about the playhouses. It is also worth remembering, as Andy Kesson notes in the 2017 issue of Shakespeare Studies, that ‘house’ referred to ‘any space, indoor or outdoor, and not simply an individual building’ (27), so a playhouse, purposely built, was merely any kind of structure in which some kind of building work was undertaken to prepare it for the presentation of plays. With this in mind, while the focus in what follows will lean towards the amphitheatres with which readers might tend to associate the term ‘playhouse’, I also offer comments about how the components of playhouse architecture were developed over time in any kind of ‘house’ for which one built purpose was to house play performances.

CASE STUDY: THE DIFFERENCE A DOOR MAKES When planning for the modern Globe reconstruction was underway during the early 1980s, John Orrell outlined his initial research for the project in The Quest for Shakespeare’s Globe (1983). While he admitted that the most reliable information about the building’s architecture came from sources that related only secondarily to the Globe, he was confident that the gaps could be filled because he believed there to have been ‘a standard plan for the large wooden frames of most of the public

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theatres of Shakespeare’s time’ (xiii). Thus, although the most reliable image of the exterior of the building  – Wenceslaus Hollar’s immaculate panorama of London based on a sketch he made during the late 1630s – obviously referred to the second Globe built in 1614, Orrell maintained ‘that the second Globe, for all its undoubted theatrical evolution, substantially resembled its predecessor, and that this was in turn similar  – so far as its main structural frame went  – to the Theatre of 1576’ (xiii). Plans for a twenty-four-sided polygonal frame were drawn up on the basis of Hollar’s panorama and several other sources, including surviving records of the Fortune playhouse that was designed with a rectangular frame but the plans for which made frequent (although not fully detailed) references to key design features of the Globe. Yet with construction due shortly to begin, the plans were undermined by the archaeological discovery of a small section of the foundations of the Globe and significantly more of those at the Rose during 1988 to 1989 (for details of these excavations, see Bowsher 2012: 72, 76, 95). The current icosagonal frame was adopted but not without much debate over the implications of the discoveries. Of particular concern was the evidence from the Rose excavation that the playhouse built by Henslowe in 1587 began as a regular polygon but with fewer sides (fourteen) and that the renovations of 1592 extended to a reconstruction of the frame, leaving the building with a quite irregular oblong shape. At a special symposium convened to discuss these matters on 10 October 1992, Orrell dismissed the evidence from the Rose excavation by arguing, as Paul Nelsen paraphrases, that it was ‘enigmatic evidence subversive of any effort to reconstruct the Globe’s shape and dimensions’ (Nelsen 2012: 5). Viewing the Rose as a subversive outlier in this manner also meant that the evidence of the shape and size of the Rose stage (trapezoidal, with the longest edge along the inner wall of the frame, and the front edge only a little over 8 metres in length) could be disregarded as irrelevant. The plan for the interior of the Globe reconstruction had long been focused on replicating the details of the sketch of the interior of the Swan by Johannes de Witt, a Dutch visitor to London in 1596, with its clearly rectilinear thrust stage (see Figure 4.3.2), and the visitor to the modern reconstruction cannot help but notice the extent to which the new Globe has been created in this image. It is with some irony, then, that even the construction of the upper sections of the new building has followed the de Witt sketch of the Swan far more closely than it has Hollar’s exterior view – the modern reconstruction has one gabled roof pitched atop the canopy of the stage, supported by the inner frame, whereas the exterior view on Hollar’s panorama shows the second Globe to have had double gabled roofs extending across the top of the frame, with an additional feature resembling an ‘onion dome’ on a turret nestled in the valley of the two gables (Fitzpatrick 2004: 16; see Figure 4.3.3). There was one significant change made to the interior of the Globe, diverging from the features of de Witt’s Swan sketch: a third or central door was added to the two that are shown on the rear of the Swan stage because the chief academic adviser, Andrew Gurr, had determined that a third door was required for a number of assumed Elizabethan and Jacobean stage conventions, such as the central path taken from up to down stage by royal processions or the discovery space used in Much Ado About Nothing to reveal Hero’s bed. He would later publish his arguments with supporting

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Figure 4.3.2  Aernout van Buchel’s copy of the sketch of the Swan playhouse by Johannes de Witt, c. 1596. Image courtesy Folger Shakespeare Library LUNA Digital Image Collection, ID 8111. From facsimile published in The Graphic, 26 May 1888.

evidence from several plays and Inigo Jones’s plan for the Cockpit, circa 1616 (Gurr 2001: 61). Notwithstanding Gurr’s admission that the drawing attributed to Jones is for a ‘hall theatre’ instead of the amphitheatre being reconstructed at the Globe, it appeared to provide the ocular proof needed to translate suspicion into truth. Yet doubts had already been raised about the attribution, identification and date of the drawing, with it more likely being a plan drawn up for William Davenant’s Fleet Street playhouse, not built until the Restoration period (Wilson 1997: 142). Absent any visual corroboration, then, the weight of the case falls on evidence from the plays and, as Tim Fitzpatrick has argued, the examples provided by Gurr and reinforced

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Figure 4.3.3  A recent photographic enlargement of Wenceslaus Hollar’s drawing of the Globe in ‘A View from St. Mary’s, Southwark, Looking Towards Westminster’ (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection). First published in Tim Fitzpatrick, ‘Reconstructing Shakespeare’s Second Globe Using “Computer Aided Design” (CAD) tools’, Early Modern Literary Studies, Special Issue 13 (April 2004): 4.1–35 http://purl. oclc.org/emls/si-13/fitzpatrick.

by Mariko Ichikawa in Shakespearean Entrances (2002) are far from representative (Fitzpatrick 2011: 254–60). While we cannot ignore the direction at the start of Thomas Heywood’s Four Prentices of London for three prologues to enter ‘at three doors’, for example, the question is whether Heywood is writing for a specific venue and whether this can be taken as evidence of three doors at the Globe if that venue is someplace else. If we accept the principle of resemblance that saw the Hollar and de Witt images used as evidence for Globe architecture, then this example alone would provide valid grounds for including three doors at the Globe, but given that our best evidence for the play’s first venue puts it at the Rose (Wiggins 2014: 4.1351) – the same playhouse that Orrell had dismissed as ‘subversive’ to Globe reconstruction plans – the case was always fraught. There are of course other examples, but not many. Alan Dessen and Leslie Thomson’s A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642 lists just two other examples of directions referring to three doors and one ‘middle door’ (1999: 73). By contrast they offer ‘a small sampling of hundreds’ of exits/entrances referring to ‘one door’ and either ‘another door’ or ‘the other door’ (73), so it would seem that the weight of numbers favours the idea that most plays of the period were written for stages with two points of entry/exit. Fitzpatrick offers a detailed critique

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of each of the examples offered by Gurr and Ichikawa, arguing that even explicit references to a third door could be read as the use of a ‘concealment space’ at the rear of the stage rather than a point of access to the tiring house (2011: 251–88). Wiggins notes instead, in the case of Four Prentices, that since the remainder of the play ‘requires only two’ doors, it is possible that the induction was a later addition for a three-door stage (2014: 4.1351). At this level of the debate, the new student of theatre history might well ask whether it really matters if the Globe reconstruction has the ‘right’ number of sides or doors, but I hope these examples make it clear that the Globe reconstruction has been the focus for a number of issues confronting scholars in this field at the level of epistemology. Debates over the sides or doors of the Globe have foregrounded the lack of agreement within the field over the extent to which broad generalizations can be made on the basis of individual fragments, remains or references. It is my opinion that proponents of both the two-door and three-door positions have overstated the case that can be made on the basis of inference from indirect evidence: it is very likely that some playing spaces had three or even more points of entry (despite Fitzpatrick’s attempt to explain away the references to a third door in some plays of the period) but it certainly cannot be established that the Globe was one of them (as Gurr and Ichikawa argue and indeed as the planners for the Globe reconstruction accepted).

CASE STUDY: LOCATING SOUND, DISLOCATING THE MACBETHS What I also suspect the debates about doors reveal is that we are only beginning to scratch the surface of a deeper relationship between playtext and playing space, where the language of space within the play is not merely about activating the fiction of being someplace else. It may be the case that playwrights willed their audiences to imagine that the ‘wooden O’ of a playhouse could hold the ‘vasty fields of France’, as the chorus demands at the beginning of Henry V (Prologue, 12–13), but they also infused plays with spatial codes that anchored those imaginary spaces to specific elements of playhouse space. One excellent study that may pave the way for more work on the way plays do this is Sarah Dustagheer’s Shakespeare’s Two Playhouses: Repertory and Theatre Space at the Globe and the Blackfriars, 1599–1613 (2017), which examines how Shakespeare and other playwrights adapted their language for the company’s two principal venues. Julius Caesar for example exploits the acoustics of the Globe by using alarums of differing volumes to simulate armies in motion and the approach of battle (Dustagheer 2017: 103–5), but a play like The Tempest uses music and dispersed sound in the Blackfriars to reinforce the ‘confused noyse within’ that signals the destruction of the boat offstage at the end of the first scene (qtd. 120). Dustagheer is of course focusing on innovations within the repertory of Shakespeare’s company and in the playwright’s own plays written in response to specific structural features of these new playhouses. By using the same approach, further studies of how plays are adapted to specific playhouses will naturally lead to more emphasis on the uniqueness of each playhouse instead of on their adherence to a ‘standard plan’ or common features. Such an approach promises to gainfully

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extend Roslyn Knutson’s notion of a ‘house style’ – the features of a repertory that may be determined by the particular membership and market of each company – to include important features of the particular houses in which each company principally performed (Knutson 2009: 99). Yet a focus on innovation and uniqueness may not only prevent a new wave of scholars from acknowledging points of wider commonality between playhouses, companies and repertories, but also – and, I think, more importantly – may lead to the mistaken impression that playhouses came first and then a spatial language was developed to suit the spaces and structures that they made available to performers. This latter issue is compounded by the fact that comprehensive studies of the early modern stage tend to concentrate only on the period associated with the rise of the playhouses. Dessen and Thomson’s Dictionary, for example, includes stage directions only from plays dated after 1580. Consider, then, the use of the term ‘within’ as the place from which the ‘confused noyse’ emanates in The Tempest. Dessen and Thomson mention this term is ‘widely used (roughly 800 examples) to indicate the location of a sound or the presence of a figure within the tiring house and therefore offstage out of sight of the playgoer’ (1999: 253). The ‘tiring house’ is the room presumed to have been situated behind the stage in all of the major playhouses and so, when dealing with plays after 1580, it is reasonable to suppose that directions to an offstage space are referring to the room used for that purpose in the larger playhouses. Curiously, however, the same association is assumed to have been true of the direction ‘without’, which Dessen and Thomson claim was ‘used sporadically, usually as a synonym for the more familiar and widely used within’, but they do add that the terms are also used ‘occasionally’ as opposites (1999: 253). In trying to decipher instances of the terms functioning as opposites, they determine that this would have to mean the same thing as the modern distinction between onstage and offstage, so the term ‘without’ would only be opposed to ‘within’ when it signified a character being ‘out’ on the stage and not inside the tiring house. This assumption comes unstuck when in the same signal directions are provided to players to enter both without and within, as in 1 Henry VI: ‘Enter Talbot and Burgundy without: within, Puzel, Charles, Bastard, and Reignier on the Walls’ (3.2.39.2–3). To their credit, Dessen and Thomson cite this example, but they do not attempt to reconcile entering both without and within with their earlier observation about the onstage-offstage distinction. Bruce Smith has argued that the circulation of sound in the Globe made it possible for the players to shift the apparent focus of the fiction and thereby signal whether the onstage space was to be understood as – or, indeed, to feel as though it was – within or without (2013: 180–2). On occasion when the fiction demanded, then, the source of sound could be moved and spatial cues provided in speech to make the stage space seem like it was ‘within’ and the tiring house was ‘without’ this internalized locus. Fitzpatrick would most likely agree with this idea that the sonic environment can be manipulated to reposition the apparent locus of the fiction onstage as being either inside or outside, but he would undoubtedly also argue that this is not something that happened only occasionally in performance. His explanation for the prevalence of two-door stages in playhouse design involves proposing that the early modern theatre used a set of spatial conventions according

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to which one door would be encoded as ‘inwards’ (2011: 226) and the other as ‘outwards’ (229), meaning that the door a character used to enter or exit signified the direction of their movement in relation to the scene being presented onstage. Fitzpatrick’s study covers 115 plays from the 1580s to the closing of the theatres to demonstrate that these patterns can be found operating throughout the period of the playhouses, but he briefly mentions that an early play like Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister, from the 1550s, can also be seen to use a highly simplified version of this pattern in ‘a simply binary system: its single location (outside Ralph’s mistress’s house) requires only two entrances: from elsewhere, and from the house’ (Fitzpatrick 2011: 195). For Fitzpatrick, then, the binary system can be shown to have originated on stages that predate the rise of the playhouses but evolved to allow for more complex patterns in later years. One example of a play that engages creatively with the two-door pattern is Macbeth. Self-referential jokes come to life when seen as expressions of the pattern, as in Macbeth’s exhortation for Lennox to enter – ‘Come in, without there!’ (4.1.134) – followed by asking the thane if he had seen the ‘Weird Sisters’, to which Lennox replies that he had not, but Macbeth presses him: ‘Came they not by you?’ (136). Using a two-door system, the Weird Sisters will have exited through the ‘outwards door’ in keeping with their supernatural habitations, so Lennox’s entry through the same door (‘without there’) will have seen him pass the departing players, but the fiction requires imagining that the door represents two distinct outer places.1 This fiction is momentarily undermined by the metafiction of a joke about the ‘vanishing’ entities having to nevertheless exit through a stage door.2 A more meaningful example of the pattern being used in this play is the departure of Macbeth and his wife to their chamber after being frightened by the ‘Knock within’ that follows the murder of Duncan in the guest chamber (2.2.58). Fitzpatrick points out that with the murder having been committed beyond the ‘inwards door’, the couple’s bedchamber – towards which Lady Macbeth ushers her husband to move further away from the murder – must be through the ‘outwards door’ but does not examine this further except to discuss the echoes with this scene in her sleepwalking episode (2011: 150, 236–38). Yet I would go further to add that by encoding the door to their private bedchamber as an outward passage, this scene also imbues their most intimate, innermost shared space as one now removed from its place at the core of their domestic environment. The heart of their marriage thus ceases to be the bedroom and is replaced (re-placed) by the murder of the king, signifying the couple’s sense of alienation at that moment and thereafter, even within their most familiar, familial space.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS: LOOKING IN, LOOKING OUT, LOOKING AHEAD Much more can be done to examine the ways that plays document the conditions or spaces within which they were performed in the early modern period but also to analyse how they imaginatively interact with those spaces to create meaning. There is also, I feel, far more scope to investigate the development of stage conventions during the period before the rise of the playhouses to better understand how the

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major playhouses enabled both playwrights and players to retain, refine or replace those conventions. While Fitzpatrick identifies the binary system operating in a simple form in Ralph Roister Doister, more research is needed in this direction, and it is worth noting that John Heywood’s earlier The Play of the Weather, printed in 1533, contains the instruction ‘goth out’ (Heywood 1977: TLN 181) for leaving the stage and ‘cometh in’ (TLN 191) for entry. Moreover, the same play makes provision for the stage to house a structure referred to as Jupiter’s ‘trone’ (throne) to include a space ‘in’ (TLN 180) and ‘into’ (TLN 1281) which characters move and music is played. As Janette Dillon argues, this throne might represent a stepping stone in the evolution of the English stage, somewhere between the earlier booth stage construction and the Shakespearean ‘discovery space’ (2013: 190–93).3 The even earlier Mankind (c. 1475) does not require such an elaborate onstage structure and might have been suited to performance on a booth stage’s pop-up scaffold with curtained change room behind, but in-text references to a ‘dore’ (1904: TLN 154) and ‘this house’ (TLN 202) lead Tom Pettitt to suggest it was written for ‘indoor performance, perhaps in the great hall of a domestic or institutional residence’ (1996: 191). Yet the play includes a sequence in which characters demand payment from the audience or else the devil Titivillus will not make his ‘abhomynabull presens’ before them (TLN 458), which sounds to this ear at least more like the stuff of the booth stage rather than the great hall. In any case, Mankind also includes a marginal direction that Titivillus ‘goth out with þe spade’ to signal his exit, indicating a shared spatial language with Heywood’s play, with the stage space being ‘in’ and offstage being ‘out’. This simple binary might thus have existed for more than a century before the appearance of the major playhouses, but a play like Ralph Roister Doister shows it to already have been shifting in the 1550s. A recent special issue of the journal Shakespeare (2017) edited by Roy Eriksen, contains essays on the theme of ‘The Architectures of Shakespeare’, establishing current interest in thinking anew about the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays constitute a logical expression of the architecture of the playhouses for which they were written. Yet Anthony Johnson begins his essay by lamenting the ‘relative paucity of Early Modern architectural meta-language in Shakespeare’s work’ (2017: 114), after which he argues that Ben Jonson was more prone to explicit evocations of the architectural features of the specific buildings for which his plays were written, arguably influenced heavily by his production of masques (121–22). For Shakespeare, according to Johnson, the playhouse is never so literally pointed out but is instead invoked by a language that, like Hamlet’s designation of types of animals to the shapes of the clouds, merely invites the audience to participate in sharing the illusion of stability in place (121). Lois Leveen offers a more concrete example of just such an illusion by observing that there is no balcony in the so-called balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, and that it is Shakespeare’s ability to create a sense of Juliet’s elevation that has enabled this feature to become so fixed in the popular imagination (2017: 158–61). I agree with Leveen but feel that we need not look far to see evidence of the kind of literal reference Johnson sees lacking in Shakespeare: Hamlet’s own ‘goodly frame’ speech (2.2.264–67), for example, identifies rather literally the stage (‘a sterile promontory’), the open playhouse (‘this

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most excellent canopy the air’) and the decorated roofing (‘this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire’). The challenge for research into the early modern playhouses will be to navigate the chicken-and-egg question of the relationship between the language of space that we find in the plays and the playhouse structure to which that language refers: do we view the plays as a record of stage practices that evolved to suit the new accommodations of the large playhouses or do we see them as a record of the conventions of performance that predate the playhouses and could be applied to any space suitable for playing? The answer, I suggest, is both, but also more besides. In some respects the field has come full circle – antiquarian interest in playhouse research was sparked by the desire to identify the places Shakespeare’s plays were staged; now, theatre historians are identifying the playhouses in the plays, which can be an aid to textual criticism rather than background noise. Looking at Macbeth again, for example, it may not have been necessary for Kenneth Muir to gloss the word ‘noise’ as ‘a company of musicians, usually three in number, who attended taverns, etc.’ (4.1.106, note) in the first Arden edition, if the line in question is considered in terms of playhouse design and thus read as another of the play’s metafictional moments. Macbeth cuts himself off while demanding answers to questions from the witches, asking instead, ‘Why sinks that cauldron? and what noise is this?’ (4.1.105), which may very superficially be read simply as his (in character) astonishment at an effect that may appear and sound quite banal: the cauldron located on the trap door could be lowered carefully using a platform suspended by a rope and pulley system, which would of course also make a noise as it is operated. Rather than assuming that players and playwrights would seek at all times to conceal the hallmarks of their artifice, the plays of the era seem ever more insistently to revel in that same artifice by overtly drawing attention to it. While theatre historians have long focused research on relatively static and unambiguous documents like court depositions and witness statements, land and lease agreements, records of the sewer commissions, or acts of the Privy Council, our understanding of the dynamic evolution of playing and playhouses may require more engagement with the interpretive elements of theatre practice and literary analysis. The Globe reconstruction may not have succeeded in replicating every detail of either its first or second namesake, just as the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse is not an exact replica of the early Blackfriars’ playhouse, but the research carried out in these venues involving collaborations between performers, dramaturgs, historians and textual scholars is shedding new light – if albeit at times candlelit at best – on the conditions of playing in the early modern period. It is appropriate for playhouse historians to look to future research with a similarly collaborative and experimental mindset.

NOTES 1 Fitzpatrick does not include this example in his book, but it was discussed in a workshop that he ran on the two-door model at the 2010 conference of the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association at the University of Sydney.

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2 It is of course possible that the witches could vanish using the trap door, but my sense of the stage traffic in Act 4 Scene 1 is that the trap door is used for the disappearance of the cauldron and the entry and exit of each of the apparitions, so any further use of the device in this scene increases the potential for congestion below stage. The very presence of the line, ‘Came they not by you?’, is to my way of thinking the clue that tells us they were expected to exit via the same door as Lennox was to enter. 3 The booth stage was a temporary construction that could be mounted at markets or fairs, with an elevated stage made of planks on trestles or barrels, and a preparation space at the rear of the stage, cordoned from view by the use of curtains hung between poles.

REFERENCES Adams, J. Q. (1917), Shakespearean Playhouses: A History of English Theatres from the Beginning to the Restoration, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Bowsher, J. (2012), Shakespeare’s London Theatreland: Archaeology, History and Drama, London: Museum of London Archaeology. Capell, E. (1767), Mr. William Shakespeare, His Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, 10 vols, London. Chalmers, G. (1797), An Apology for the Believers in the Shakespeare Papers, London. Dessen, A. C. and L. Thomson (1999), A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dillon, J. (2013), ‘From Scaffold to Discovery-Space: Change and Continuity’, in R. Morse, H. Cooper and P. Holland (eds), Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents, 190–203, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dustagheer, S. (2017), Shakespeare’s Two Playhouses: Repertory and Theatre Space at the Globe and the Blackfriars, 1599–1613, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fitzpatrick, T. (2004), ‘Reconstructing Shakespeare’s Second Globe Using “Computer Aided Design” (CAD) Tools’, EMLS: Early Modern Literary Studies Special Issue 13: 4.1–35. Fitzpatrick, T. (2011), Playwright, Space, and Place in Early Modern Performance: Shakespeare and Company, Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate. Gurr, A. (2001), ‘Doors at the Globe: The Gulf between Page and Stage’, Theatre Notebook, 55 (2): 59–71. Gurr, A. (2017), Shakespeare’s Workplace: Essays on Shakespearean Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halliwell, J. O. (1853), Curiosities of Modern Shaksperian Criticism, London: John Russell Smith. Heywood, J. (1977 [1533]), The Play of the Weather, Malone Society Reprints, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hodges, C. W. (1980), The Battlement Garden: Britain from the Wars of the Roses to the Age of Shakespeare, New York: Houghton Mifflin. Ichikawa, M. (2002), Shakespearean Entrances, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Johnson, A. W. (2017), ‘Shakespeare, Architecture, and the Chorographic Imagination’, Shakespeare, 13 (2): 114–35. Johnson, L. (2018), Shakespeare’s Lost Playhouse: Eleven Days at Newington Butts, New York: Routledge. Johnson, S. (1765), The Plays of William Shakespeare, 8 vols, London. Johnson, S. (1779), The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, 4 vols, London. Keenan, S. (2008), Renaissance Literature, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kesson, A. (2017), ‘Playhouses, Plays, and Theatre History: Rethinking the 1580s’, Forum: Drama of the 1580s’, Shakespeare Studies, 45: 19–40. Knutson, R. L. (2009), ‘The Start of Something Big’, in H. Ostovich, H. S. Syme and A. Griffin (eds), Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603: Material Practices and the Conditions of Playing, 99–108, Farnham: Ashgate. Leveen, L. (2017), ‘Putting the “Where” into “Wherefore Art Thou”: Urban Architectures of Desire in Romeo and Juliet’, Shakespeare, 13 (2): 155–63. Mackinder, A., L. Blackmore, J. Bowsher and C. Phillpotts (2013), The Hope Playhouse, Animal Baiting and Later Industrial Activity at Bear Gardens on Bankside: Excavations at Riverside House and New Globe Walk, Southwark, 1999–2000, MOLA Archaeology Studies Series 25, London: Museum of London Archaeology. Malone, E. (1796), An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers, London. Malone, E. (1821 [orig. 1790]), The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, vol. 3, London. ‘Mankind’ (1904 [c. 1475]), in F. J. Furnivall and A. W. Pollard (eds), The Macro Plays, 1–34, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nelsen, P. (2012), ‘Reinventing Shakespeare’s Globe? A Report of Design Choices for the ISGC Globe’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 10 (4): 5–8. Ordish, T. F. (1899), Early London Theatres: In the Fields, London: Elliot Stock. Orrell, J. (1983), The Quest for Shakespeare’s Globe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pettitt, T. (1996), ‘Mankind: An English Fastnachtspiel?’, in M. Twycross (ed.), Festive Drama: Papers from the Sixth Triennial Colloquium of the International Society for the Study of Medieval Theatre Lancaster, 13–19 July 1989, 190–202, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. Pope, A. (1725), The Works of Mr. William Shakespear, 6 vols, London. Rowe, N. (1709), The Works of Mr. William Shakespear, 6 vols, London. Schoenbaum, S. (1977), William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Shakespeare, W. (1951), Macbeth, ed. K. Muir, London: Arden Shakespeare. Shakespeare, W. (1995), King Henry V, ed. T. W. Craik, Arden Shakespeare Third Series, London: Arden Shakespeare. Shakespeare, W. (2000), King Henry VI Part 1, ed. E. Burns, Arden Shakespeare Third Series, London: Arden Shakespeare. Shakespeare, W. (2015), Macbeth, ed. S. Clark and P. Mason, Arden Shakespeare Third Series, London: Arden Shakespeare. Shakespeare, W. (2016), Hamlet, rev. edn, ed. A. Thompson and N. Taylor, Arden Shakespeare Third Series, London: Arden Shakespeare.

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Smith, B. R. (2013), ‘Within, Without, Withinwards: The Circulation of Sound in Shakespeare’s Theatre’, in F. Karim-Cooper and T. Stern (eds), Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance, 171–94, London and New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare. Somerset, A. (2012), ‘Local Records’, in A. F. Kinney (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare, 373–89, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Steevens, G. (1773), The Plays of William Shakespeare, 10 vols, London. Stow, J. (1631), Annales, or a Generall Chronicle of England, revised by Edmond Howes, London. Theobald, L. (1733), The Works of Shakespeare, 7 vols, London. Wiggins, M., with C. Richardson (2014), British Drama, 1533–1642: A Catalogue, vol. 4, 1598–602, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilson, J. (1997), The Archaeology of Shakespeare, Stroud: Sutton Publishing.

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CHAPTER 4.4

Drama beyond the playhouses TRACEY HILL

By some considerable margin, the largest audiences for dramatic spectacle in early modern London assembled in the open air rather than inside theatres. Unconstrained by the spatial limits of the professional playhouses, vast crowds flocked to see free entertainment on the streets and the river Thames. Eyewitnesses such as the Venetian Orazio Busino testify to the large number of boisterous spectators drawn by street pageantry, which required many ‘whifflers’ to act as crowd control.1 Funded by the City of London and its livery companies, civic pageantry was a lavish, colourful and very noisy theatrical experience. The central contention of this chapter is thus that drama ‘beyond the playhouses’ constituted a formative, widespread and persistent performance tradition in early modern London. I will suggest that the notion of a ‘playhouse’ needs to be more flexible and capacious than the usual narrowly defined concept of a ‘purpose-built’ theatre. This chapter will accordingly traverse a range of urban spaces, from inns to streets to splendid livery company halls, in order to demonstrate the profound connections between the professional stage  – as audiences would have experienced it in purpose-built venues like the Rose or Fortune playhouses – and peripatetic or occasional drama at a range of other venues (Figure 4.4.1). To illuminate these parallels I will in due course focus on the brief but varied career of George Peele, dramatist and impresario/pageant poet for the City of London. In general terms, there were two main modes of London pageantry in the period: ‘in-house’ civic events like the annual Lord Mayor’s Show, when the inauguration of the City’s chief officer was celebrated, and ad hoc celebrations such as coronation entries, royal visits and the installation of the Prince of Wales. Dramatists familiar to students of early modern drama were involved in all of these. George Peele, this chapter’s focal point, was one of the earliest pageant poets, and he was succeeded (in chronological order of their earliest civic writing) by Anthony Munday, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, John Marston, John Webster and Thomas Heywood. John Taylor, the ‘Water Poet’, also worked on one of the mayoral shows as did John Heminges (a liveryman of the Grocers’ Company), best known as one of the editors of the 1623 Shakespeare folio. Middleton was so highly regarded as

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Figure 4.4.1  Map showing playing spaces in the early modern City of London, adapted from C. W. Redwood’s illustration to J. Q. Adams (1917), Shakespearean Playhouses: A History of English Theatres from the Beginning to the Restoration, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Source: Wikimedia Commons/public domain.

a civic poet that in 1620 he was given the salaried post of City Chronologer, which involved taking the lead on devising, organizing and publishing City entertainments (Jonson succeeded him).2 Close links therefore existed between personnel (and, as we’ll see below, dramatic modes and genres) from the professional stage and those employed to devise, act, sing or play musical instruments on civic occasions. The actor John Lowin, who played Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi, was a member of the Goldsmiths’ Company, and it was surely that connection which led to him being given the role of ‘Leofstane’ in the 1611 Lord Mayor’s Show for fellow Goldsmith James Pemberton, written by Munday and printed as Chruso-thriambos. As David Kathman has shown, membership of the City’s livery companies was ubiquitous among players and dramatists (Kathman 2004). Richard Burbage, one of the leading lights of the King’s Men, took on a speaking part in the civic entertainment for Prince Henry’s installation as Prince of Wales in 1610, Londons Love. Thomas Rowley, probable brother of Samuel and William Rowley, took part in the 1605 mayoral show as a giant. From the Admiral’s Men, lead actor Edward Alleyn performed as the Genius of London in the 1604 coronation entry for King James I and VI. On the same occasion ‘Thamesis’ was played by a child actor from the Children of her Majesty’s Revels.

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(These and other children’s troupes also performed at various livery company halls, as will be discussed later.) Such employment of professional actors in civic pageantry suggests that expertise in delivering dramatic verse and speeches was an important consideration. In the early to mid-sixteenth century the City and the livery companies tended to turn to schoolmasters such as Richard Mulcaster of the Merchant Taylors’ School to write verses and coach children to present them, but with the increasing involvement of stage dramatists, adult performers featured more often. By the end of the sixteenth century the format of the mayoral show and royal entry had become well established, both featuring a combination of peripatetic pageant devices and fixed stations on existing topographical features like conduits (public water fountains), from which speeches, music and song were produced. These devices were dramatic tableaux, representing themes and figures relevant to the livery company, the Lord Mayor and/or civic virtues more generally; in some cases there was an overarching narrative connecting them, like the battle between Zeal and Envy in the 1613 mayoral show, published as The Triumphs of Truth. In terms of processional routes, the royal entry went in an east-to-west direction, starting at the Tower of London and travelling through some of the City’s major thoroughfares such as Cornhill to Fleet Street and thereafter to Westminster. The mayoral show began at the Guildhall and proceeded through the City to the river; on the Lord Mayor’s return from Westminster by barge, it followed the traditional ceremonial route via St Paul’s and Cheapside back to Guildhall. Individual pageants and musical interludes were mounted en route in notable places like the battlements of St Paul’s, the Little (or ‘Pissing’) Conduit, and the Great Conduit and the Standard on Cheap. Conduits were particularly suitable stages: they tended to be in the middle of the street, they offered an elevated platform for performers, and they were places where crowds routinely congregated.

STATIC PLAYING VENUES: HALLS AND SCHOOLS Arrangements between livery companies and performers could also be more informal. Busking players and musicians would sometimes approach company members in taverns, obviously hoping to be remunerated on the spot, or to be employed to perform in their halls, such as when in 1604 ‘a noyse of trompetters’ approached members of the Armourers and Brasiers ‘at the robinhood’ (they were given 2s. 6d.) (Armourers and Brasiers’ Company Court Minutes, 1559–1621; LMA: CLC/L/ AB/B/001/MS12071/002, f. 111r). In various contexts, then, performers received a regular income from the livery companies. The arrangement worked in one of two ways: livery company halls were sometimes leased out for troupes to perform in, with, one assumes, paying spectators; in other instances, players were employed to provide entertainment for company feasts. The latter was a more common practice than has commonly been acknowledged, and both child and adult groups performed in the livery halls. For instance, the Goldsmiths engaged ‘the syngnyne chyldren of Paules’ for a company dinner in June 1560 (Robertson and Gordon 1954: 139). This was not a one-off: Paul’s Boys and the Merchant Taylors’ School Boys sang and played interludes at the halls of the Goldsmiths, Drapers and Merchant Taylors on

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an intermittent basis throughout the period (a fact which has been known for a long time). However, because until very recently the minor livery companies’ records – post-1558 – have not been thoroughly scrutinized, the prevalence of this practice has been hitherto unexplored. It is now becoming apparent how very important the City’s various performance spaces were to the rise of professional theatre in and around London. As I have already shown, occasionally it is possible to tell which troupe was performing. The Wax Chandlers’ records for a company feast day in the mid-1560s show a payment of 13s. 4d. to ‘the children of Powles for ther musick at dynner and there playe’ (Wax Chandlers’ Company Master’s and Wardens’ Accounts, 1557–9; LMA: CLC/L/WB/D/001/MS09481/001 f. 155r). ‘The Boyes of the hospital’ (possibly Christ’s Hospital, George Peele’s childhood home) performed for five shillings at Tallow Chandlers’ Hall at a feast to celebrate the election of the Company’s Master and Wardens during the late 1550s (Tallow Chandlers’ Company Wardens’ Account Book, 1549–85; LMA: CLC/L/TC/D/001/MS06152/001, f. 68v). Indeed, this company were enthusiastic patrons of players: a few years later the Children of Westminster performed ‘an interlude’ for them, and the Children of Paul’s returned to their hall in 1566–7. Butchers’ Hall, on Newgate Shambles next door to Christ Church (the pre-Reformation Greyfriars), hosted players from the early 1560s to at least 1588. The ‘lower church’ of Christ Church itself  – which was an enormous 300 feet long and 89 feet wide – was used for pageant-making till 1605–6, and potentially for other dramatic purposes too (Erler 2008: xxxiv and 203). Butchers’ Hall was used as a de facto playhouse for paying spectators as well as when the Company patronized players themselves. The third item from their accounts quoted below implies that on occasion children as well as adults performed in their hall: ‘Item for ffower playes in the hall ——— vj s. viij d.’; ‘Item for A playe in the hall ——— xx d.’; ‘Item a playe playde by men ——— xx d.’ (Butchers’ Company Wardens’ Accounts; LMA: CLC/L/BI/D/003/MS06440/001, ff. 163v and 188v). Child actors performed an interlude about St George, the company’s patron saint, for the Armourers and Brasiers’ Company in 1589: After [the banquet] a boye Armid with a virgin following Hime leading a Lamb came in with a drome and flute before theim/ and after marching thrisse about the hall their tables all sett they marched to the high tabill with a speache. (MS12071/002, p. 483) Other fixed playing venues were commonly used in the period, and all  – not coincidentally  – were rectangular halls or inn yards.3 Interludes such as ‘the play of Philomathes’ were put on at St Paul’s School from the 1550s to the 1580s, both privately and to paying audiences (although there were blurred lines between rehearsal and paid performance in the City schools). Scholars did perform plays publicly to a paying audience at the Merchant Taylors’ School on Suffolk Lane under Richard Mulcaster’s leadership from soon after it opened in 1561 until 1574 when this practice was brought to a halt due to unruly audience behaviour. Mulcaster also produced speeches and verses for mayoral pageantry in the same period, and Merchant Taylors’ scholars performed in civic pageantry and probably

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in livery company halls too. Indeed, the school had strong dramatic traditions: pupils who went on to become playwrights include Thomas Kyd, Thomas Lodge and James Shirley. As well as livery company halls and the City schools, parish fraternity halls were used as stages in the crucial mid-sixteenth-century formative years of London drama. Two of the most significant were St Giles’ parish hall, located just north of Cripplegate, and Trinity Hall on Aldersgate. These spaces have largely gone under the radar of theatre historians. However, as Erler writes, Trinity Hall was a ‘significant venue … [and] important to the evolution of London commercial theatre’.4 She draws intriguing links with what seem to have been the latter’s final days as a theatrical performance venue and the establishment of the Red Lion in Aldgate in 1567, implying that the latter may have effectively supplanted Trinity Hall and other similar venues (2008: xiii, xliii–xliv). Its location close to Smithfield, site of Bartholomew Fair, further associated it with entertainment. Indeed, Trinity Hall was used as a playhouse specifically, although not exclusively, at ‘Barthilmewe tyde’ in the 1560s (Erler 2008: 144–5). This large rectangular hall, with its impressive stained glass window providing plenty of light, was let to players from 1558 on a regular basis until at least 1568 (Basing 1982: vii–xxviii). What has not survived, unfortunately, is much indication of the nature of the plays presented, although Anne Lancashire has made the plausible supposition that the entertainments performed in livery and parish halls in this period would probably have resembled moralitystyle interludes like ‘Lusty Juventus’ (c. 1565) (2002: 109–10). Perhaps too, as with the Armourers and Brasiers’ Company instance cited above, bespoke playlets were designed to incorporate company saints or other important figures. Other religious buildings used for playing included St Katharine Cree on Leadenhall Street, which in the early sixteenth century received a licence to stage plays in its exceptionally large churchyard (Erler 2008: 226–7).

‘TO A PLAYE AT THE BULL’: THE CITY INNS More significant still were four large inns within the limits of the City of London – the Bel Savage to the west on Ludgate Hill, the Cross Keys and the Bell, adjacent to each other at the bottom of Gracechurch Street, and the Bull, directly north of the latter two near Bishopsgate – where plays and other entertainments such as fencing contests and Banks’s famous performing horse Morocco were regularly hosted. It is important to stress that the boundary of the City’s jurisdiction extended some distance beyond its ancient city wall. The Fortune playhouse north of Cripplegate was thus located only a couple of hundred yards from the City limits, and the Theatre and Curtain in Shoreditch were also a fairly short walk away from the City. The advantages of playing at the City inns were numerous, and contemporary evidence indicates that they were popular with urban inhabitants and visitors. They were located on major access routes into the heart of the metropolis, for one thing, without the risk and inconvenience of travelling to the suburbs, an especial concern in the winter months. Lawrence Manley writes that the City inns already held an ‘important place at the center of social life and … [offered] a ready-made audience

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comprising both travelers and local residents’. He also points out that ‘inns with buildings ranged around an enclosed central courtyard also provided an ideal space for performance: the physical means to restrict entrance for the purpose of charging admission, an open yard for standing, and additional accommodation in the galleries that ran around the courtyard and allowed access to upper-story rooms’ (2008: 184). Their yards appear to have been spacious enough, and other aspects of hospitality such as food and drink were readily on hand. Theatre companies who utilized the inns – such as the Queen’s Men – were, after all, habituated to inn-playing from the extensive time they spent touring provincial towns and cities. One of the most perplexing aspects of early modern theatre history is that performances at the City inns were then so important but are now so poorly understood. As Andy Kesson puts it, ‘Elizabethans … may well have considered the inns as the primary, most prestigious playing houses in town’ (2017). This oversight is due more to the enduring myth of the City’s wholesale aversion to theatre than to a paucity of documentary sources. Play-going may have been controlled within the City, as it was in the Middlesex and Surrey suburbs, of course, but it was permitted for some decades. The persistent notion of resolutely anti-theatrical dour puritan ‘City fathers’ is a scholarly fantasy. William Ingram’s more balanced take is that the 1574 Act to license playing within the City had ‘less to do with the suppression of stage playing, and more to do with City finances, than may at first appear’: the Act was thus, he argues, ‘designed actually to enable, rather than suppress, the responsible presentation of stage plays in the City’ (1992: 122, 138). The City of London thereby established a licencing arrangement for the inns that allowed plays to be performed on alternative days of the week to fencing.5 Records of City inn drama survive from the mid-1570s: there is as yet no evidence of earlier inn-playing, but this seems quite likely to emerge given the volume of performance records now being unearthed from the 1560s and early 1570s (performances are recorded at the Saracen’s Head in Islington in the 1550s (Brownstein 1971)). Our earliest known source about City inn-playing to date is from A Perambulation of Kent (1576), where William Lambarde mentions the Bel Savage inn, along with the Paris Garden on Bankside, as a ‘common place, to beholde Beare bayting, Enterludes, or Fence playe’ (1576: sig. Aa2r). Two years later the Bull inn on Bishopsgate crops up in the unlikely context of an early modern Italian-English phrasebook, Florio His Firste Fruites. In response to the stock phrase, ‘Where shal we goe?’, the suggested answer is ‘To a playe at the Bull, or els to some other place’ (Florio 1578: sig. A1r). After the formation of the Queen’s Men in 1583 the City inns became yet more central playing venues. That year the City’s Court of Aldermen permitted the troupe to use ‘the Bull and the Bell and nowhere else in the City until the following Shrovetide (3 March 1584), on holidays, Wednesdays and Saturdays only, not on Sundays or during times of divine service’ (Kathman 2011: 158). According to W. R. Streitberger, prior to the establishment of the Queen’s Men in 1583, the four City inns ‘hosted companies performing in the Queen’s revels’ (2011: 57). Clues to what was actually played at the City inns also survive. Stephen Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse refers not only to individual inns but to what appear to be discrete productions. Such testimony, from a man who knew the theatre from the inside

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even if by 1579 he had largely abjured it, is highly valuable. Gosson mentions ‘twoo prose Bookes plaied at the Belsauage’ and ‘the Iew & Ptoleme, showne at the Bull’ (1579: sig. C6v). Tarletons Jests contains an anecdote about Tarleton and William Knell performing what might have been The Famous Victories of Henry V at the Bull: At the Bull at Bishops-gate was a play of Henry the fift, wherein the Iudge was to take a boxe on the eare, and because he was absent that should take the blow: Tarlton himselfe (euer forward to please) tooke upon him to play the same Iudge, besides his owne part of the Clowne: and Knell then playing Henry the fift, hit Tarlton a sound boxe indeed, which made the people laugh the more, because it was he. (Tarleton 1613: sig. C2v) William Prynne’s vast jeremiad against contemporary sin, Histriomastix, in which he mentions ‘the visibile [sic] apparition of the devil on stage at the Bel Savage playhouse … whiles they were there profanely playing The History of Faustus’, offers evidence of an inn performance of some version of a Faustus play – possibly Marlowe’s (Wickham, Berry and Ingram 2000: 303). Along with letters, minutes and edicts from the City of London Corporation and the Privy Council, title pages of playbooks can provide information too. Eight survive from 1590 to 1603 which specifically mention performance ‘in’ the City of London, a good marker that the play in question had not been staged at one of the suburban playhouses, or at least not exclusively. Given the indifference of much theatre history towards the City inns, one might be surprised to see some ‘big names’ featured here. The earliest is the 1590 edition of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, which refers to the play having been performed ‘upon stages in the citie of London’; the latest is the first quarto of Hamlet, published in 1603: ‘As it hath beene diuerse times acted by his Highnesse seruants in the Cittie of London’ (Shakespeare 1603: sig. A4r).6 The Troublesome Raigne of John King of England, which has been ascribed to Peele, also states that ‘it was (sundry times) publikely acted by the Queenes Maiesties Players, in the honourable citie of London’ (1591b: sig. A2r). Such is the reluctance to acknowledge the inns’ importance, however, that scholars from W. W. Greg onwards have tied themselves in knots trying to argue that ‘in’ the City does not mean ‘in’ the City but somehow outside of it. Relatedly, theatre historians have presumed that a much later and somewhat confused reference in Richard Rawlidge’s 1628 polemic A Monster Late Found Out and Discovered to plays being prohibited within the City limits during the reign of Elizabeth I meant that the inns ceased operations as playhouses by 1595–6 or possibly 1594.7 However, Herbert Berry comments that ‘the evidence for this is not overwhelming’, and Wickham, Berry and Ingram concede that ‘no document expressly says’ that the inns were ‘suppressed’ at this date (Berry 2006: 136; Wickham, Berry and Ingram 2000: 304–5). It now seems more likely that inn-playing continued in tandem with the suburban playhouses for some years after the patron of the Chamberlain’s Men famously asked for his troupe to be allowed to continue to perform at the Cross Keys in 1594. This would certainly explain the hitherto puzzling reference to the City on the Hamlet quarto, as well as a similar staging location on the first 1598 edition of the massively popular

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Mucedorus: ‘as it hath bin sundrie times plaide in the honorable cittie of London’ (1598: sig. A1r). Putting inn-playing back in the frame enables a fresh perspective on staging, repertory, acting troupes and doubtless further aspects of theatre history, as discussed elsewhere in this volume.

A MAN ‘VERY WELL KNOWNE IN THE CITY OF LONDON’ Shared economic, spatial and social structures therefore underpinned and enabled various performance spaces in early modern London. Erler argues that ‘in four areas – equipment, costumes, space, and personnel – we can see the indebtedness of … various venues and kinds of playing to one another’. ‘Versatility’, she suggests, was thus a ‘distinguishing mark’ of cross-generic theatrical activity (2014: 99, 102). Those who acted, sang, played instruments, designed devices or wrote speeches for performance outside of the playhouses certainly did have to be versatile. I’ve already demonstrated the ways in which players and dramatists switched readily between venues and genres, and the close connections between civic and professional drama in terms of themes and dramatic form pervade the career of my case study, George Peele. Peele wrote City pageants as well as plays for children’s and adult professional companies, and for a range of performance spaces, both inside and outside of the metropolis. Although he was primarily a London-based writer, he did some work in 1583 on the entertainments put on for Count Laski at Oxford, further discussed below; early the following year his court play The Araygnment of Paris was performed by the Children of the Chapel at Whitehall Palace. He also composed occasional celebratory verse for courtiers such as the Earl of Essex. Peele is best known, however, as the writer of The Battle of Alcazar and a handful of other stage plays from the 1580s and 1590s. Drama scholars are usually less aware that around 1585, just as his stage work was taking off, Peele succeeded his father James as pageant poet and impresario for the City of London’s mayoral Show. Peele senior was a pioneer in civic entertainments in the 1560s. Father and son were both members of the Salters’ Company, one of the Great Twelve livery companies of London, and James Peele worked for the City for many years: from 1562 until his death in 1585 he was Clerk of Christ’s Hospital, one of the City’s major charitable bodies and a place that offered refuge and education for children. His son was educated in its school. Manifold parallels can be drawn between Peele’s stage plays and his City pageants, and I will explore these further below. Sadly, nothing remains to back up Jean Robertson and D. J. Gordon’s supposition that George Peele may have written the mayoral shows in 1581 and 1583, before pageant books started to appear in print (1953: xxxiv). However, Peele did commence  – or perhaps continue  – his work on civic pageantry on the back of what appears to be a similar role in 1583 when he received payments of £20 and £18 ‘in respect of the playes and intertaynment’ and ‘for prouision of the playes at Christchurch [college]’ during a visit to Oxford by the Polish dignitary Baron Laski (Elliot 2004: 183, 188). It’s not entirely clear from either of these records whether Peele was being employed to write speeches or to organize the whole entertainment,

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or a combination of the two, as was his practice for the City companies. David Horne remarks that Christ Church was ‘a center of playwrighting and producing’ in the period when Peele was a student there; indeed, he introduces the possibility that Peele might have offered the college role of Censor, ‘one of the duties of which was to oversee the plays’, an intriguing idea which unfortunately he does not back up with any evidence (1952: 42, 56). Nonetheless, Horne’s hypothesis is that the large sum of £20 may have represented payment for ‘technical direction: the supervising of construction and erection of the stage and scenery, and devising and executing the scenic effects, costuming and fireworks’, all activities which strike a chord with the civic records I discuss below (1952: 63). With such a track record, not to mention Peele’s own status as a freeman of the City, Horne’s claim that ‘it was unlikely that he … was enthusiastic’ about his mayoral Shows, together with his implication that he only undertook them for the money, reveals more about Horne’s preferences than it does about those of the dramatist (1952: 76). We are on firmer ground in the case of 1585, where the first surviving printed pageant book from the period unarguably places George Peele as the writer of that year’s pageant speeches. His name does not appear in the Skinners’ Company records due to the organizational work being delegated to the company yeomanry but evidence of his authorship does appear on the final page of the slim pamphlet published as The Device of the Pageant Borne before Woolstone Dixi: ‘Donne [sic] by George Peele, Maister of artes in Oxford’, underscored by a contemporary manuscript annotation, ‘By G. Peele’, on the title page of the only extant copy (Peele 1585: sig. A4r). The Skinners’ Company court commanded that ‘all manner [of] thinges that are to be prouided againste Simon and Iude day’ should be set in motion ‘as hath bin accustomid for … this Companie’, which at least reveals that there was continuity with previous Skinners’ mayoralties (Skinners’ Company Court Book, 1577–1617; LMA: CLC/L/SE/B/001/MS30708/002, f. 120v). The pageant book tells us something about the performance, but to gain further insight into the theatrical show Peele designed we need to look elsewhere. When the Draper Thomas Pullison was elected Lord Mayor the year before, a foreign visitor, Lupold van Wedel, witnessed the show and described a pageant device thus: ‘some men were carrying a representation in the shape of a house with a pointed roof painted in blue and golden colours and ornamented with garlands, on which sat some young girls in fine apparel, one holding a book, another a pair of scales, the third a sceptre’ (1895: 255). The 1585 Show appears to have used a similar format, with children sitting in some kind of tiered structure (more on this later) taking twelve speaking parts, from London herself to four ‘nymphs’. An actor ‘apparelled like a Moore’ riding a lynx preceded the pageant and introduced its speakers, a device reused by Anthony Munday in the 1616 Show for the Fishmongers’ Company (Peele 1585: sig. A2r). In an echo of pageant dramaturgy to which I’ll return shortly, Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar also has a Moor as a central protagonist, who enters the stage in a chariot, and in Edward the First Queen Elinor is carried in a litter borne by four Moors, although in the latter instance the Moors do not speak. The general pattern for mayoral inaugurations in the mid-late sixteenth century therefore seems to have been to have a figure (either dumb or as a speaking

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presenter) accompanied by or riding on an animal referring in some fashion to the Company, as well as a discrete pageant device. George Peele’s career in civic pageantry continued for some years. We do know that he produced a pageant book for the 1588 Show (although no copy exists) because it was entered into the Stationers’ Register. Little else is available to us, though, for the Drapers’ Company allocated the organization of Calthorpe’s Show to their Bachelors, whose deliberations have not been preserved. For 1591, in contrast, we have a pageant book, Descensus Astraeae, but no accompanying documentation, for the Salters’ Company archives for the period were destroyed in the Great Fire. Fortunately, this text is slightly more expansive than the one Peele wrote six years earlier. It describes a pageant station bearing around fifteen speaking parts, most likely performed by children, and thematically, as its title implies, it centres on some of the queen’s personae, calling her ‘our faire Astraea, our Pandora faire, / our sweet Eliza, or Zabeta faire’ (Peele 1591a: sig. A2v). Lord Mayor William Webbe himself is relegated to the background, mentioned in passing at the start as ‘a worthie Gouernor for Londons good’, invoked again in the text’s concluding speech, but otherwise only present via the usual wordplay on his name with a device of a child spinning a web in ‘the hinder part of the Pageant’ (Peele 1591a: sigs A2r and A4r). In the absence of any known alternative contender for the job it is possible that Peele was again commissioned in 1586 and 1587, but he was by his own account suffering from a ‘longe sicknes’ in 1596 and is therefore very unlikely to have been employed by any civic body in September–October of that year (he died in November). The year 1595 thus represents his civic pageantry swan song: he submitted a ‘sute’ to the Skinners’ Company, which was accepted, and he was duly appointed to produce a pageant (MS30708/002, f. 229r-v). For this event a pageant and a ‘Luzarne [lynx] with a moscovitor [Muscovite]’ were ordered, suggesting the same pattern of heraldic animal with human figure and separate pageant device that we have seen before (f. 230r). The lynx stands in for the animals whose pelts the Skinners worked with, and the Muscovite refers to one of the territories where they traded, as well as to the long-standing Russia or Muscovy Company, to which a number of Skinners belonged. So what does this evidence of prolonged involvement in pageantry mean for Peele’s importance as a City dramatist, building on his father’s earlier work? Merrie Conceited Jests of George Peele Gentleman, published about a decade after Peele’s death, refers on its title page to its subject as having been ‘very well knowne in the City of London’ ([1607]: sig. A1r). As with all such jest books, one should treat any supposedly biographical detail with caution, but the emphasis on Peele’s familiarity in civic circles is striking. The claim in the same work that Peele ‘had all the ouersight of the pageants’ is also too specific to be readily discounted (sig. B4r). When Peele was commissioned for the 1595 Show there was no reference to a painter-stainer or artificer as co-producer, as was to become the norm, which makes it likely that he played a leading, supervisory as well as a literary role at that juncture.8 On this basis he merits a status as an impresario who took the genre forward in both creative and logistical ways, and his work for the City established a path to be followed by other professional dramatists.

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‘ENTER THE TRAIN’: PEELE ON THE STREETS AND THE STAGE I will now return to some of the many productive likenesses that can be drawn out between Peele’s theatrical work both inside and ‘beyond’ the playhouses. In general terms, we ought to see these correspondences as a way of throwing fresh light on both the stage plays and the pageantry produced by canonical dramatists like Middleton, Webster and Dekker, rather than dismissing the latter as culturally worthless hagiography. A. R. Braunmuller cites criticisms of Peele by scholars such as G. K. Hunter and Muriel Bradbrook, for whom his plays’ use of ‘pageantry and “shows”’ is regarded as their ‘abiding defect’. In contrast, Braunmuller’s view (with which I concur) is that ‘Peele’s work as a court and civic poet … taught [him] what the public liked, and they liked ceremonies, processions, and similar episodes’ (1983: 128). I have already established a common convention of a single figure being used to proceed or introduce a pageant device in Peele’s civic entertainments. Similar kinds of ‘presenter’ characters are also utilized in his plays, and they operate in both contexts to provide explication for the audience. In Descensus Astraeae the first speaker is called ‘the Presenter’; both The Battle of Alcazar and David and Bethsabe have roles for a ‘presenter’ or prologue, and The Old Wives Tale employs what IngaStina Ewbank calls a ‘frame construction’, centred on the old woman, who performs a presenter role (1975: 137). Civic pageantry put great emphasis on costume and properties, largely to help the audience interpret the devices, given the considerable background noise, and these characteristics are present in Peele’s plays too. In The Araygnment of Paris Faunus asks Flora to set the scene in front of the audience. She obliges, picking up on the colour and fabric of the costumes in great detail – such as Pallas in her ‘flowers of hue and collowers red’ – as well as the identifying props employed by the characters, including Pallas’s plume, helmet, lance and Gorgon’s head (Peele 1584: sig. A4v). By way of comparison, in one of many examples I could cite, ‘London’ in Middleton (and Munday)’s 1613 mayoral Show The Triumphs of Truth is described as ‘a Graue Foeminine Shape … representing London, attired like a reuerend Mother, a long white haire naturally flowing on either side of her: on her head a modell of Steeples and Turrets, her habite Crimson silke, neere to the Honourable garment of the Citty: her left hand holding a Key of gold’ (1613: sig. A4r). Middleton’s ‘London’ may also offer clues about the costuming of ‘a Lady very richly attyred, representing London’ in Robert Wilson’s The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London (1590: sig. A2v). Pageant devices were often loaded with figures depicting royal and/or civic virtues, with the greatest in the highest place, and one can see the same dramaturgical approach in a stage direction in Peele’s Edward the First: ‘The Queene Mother being set on the one side, and Queene Elinor on the other, the king sitteth in the middest mounted highest, and at his feete the Ensigne vnderneath him’ (1593: sig. A2v). Such shared characteristics may well derive in part from the house style of the Queen’s Men, for whom Peele wrote on a number of occasions. (His plays for this troupe include The Old Wives Tale, The Love of King Dauid and Fair Bethsabe and possibly The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England.) Queen’s Men’s

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plays, MacLean and McMillin write in their essential book on the troupe, tend to demonstrate ‘narrative overdetermination’, an impulse to convey clear messages to the audience shared by civic pageantry. Their plays, they argue, also incorporate processions ‘which seem to exist for their own sake’ as well as ‘the organisation of major scenes around a scenic emblem’ (1998: 142); in such processions, figures carry devices to convey their qualities and/or their identities, just as they do in civic pageantry. In both genres, processions were not simply ways of getting characters onstage but had theatrical appeal in their own right. Ewbank comments that Peele takes ‘great care over stage directions’ to emphasize the visual quality of his work (1975: 134, 137).9 Extensive stage directions are provided in Edward the First, for example, such as this one from the first scene of the play: The Trumpets sound, and enter the traine, viz. his maimed Souldiers with headpeeces and Garlands on them, euery man with his red Crosse on his coate: the Ancient borne in a Chaire, his Garland and his plumes on his headpeece, his Ensigne in his hand. Enter after them Glocester and Mortimer bareheaded, & others as many as may be. (Peele 1593: sig. A2v) The processional feel here, as well as the properties borne by the characters, bear strong similarities with mayoral Shows, where emblematic and iconographic meanings are foregrounded by the use of stage directions and pageant devices. I would even go so far as to say that Peele’s stage directions – especially the rather loose ‘& others as many as may be’ – resemble the pageant ‘pitches’ presented to the livery companies by dramatists and artificers, which were intended to explain logistics as much as content. This ‘loose’ quality is reflected in Peele’s plays more widely. Amy Lidster argues that Edward the First demonstrates a ‘model of history [which] is defined by lurching tonal shifts, episodic and fractured plotting’, adding that the play ‘seems closely to match the “medley” model of playmaking proposed by MacLean and McMillin for the plays of the Queen’s Men, a style that prioritises variety – music, comedy, tragic scenes and historical data (coronation dates, aristocratic genealogies) – over tonal or narrative integrity’ (2019). There is a distinctly episodic quality to a number of Peele’s stage plays (especially The Old Wives Tale) as well as to his and others’ City entertainments. Edward the First is structured around a series of ‘pageants’: a triumphal entry through Cheapside, a coronation where ‘Queene Elinor, Queene Mother, the King and Queene [enter] vnder a Canopie’ (Peele 1593: sig. C3v), a royal christening and wedding, and what is referred to as a ‘showe’ (1593: sig. H4v). However, I would argue that the apparently ‘bitty’ quality of Peele’s and other late-sixteenth-century plays, rather than being a flaw, demonstrates the mutually constitutive relationship between ‘professional’ and civic drama in this period. Peele’s pageantry and plays share other characteristics too. Civic concerns feature in Edward the First, an ostensibly royal play when Maris, the Lord Mayor’s wife, states that after a twelve-year wait she has finally had her first child during her husband’s mayoral term (Peele 1593: sig. D1v). Its patriotic verses resemble the Arcadian vision of England invoked in Descensus Astraeae, and there are equally

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likenesses with The Araygnment of Paris in both the bucolic setting and the flattery of the queen. Juno, Pallas and Venus present Paris with ‘showes’: Pallas’s show features ‘9. knights in armour, treading a warlike Almaine, by drome and fife’ (Peele 1584: sig. C1r). Similarly, a royal train enters accompanied by drums and trumpets in both Edward the First and The Battle of Alcazar. Drums, trumpets and fifes are the instruments employed ubiquitously in civic entertainments in livery company halls as well as on the streets. The latter play concludes with the figure of Fame and some fireworks, as The Triumphs of Truth does (fireworks were commonly used in civic pageantry, as is Fame with her trumpet). Diana in The Araygnment of Paris has a bower, just as the famed Lord Mayor William Walworth has a bower in Munday’s 1616 Show Chrysanaleia. The ‘Three Goddesses’ / judgement of Paris theme, the centrepiece of the latter play, had been used in 1533 for Anne Boleyn’s coronation entry.10 Peele’s career in its totality is an early example of the mutually beneficial relationship between civic pageantry and the professional stage, a relationship which was only to strengthen in the coming decades. His employments for the City, alongside those of numerous contemporaries, demonstrate that in early modern London theatricality drew upon manifold connections, personal, institutional and generic. Drama ‘beyond’ the playhouses is an area ripe for further exploration. Details of livery company-sponsored performances are emerging all the time, theatre historians are at last looking seriously at the City inns, and the work I have done in this chapter to expand on the many parallels between ‘professional’ and civic theatre can readily be extended to Peele’s contemporaries such as Middleton, Dekker, Munday, Webster, Jonson and Heywood.

NOTES 1 The records of the Armourers and Brasiers, Wax Chandlers and Tallow Chandlers were transcribed by Dr Charlie Berry. 2 Busino’s account of the 1617 Lord Mayor’s Show can be found in the Calendar of State Papers (1909: 15, no. 103A). 3 As part of this role Middleton published Honorable Entertainments Compos’de for the Seruice of This Noble Cittie in 1621; for commentary, see Hill (2017). 4 For a longer discussion of the significance of rectangular playing spaces in London, see Syme (2016). 5 Trinity Hall’s dimensions were 54′ 8″ east-west and 15′ 8″ north-south. In comparison, it has been calculated that the theatre at Paul’s was around 40′6″ by 23′ (Erler 2008: xxii). 6 Fencing also took place at the Curtain in Shoreditch, the Swan on Bankside, Leadenhall, Newgate Sessions Hall and possibly Christ Church Greyfriars (see Anglin 1984 and Berry 2006); performative wrestling contests, sponsored by livery companies, were staged at Smithfield during Bartholomew Fair. 7 For a fuller discussion of City inn staging, see Menzer (2006).

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8 See, for example, Gurr (2010). 9 For more on the civic pageantry commissioning process, see Hill (2010), chapter 2. 10 See Hackett (2014: 230–3) and Crover (2020: 52, 59–60).

REFERENCES Anglin, J. P. (1984), ‘The Schools of Defense in Elizabethan London’, Renaissance Quarterly, 37 (3): 393–410. Basing, P., ed. (1982), ‘Introduction’, in Parish Fraternity Register: Fraternity of the Holy Trinity and SS. Fabian and Sebastian (Parish of St. Botolph without Aldersgate), vii–xxviii, London: London Record Society. Available online: http://www.britishhistory.ac.uk/london-record-soc/vol18/vii-xxviii (accessed 17 August 2020). Berry, H. (2006), ‘The Bell Savage Inn and Playhouse’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 19: 121–43. Braunmuller, A. R. (1983), George Peele, Boston: Twayne Publishing. Brownstein, O. L. (1971), ‘The Saracen’s Head, Islington: A Pre-Elizabethan Inn Playhouse’, Theatre Notebook, 25 (2): 68–72. Calendar of State Papers Relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, vol. 15: 1617–1619 (1909), London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office. Available online: https:// www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/venice/vol15/pp44–63 Crover, S. (2020), ‘“Cleopatra in Her Barge”: Anne Boleyn’s Coronation Pageants and the Production of English Cultural Capital’, in A. Sen and J. C. Finlayson (eds), Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London, 50–69, Abingdon: Routledge. Elliot, J. R., ed. (2004), Records of Early English Drama: Oxford, vol. 1: The Records, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Erler, M., ed. (2008), Records of Early English Drama: Ecclesiastical London, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Erler, M. (2014), ‘London Commercial Theatre 1500–1576’, in J. Jenkins and J. Sanders (eds), Editing, Performance, Texts: New Practices in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama, 93–106, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ewbank, I. (1975), ‘“What Words, What Looks, What Wonders?”: Language and Spectacle in the Theatre of George Peele’, in G. R. Hibbard (ed.), The Elizabethan Theatre V, 124–54, Toronto: Macmillan. Florio, J. (1578), Florio His Firste Fruites, London. Gosson, S. (1579), The Schoole of Abuse, London. Gurr, A. (2010), ‘Venues on the Verges: London’s Theatre Government between 1594 and 1614’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 61 (4): 468–89. Hackett, H. (2014), ‘A New Image of Elizabeth I: The Three Goddesses Theme in Art and Literature’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 77 (3): 225–56. Hill, T. (2010), Pageantry and Power: A Cultural History of the Early Modern Lord Mayor’s Show, 1585–1639, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hill, T. (2017), ‘“Ever Obedient in His Studies”: Thomas Middleton and the City, c. 1621’, London Journal, 42 (2): 137–50.

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Horne, D. H. (1952), The Life and Minor Works of George Peele, New Haven: Yale University Press. Ingram, W. (1992), The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of the Adult Professional Theater in Elizabethan London, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kathman, D. (2004), ‘Grocers, Goldsmiths, and Drapers: Freemen and Apprentices in the Elizabethan Theater’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 55 (1): 1–49. Kathman, D. (2005), ‘Citizens, Innholders, and Playhouse Builders, 1543–1622’, Research Opportunities in Medieval & Renaissance Drama, 44: 38–64. Kathman, D. (2009), ‘Alice Layston and the Cross Keys’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 22: 144–78. Kathman, D. (2011), ‘Inn-Yard Playhouses’, in R. Dutton (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, 153–67, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kesson, A. (2017), ‘No Room in the Inns?’, Before Shakespeare, 18 December. Available online: https://beforeshakespeare.com/2017/12/18/performing-words-2-no-room-inthe-inns/ (accessed 19 November 2020). Lambarde, W. (1576), A Perambulation of Kent, London. Lancashire, A. (2002), English Civic Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lancashire, A. (2011), ‘London Street Theatre’, in Richard Dutton (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, 323–39, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lancashire, A., ed. (2015), Records of Early English Drama: Civic London to 1558, 3 vols, Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Lidster, A. (2019), ‘Read Not Dead: Edward I’. Available online: https://changinghistories. wordpress.com/2019/03/27/read-not-dead-edward-i/ (accessed 18 November 2020). MacLean, S. and S. McMillin (1998), The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Manley, L. (2008), ‘Why Did London Inns Function as Theaters?’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 71 (1): 181–97. Menzer, P. (2006), ‘The Tragedians of the City? Q1 Hamlet and the Settlements of the 1590s’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 57 (2): 162–82. Merrie Conceited Iests of George Peele Gentleman, Sometimes a Student in Oxford. VVherein Is Shewed the Course of His Life How He Liued: A Man Very Well Knowne in the Citie of London and Elsewhere (1607), London. Middleton, T. (1613), The Triumphs of Truth, London. Middleton, T. (1621), Honorable Entertainments Compos’de for the Seruice of this Noble Cittie, London. A Most Pleasant Comedie of Mucedorus the Kings Sonne of Valentia and Amadine the Kings Daughter of Arragon with the Merie Conceites of Mouse (1598), London. Peele, G. (1584), The Araygnment of Paris., London. Peele, G. (1585), The Device of the Pageant Borne before Woolstone Dixi, London. Peele, G. (1591a), Descensus Astraeae, London. Peele, G. (1591b), The Troublesome Raigne of John King of England, London. Peele, G. (1593), The Famous Chronicle of King Edward the First, London. Robertson, J. and D. J. Gordon, eds (1954), A Calendar of Dramatic Records in the Books of the Livery Companies of London, Oxford: Malone Society. Shakespeare, W. (1603), The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmark, London.

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Streitberger, W. R. (2011), ‘Adult Playing Companies to 1583’, in Richard Dutton (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, 19–38, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Syme, H. (2016), ‘Post-Curtain Theatre History’, Dispositio, 18 May. Available online: http://www.dispositio.net/archives/2262 (accessed 19 November 2020). Tarleton, R. (1613), Tarltons Jests Drawne into These Three Parts, London. Von Wedel, L. (1895), ‘Journey through England and Scotland Made by Lupold von Wedel in the Years 1584 and 1585’, trans. Gottfried von Bulow, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 9: 223–70. Wickham, G., H. Berry and W. Ingram, eds (2000), English Professional Theatre, 1530–1660, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wiggins, M. (2014), British Drama 1553–1642: A Catalogue, vol. 2: 1567–89, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilson, R. (1590), The Pleasant and Stately Morall, of the Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, London.

CHAPTER 4.5

Material culture CHLOE PORTER

Early modern plays are the product of a lively material culture. Like many early modern cities, London in this period experienced booming population growth that created a ‘concentrated market for goods’ (Rublack 2010: 4). The playhouses that sprang up in late-sixteenth-century London entertained a city enmeshed in a global network of mercantilism and commerce, ‘whose very life turned on the provision of material things’ (Harris Sacks 2000: 21). Indeed, the theatres can be considered as ‘actual markets’ (Bruster 1992: 9–10), in which a variety of things circulated, from the pins that may have fastened stage costumes to the ‘peaches, plums, figs, apples, hazelnuts and oysters’ that playgoers consumed (Tiramani 2010: 85; Trudell 2013: 230). Against this backdrop, playwrights often figure themselves as makers of goods and their plays as commodities. John Lyly in Midas (2000: Prologue in Paul’s, 9–10) compares plays to ‘picktooths’ and ‘pots’ and playwriting to painting and tailoring; similarly, the Epistle to Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s The Roaring Girl states that ‘the fashion of playmaking’ is best compared ‘to the alteration in apparel’ (1987: 3). In The Devil Is an Ass, Ben Jonson (1994: Prologue, 17–18) invites playgoers to regard his ‘scenes’ as they would ‘Muscovy glass’; Hamlet, meanwhile, likens a player’s voice to ‘uncurrent gold … cracked within the ring’, plays to ‘caviare’, and a speech to an overgrown ‘beard’, and, most famously, states that mimesis holds ‘the mirror up to Nature’ (2.2.365–437; 3.2.22). These examples highlight both the materiality of performance and the performativity of objects and materials. Significantly, that objects are not ‘static’, but perform on and ‘offstage’, is also crucial for materialist scholars of early modern English drama (Harris and Korda 2002: 18; Richardson 2011: 31). Following this view, this chapter explores the possibilities that attend the study of the movements of things in early modern drama, a major critical preoccupation since the late-twentieth-century ‘material turn’ in the humanities. This critical development emerged partly in response to the ‘cultural’, ‘linguistic’, ‘literary’ and ‘textual’ concerns of much 1980s scholarship (Hicks and Beaudry 2010: 1). For example, the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s (1986: 2) highly influential essay collection argues against the ‘Western’ assumption that ‘the world of things’ is ‘inert and mute, set in motion and animated, and indeed knowable, only by persons and their words’. Appadurai contends that we should recognize that ‘things’ accrue ‘social lives’ when they circulate as commodities and that by tracing the ‘trajectories’

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of ‘things-in-motion’ we may understand ‘the human transactions and calculations that enliven things’ (1986: 1, 5). Significantly, Appadurai (1986: 5) notes that this approach necessarily entails ‘a minimum level of … methodological fetishism’, where fetishism means ‘attention to the things themselves’, but also implies Karl Marx’s (1990: 164–6) account of the commodity fetish as the ‘mystical’ belief that there are ‘social relations between things’. The necessity of critical fetishism informs later New Materialist scholarship, including thing theory, object-oriented ontology and vibrant materialism. In his account of thing theory, for example, Bill Brown (2001: 7) argues that ‘methodological fetishism is not so much an error as it is a condition for thought’, useful for literary scholars and critical theorists in that it permits us to consider how ‘inanimate objects constitute human subjects’. Similarly, Jane Bennett (2010: 2, 17) follows Appadurai and Brown in embracing ‘methodological naiveté’ to open up ‘nonhuman vitality’. Critics of Shakespearean drama have embraced this turn to the material. Early modern theatre is an ideal site for materialist scholarship, not only because it participates in the period’s burgeoning global mercantilism but also because performance on the commercial stages involved navigation of ‘a complex, shifting ensemble of property relations’ (Harris and Korda 2002: 2). Stage properties, that is ‘all the moveable physical objects of the stage’ including ‘furniture, costumes and hand properties’, were essential for performance (Harris and Korda 2002: 2). Furthermore, playwrights are fascinated with the power and meaning of objects, and the movements of things are often at the centre of the action. We might think here of the handkerchief in Othello – perhaps the most-discussed thing-in-motion in Shakespearean drama  – which passes from Othello to Desdemona to Emilia to Iago to become a prompt for Othello’s jealousy. Or we might consider the appearance onstage of religious or supernatural objects such as an ‘altar … richly adorned’ with dancing ‘statues’ that appears in Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess (2007: 5.2.33SD). Scholars have tended to understand the significance of such things in relation to historical contexts, including early modern attitudes to property and luxury goods and religious anxieties about material culture (Korda 2002: 2; Richardson 2011: 9–10; Smith 2013: 4–8; Williamson 2009). PostReformation religion is an especially significant context: Protestantism to an extent denigrates the material, particularly in contexts of worship, but, at the same time, many people retained Catholic ‘habits’ and therefore a continuing investment in the place of the material and visual in devotional practices (Richardson 2011: 8–9; Williamson 2009: 6, 12). Furthermore, the plays reflect the important role of material and visual cultures in Protestant culture (Hamling 2010; Porter 2013; Richardson 2011: 9). Although historicist discussion of the plays in these and other contexts remains a dominant critical approach, studies also turn increasingly to New Materialism to explore the ‘humanlike agency’ of materials such as the handkerchief in Othello (Gamboa and Switzky 2020; Harris 2009: 77). Across this critical picture, the risks and opportunities of methodological fetishism remain in question, and scholars grapple with the extent to which it undermines or permits socially and politically engaged scholarship (Agnew 1994: 34–5; Bruster 2003: 202–5; Harris 2009: 5–6; Korda 2002: 8–9). In particular, in an influential

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essay, Douglas Bruster (2003: 204) cautions that we must historicize early modern materialisms in order to avoid ‘critical fetishism’. This chapter follows Bruster’s recommendation with a slight alteration, as I discuss Middleton’s A Game at Chess (1624) as a test case for historicist analysis that embraces methodological fetishism. In addition to the altar and its moving statues, there are many objects in Middleton’s play whose actions and significance we might trace: multiple letters; books; a ‘cabinet of intelligences’; a ‘magical glass’ and a giant, human-size ‘bag’ that resembles a ‘hell-mouth’ (2.1.191; 4.1.94; 5.3.179). Most importantly, we might pursue the play’s characters as things-inmotion, since this play presents an allegorical chess game in which the ‘White’ pieces are members of the English court and church, while the ‘Black House’ is the Spanish court and members of the Roman Catholic church. Throughout the drama, and especially at the conclusion, Black pieces are placed in the gigantic bag, as illustrated in the background of the lower half of the title page to the 1625 quarto (Figure 4.5.1). In this allegory, Middleton satirizes the 1623 ‘Spanish match’, that is the failed attempt to arrange a marriage between Prince Charles and Maria Anna, daughter of Philip III of Spain. When the play was first performed to huge audiences in an ‘unprecedented’ nine-day run at the Globe, the characters resembled recognizable, living people, rather than anthropomorphic chess pieces (Taylor 2007: 1825). For example, the Black Knight strongly resembled the Conde de Gondomar, former Spanish Ambassador to England: the actor playing this character wore a ‘discarded suit of Gondomar’s clothes’ and appeared onstage with ‘Gondomar’s actual litter and special chair’, designed to ease the Conde’s anal fistula (Taylor 2007: 1775; Jones and Stallybrass 2000: 196). In this light, it might seem critically naive to pursue this play’s ‘pieces’ as ‘things-in-motion’. As noted above, however, materialist methodologies embrace such naivety as a means of political and social critique. Gina Bloom (2018: 157) argues persuasively that A Game at Chess invites audiences  to view the drama as a playable, ‘multisensory’ game but does not engage  with materialist methodologies. How might methodological fetishism elucidate social or political meaning in an analysis of A Game at Chess, building on Bloom’s insight? One answer to this question is that historicist examination of early modern drama in the context of the period’s material culture reveals that it is not naive to pursue Middleton’s characters as pieces. To assume that characters’ resemblance to living people disassociates them from a world of objects is ‘anachronistic’, since early modern chess sets predate the standardization of chess pieces into ‘modern, abstract shapes’ and could include pieces ‘individualized’ to represent different social classes, just as players in a play wore costumes to signal characters’ social status (Taylor  2007: 1826). The ‘signs’ for ‘persons and pieces’ were therefore indistinct (Taylor 2007: 1826). Furthermore, characters’ recognizability relied on an assemblage of properties, such as Gondomar’s famous chair and clothing. Finally, portraits of historical and living figures often decorated early modern games boards and pieces (Zollinger 2017: 121–2). For example, a German pearwood medallion (c. 1530–58), thought to have been used as a games piece and now held in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, is adorned with a portrait of Charles

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Figure 4.5.1  Thomas Middleton (d. 1627). A game at chæss as it was acted nine dayes to gether at the Globe on the banks side (London: s.n., 1625?), illustrated title page. Call #: STC 17883. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

V (Figure  4.5.2).  Such  examples demonstrate the role of gaming objects in the circulation and making of images of political figures. The ‘highly individualised’ resemblance of characters to figures such as Gondomar in seventeenth-century performances does  not, therefore, distinguish them entirely from games pieces (Howard Hill 1995: 126). The material history of games here encourages us to accept the risks of critical naivety  in studying Middleton’s characters as things-in-motion. Following this observation, this chapter uses the historical contexts for the significance of material culture for early modern drama as a jumping-off point for a New Materialist–inflected

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Figure 4.5.2  German pearwood medallion (c. 1530–58), thought to have been used as a games piece (Victoria and Albert Museum, London).

study of the agency of the non-human in Middleton’s play. To develop this argument, the next stage of this chapter outlines historicist work on the power and meaning of things in early modern plays, beginning with the significance of objects in the making of subjects onstage.

OBJECTS AND SUBJECTS Writing at what might be considered the early stages of the ‘material turn’, Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass (1996) argued for a new approach to early modern literature that foregrounds the primacy of objects over

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subjects. They observed that, etymologically, an ‘ob-ject’ is ‘that which is thrown before’, where ‘a sub-ject’ is ‘that which is thrown under’: the object thus has ‘a prior status, suggesting its temporal, spatial, and even causal coming before’ (De Grazia, Quilligan and Stallybrass 1996: 5). This observation indicated that things like ‘land, clothes, tools’ can make subjects; in turn, this insight signalled an important shift in thinking, away from preoccupation with early modern drama as the site of the invention of Burckhardtian subjectivity (De Grazia, Quilligan and Stallybrass 1996: 5, 17–19; Korda 2002: 8). This shift coincided with existing interest in costume, and especially cross-dressing, as a site of identity formation in plays such as Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice (Belsey 1985; Howard 1988). Furthermore, the Marxist critical leanings of scholars such as Appadurai chimed with similar emphases in the late-twentieth-century accounts of the early modern playhouses as ‘markets’ (Agnew 1994; Bruster 1992: 9–10). A Marxist-inflected, historicist sense of the materiality of the early modern stage remains a dominant force in scholarship on the plays. In this vein, several studies since the turn of the twenty-first century have historicized the role of things onstage. A landmark example is Anne Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass’s Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (2000). Jones and Stallybrass do not write solely about drama, but theatre companies, and plays such as Othello and Hamlet feature frequently in their exploration of the ‘animatedness of clothes’ as objects that ‘constitute subjects through their power as material memories’ (2000: 2). Echoing Appadurai’s claim (1986: 4) that ‘things’ have ‘social lives’, Jones and Stallybrass contend (2000: 2–3) that ‘clothing … is a world of social relations put upon the wearer’s body’. Detailed discussion of the circulation of clothing in the early modern theatres is a cornerstone of this argument. Cloth was ‘currency’ in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, and, in keeping with this context, the theatre entrepreneur Philip Henslowe ‘created a banking system in clothes’ through his participation in the second-hand clothing market (Jones and Stallybrass 2000: 31; Rublack 2010: 5–6). Theatres provided the perfect ‘outlet’ for the ‘most splendid’ clothing that ‘frippers and pawnbrokers’ acquired second-hand from the aristocracy, since players needed to wear spectacular clothing in plays with courtly settings (Jones and Stallybrass 2000: 187). The King’s Men’s use of Gondomar’s clothing in A Game at Chess provides a notable example of the reuse of courtly clothing in the theatre in Jones and Stallybrass’s study (2000: 196). Clothing was a significant marker of social identity in early modern contexts, and in England sumptuary laws regulated dress according to social rank until 1604 (Jones and Stallybrass 2000: 187–8). When low-born actors wore second-hand aristocratic clothing, and when playgoers enjoyed the spectacle and sought to ‘rival the actors themselves in their dress’, the playhouses participated in  – and profited from  – the erosion of the significance of symbols of social hierarchy (Jones and Stallybrass 2000: 187–8). Hence, the depiction of Gondomar in A Game at Chess generated English aristocratic defences of the Conde’s ‘aristocratic … honor’ (Streete 2020: 298). Most significantly, as the circulation of second-hand clothing in the early modern theatres eroded

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boundaries of social difference, it also indicated that social identities are as ‘transmissible’ as the clothes themselves, which ‘retained or simulated the identity of former wearers’ (Jones and Stallybrass 2000: 196). By tracing the circulation of clothing, Jones and Stallybrass thus revealed the transgressive potential of material culture on the Shakespearean stage. Jones and Stallybrass’s text heralded significant scholarly interest in how objects produce social and political meaning onstage, particularly in constructions of identity and difference. Several studies (Fisher 2006; Karim-Cooper 2006; Rycroft 2019) examine the role of codpieces, breeches, hair, face paint and handkerchiefs in the formation of gender identity and constructions of sexual desire in plays by dramatists including Shakespeare, Middleton, George Chapman and John Marston. Significantly, Karim-Cooper (2021: 18; 2006) has shown that instances of gender-formation often intersect with the representation of race ‘in material terms’. For example, the painting of boy actors with ‘red and white pigments’ contributed to early modern investment in whiteness as the ‘ideal’ standard for ‘beauty’ (2006: 23–6). In addition, Karim-Cooper (2021: 18, 21) contextualizes the use of blackface onstage in relation to racist allusions to blackness in ‘early modern cultures of conduct, beauty, and visual representation’. As well as cosmetics, theatre companies deployed properties to construct ‘racial subjectivity’ (Karim-Cooper 2021: 26). For example, Ian Smith (2013: 10, 22) argues that Othello engages with ‘stage practices’ for ‘the imitation of black skin’ including the use of ‘textiles’ as well as ‘skin paint and cosmetics’. Significantly, Smith (2013: 14–15, 22) contends that Othello’s handkerchief, understood as made from black fabric, functions as a ‘substitute’ for Othello and instances the ‘overt materiality of the black body as textile’ in early modern theatre. Similarly, Sydnee Wagner (2020: 132, 139), argues persuasively that in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, ‘clothing and military tools’, rather than make-up, act as ‘technologies of racemaking’ by which Tamburlaine is ‘blackened’. There is much more work to be done on the role of material culture in constructions of race onstage: KarimCooper (2021: 26) points, for example, to the under-explored significance for early modern drama of ‘colonialist appropriated materials that are valued because of their whiteness, such as ivory’. Moreover, since ‘race may be seen to spill over from categories of religious identity’ in early modern contexts, stage properties and costume also play a key role in racialized depictions of religious difference onstage (Berek 2011; Britton 2011; Hwang Degenhardt 2010: 13). Further scholarship is needed on the place of objects at the intersection of religious and racialized discourses in plays. Historicist analysis of the depiction of religious difference in A Game at Chess exemplifies how material culture operates at this discursive intersection. Williamson (2009: 81) argues that Middleton’s play uses a range of spectacular ‘visual effects’ to ‘create a clear set of correspondences between its Spanish characters … and the superficial trickery of Roman Catholics in general’. This metatheatrical exploration of theatrical and religious ‘trickery’ is racialized. For example, midway through the

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play, the Black Knight takes the White King’s Counsellor Pawn and reveals that he has secretly corrupted the pawn, whose ‘whiteness’ is revealed to be false: This whiteness upon him is but the leprosy Of pure dissimulation. View him now: His upper garment being taken off [the White King’s Counsellor Pawn], he ­appears black vnderneath His heart and his intents are of our colour. (3.1.261–4) It is ‘likely’ that the revelation of the pawn’s hidden blackness involved layers of white  and black clothing, since John Holles, a contemporary viewer of the play, reports that ‘one of the white pawns’ wore ‘an vnder black dubblett, signifying a Spanish heart’ (Lublin 2007: 258). This material exposure reflects the play’s investment in supposed Catholic ‘hypocrisy’, but it also instances Middleton’s invocation of ‘the frequent racialization of Spain’, in keeping with ‘the Black Legend that insisted on Spain’s miscegenated nature, its Jewish and Moorish blood’ (Fuchs 2012: 409). As Barbara Fuchs (2012: 409) notes, ‘no Blacks are secretly White’ in the play, and so the use of black clothing to signal the pawn’s ‘complexion’ and ‘heart’ presents an ‘essentialist and racialized version of Spanish difference’. Middleton’s use of clothing to indicate integral ‘blackness’ here reflects the early modern view that clothes are not ‘“signs” that simply indicate the type of body that lies beneath’ but are ‘integral to a person’s identity’ (Fisher 2006: 11). This world view was a key component of antitheatrical claims that playing might alter the identities of players and playgoers materially (Jones and Stallybrass 2000: 3). In Middleton’s play this sense of the materiality of corporeality and selfhood shapes the dramatist’s essentializing satire on Spain and Catholicism. A useful example is Middleton’s depiction of the Fat Bishop, who stands for Marco Antonio de Dominis, a Jesuit former bishop who moved to England in 1616, was ‘welcomed’ by James I, and awarded titles and property but returned to Rome in 1622 (Stelling 2019: 101). The Fat Bishop begins the play as a member of the White House but moves to the Black House, declaring himself ‘all black’, following the exposure of the White King’s Counsellor Pawn (3.1.287). Middleton makes the Fat Bishop the embodiment of excess and hypocrisy through allusions to his outrageous material consumption and production. While resident in the White House, the Fat Bishop writes against the Black House and figures his texts as the material product of his consumption of White House food: I have writ this book out of the strength and marrow Of six-and-thirty dishes at a meal. Of all things I commend the White House best For plenty and variety of victuals. (2.1.21–4) ‘Marrow’ here refers both to ‘vitality’ and to ‘bone marrow’ as a ‘delicacy’ (Taylor 2007: n. 21, 1848). Energy derived from a gargantuan meal makes the Fat Bishop’s books, which retain the collagenous substance of the meal. This corporeal sense of

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book production echoes when the Fat Bishop observes that his ‘pen draws blood of the Black House’ so that ‘their cause bleeds’ and that his words ‘strike deep in / And leave the orifex gushing where I come’ (3.1.1–5). Later, when the Fat Bishop reads ‘Taxa Pænitentiaria’, or ‘the book of general pardons and of all prices’, the Black Knight jokes that the price for ‘sodomy’ should be ‘ever on the backside of your book, Bishop’ (4.2.81–108). Middleton here puns on the recto of a ‘sheet of paper’ or ‘left-hand side of an open book’ as the Fat Bishop’s sodomized ‘buttocks’ (Taylor 2007: 108n, 1868). This violent imagery of books as bodies that are wounded, penetrated and draw blood reflects a historical context in which bodies and ‘things’ are indistinct. Middleton’s satire thus draws on a materialist world view that resonates with New Materialist accounts of human–non-human relations. For example, objectoriented ontology rejects the primacy of the human and ‘restores things … to the very centre of philosophy’ so that ‘tool-beings’, rather than human beings, structure the world, ‘unleashing their forces upon us’ (Harman 2002: 20). Similarly, Bennett (2010: 99) seeks to uncover ‘a world filled not with ontologically distinct categories of beings (subjects and objects) but with variously composed materialities that form confederations’. Hence, Bennett (2010: 12–13, 23) decentres the human by focusing on ‘each human as a heterogeneous compound of wonderfully … dangerously vibrant matter’ and argues for the ‘thing power’ of ‘assemblages’ of ‘vibrant materials of all sorts’. Importantly, such accounts of the agency of things invoke a view of history – theorized especially by Bruno Latour (1993: 38–9) – in which modernity obscures ‘premodern’ openness to the intertwined nature of ‘things and humans, objects and signs’. Bennett (2010: 18–19; Mitchell 2005: 149) thus aligns her vital materialism with ‘“premodern attitudes”’ ‘discredited’ in twentieth-century criticism and treats the perceived risks of methodological fetishism as positive qualities of pre-modern thought. Scholarship on early modern drama has a complicated relationship with this resonance between pre-modern and present-day materialisms. Bruster’s (2003: 204) recommendation to historicize in order to avoid ‘critical fetishism’, while aimed at historicists, registers prominently in New Materialist work. These studies are excited by how far Shakespearean drama ‘anticipates’ New Materialist thought and reveals ‘varieties of thingship we may not yet have noticed or named’ (Gamboa and Switzky 2020: 8). For example, Julia Reinhard Lupton (2012: 214) argues that joint stools in plays including The Taming of the Shrew and A Midsummer Night’s Dream exemplify a Renaissance-furniture-oriented answer to Latour’s call to recognize that things ‘shape the dimensions and directions of our shared spaces of verbal and economic exchange’. Lupton (2012: 214, 223) cites household inventories and the fact that the Renaissance predates ‘mass production’ to support the claim that in this period ‘furnishings of all sorts’ – including Gondomar’s special chair – ‘solicited care on the part of human users’. Here, the early modern world of things speaks to the materialisms of Latour, Bennett and Brown, and historicist contexts support New Materialist readings of the plays. The balance between historicism and critical fetishism shifts significantly in New Materialist–influenced work. Historicism is here considered a risk, as it is associated

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with humanist thought and the use of objects to explain ‘human culture’, and so can be seen to conflict with New Materialist decentring of the ‘human’ (Lupton 2016: 176; Reid 2016: 95). Lupton (2016: 176–8) and Pauline Reid (2016: 95) argue persuasively that these two approaches may ‘serve as co-informants rather than rivals’ and that through New Materialist interest in non-human agency we may restructure our understanding of ‘object relations’ in pre-modern historical contexts. Significantly, however, such arguments rarely discuss how far early modern plays participate in emergent discourses of imperial, capitalist modernity understood to have obscured pre-modern object relations (Bennett 2010: 17–19; Latour 1993: 38–9). By addressing this neglect, we may usefully complicate New Materialist historiography and its significance for early modern contexts, while deepening our understanding of the political function of material culture onstage. To this end, the final stage of this chapter returns to A Game at Chess to reflect on how such a finely balanced historical context might inform a New Materialist–inflected reading of the play’s treatment of the non-human. I use Bennett’s (2010: 20–4) account of the ‘agency of the assemblage’ to discuss Middleton’s characters as things-in-motion in Middleton’s play and trace how their movements intertwine with the period’s changing discourses on property, value and fetishism.

THE AGENCY OF ASSEMBLAGES IN A GAME AT CHESS How can we analyse A Game at Chess through Bennett’s (2010: 20–4) account of ‘the agency of the assemblage’, in which assemblages are ‘ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts’? A chess set might not be thought of as ‘ad hoc’, as it is formed for repeated gameplay, rather than ‘in response to a specific need or demand’ (OED). And yet since Middleton’s anomalous play was performed to huge audiences for a short period in direct response to recent political events, the assemblage of ‘pieces’ onstage for this purpose met a specific popular demand. Furthermore, Middleton’s game has an irregular, ad hoc composition that includes a superfluous Bishop, the Fat Bishop, who is not required by either side but extends the play’s anti-Catholicism through mockery of De Dominis, who is similarly surplus to the play’s satire on the Spanish Match, in which he had no involvement (Howard Hill 1995: 54). Moreover, examination of A Game at Chess through the idea of the agentive assemblage enables us to focus on the play not only as a game involving pieces but as an ‘ecology of things’ in which a variety of non-human materials participate. As I discuss below, the pieces in this ecology are, as in Bennett’s account of the ‘human’, ‘heterogenous’ compounds of materials (2010: 12–13; 23). The respective Houses, meanwhile, are ‘groupings’ that ‘are not governed by any central head’, since, although certain pieces have more weight or agency, the movement of each piece depends on the actions of other pieces on each side across the game (Bennett 2010: 23–4). Similarly, although the Black Knight is a key protagonist who sets things in motion in the Black-House-as-assemblage, his plots rely on a widely dispersed network of agents that corresponds with the ‘distributive agency’ of the assemblage that displaces the ‘subject as the root cause of an effect’ (Bennett

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2010: 31). Indeed, it is central to Middleton’s anti-Catholicism that threats to the ‘White House and cause’ are dispersed and may emerge unexpectedly, ‘where’er they sit, stand, and in corners lurk’ (Epilogue, 3–7). A sense of distributive agency thus underpins Middleton’s depiction of the Black House’s attempt to overpower the White House. This sense of distributed agency registers in the Black House’s attempts to overwhelm the White House with corrupting things. When the White Queen’s Pawn is taken by the Black House, the Black Knight punishes her with imprisonment ‘in a room filled all with Aretine’s pictures’ (2.2.248). The White Queen’s Pawn emerges from this saturation in Pietro Aretino’s erotic images unscathed, the ‘castigation’ having ‘left no pale print of … anguish’ on the pawn’s ‘cheek’ (3.1.180–2). At the end of the play, the Black Knight, working with the Black Queen and King, attempts to seduce the White Knight and White Duke (standing for Prince Charles and the Duke of Buckingham) with the ‘altar … adorned’ with moving ‘brazen’ statues (5.1.34SD-44). The altar is itself an assemblage of things that interacts with the White Knight and White Duke: describing it as ‘the seat of adoration’, the Black Knight states that this device ‘seems t’adore / The virtues’ that attend the White characters (5.1.35–6). The altar is in this view a corrupting agent that invites the White Knight and White Duke to participate in ritualistic devotion of the sort that Protestants rejected as idolatrous, while also practising such devotion on those characters as objects of idolatry. The White Knight and White Duke are ‘unmoved’ by this experience, but, as Williamson (2009: 81; Chakravorty 1996: 183) notes, the altar invites comparisons between theatrical and religious ‘crafts and tricks’ and allows the King’s Men to self-consciously celebrate their ‘remarkable gadgetry’ and the illusory capacity of the stage. The altar thus presents a metatheatrical mode of ‘thing power’, an adoration of theatrical illusion and technology that appeals to and offers to draw in spectators watching the play (Bennett 2010: 4). That the White Prince and White Duke are ‘unmoved’ by this trickery reflects Middleton’s depiction of the White House as an assemblage composed of things rooted in a divinely created world that operate through ‘heaven’s power’ (5.3.218). For example, Jesuitess Black Queen’s Pawn describes the White Queen’s Pawn as ‘so clear a masterpiece / Of Heaven’s art, wrought out of dust and ashes’ (1.1.3–4). Elsewhere, the White House and their ‘cause’ are collectively referred to as ‘Christian waters’ and ‘crystal waters’ (1.1.196; 2.2.162). The White Queen, fearing the loss of the White Prince and White Knight, figures the ‘Integrity’ of the White House as ‘bright luminaries’, or suns, that suffer a ‘black eclipse’ (4.4.53–5). The Fat Bishop enters at this moment as the object, or ‘darkness’, that eclipses the White House, before appealing to the White Queen’s ‘virtue’ as a ‘spring’ that ‘can cool’ the Black King’s ‘inflammation’ (4.4.51–66). Where the Fat Bishop is a malignant moving object that eclipses and seeks to pollute the White House, members of the latter are fixed, secure things. For example, the White King’s ‘bosom’ is a ‘rock’ that provides safe ‘home’ for the White Queen, figured as a ‘dove’, while the ‘virtues’ of the White Knight and White Duke are as ‘fixed’ as a ‘fort’ that withstands ‘the proudest billows’ (4.4.80–102).

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Members of the Black House, in contrast, are shape-shifting compounds of multiple things. The Fat Bishop is the superfluous chess piece that ‘consistently violates’ the rules of the game, as well as ‘the greasy gormandizing prelate’ whose ‘marrow’ produces ‘fat and fulsome volumes’, whose words are weapons, and whose books can also stand for his buttocks (Taylor 2007: n. 68 1849; 2.2.21–68). In a joke on De Dominis’s possession of the Mastership of the Savoy, the Fat Bishop is also ‘The Master of the Beds’ swamped by ‘more beds than drabs’, as he phrases it in a misogynistic lament (2.2.30–6). His shape and substance fluctuate: at one point he fears that he will ‘melt’ and ‘let forth a fat bishop in sad syrup’ (3.1.72–3). According to his enemy, the Black Knight, the Fat Bishop is ‘a thing swelled up with mingled drink and urine’ and may also be a ‘balloon-ball’ that bounces between ‘both the sides’ (2.2.69–70). Similarly, the Black Knight is a compound of multiple things: a chess piece who moves with his distinctive litter and ‘golden chair with a hole in it’; he is also the physical ailment from which he suffers, ‘the fistula of Europe’; he claims that his ‘brains’ visibly resemble ‘a globe’ that ‘stands on the table’ in his ‘closet’, ‘full of countries and hard words’, ‘with lines drawn, some tropical, some oblique’ (4.2.4SD; 2.2.41; 3.1.133–8). This last reference frames the Black Knight as the ‘parent’ of global Catholic ‘plots’, which include smuggling ‘hallowed oil, beads, medals, pardons / Pictures, Veronica’s heads in private presses’ into the White House: an unleashing of objects that reflects English Protestant anxieties about a secretive influx of Catholic objects ‘from overseas’ (4.2.32–49; Williamson 2009: 1). Middleton thus pits two assemblages against one another in an essentialized, racialized material allegory. The White House is the ‘rock’ of Protestantism (4.4.30), a sturdy compound of earthy and elemental materials reflective of their divine ‘thing power’, where the Black House is an unfixed assemblage of proliferating, corrupting and destructive materials (Bennett 2010: 2; 5.3.219). Middleton thus uses configurations of non-human bodies that anticipate New Materialist thought in a ‘jingoistic’ satire on seventeenth-century Anglo-Spanish relations (Bloom 2018: 158). An important aspect of this comedy clashes with New Materialist accounts of object relations, however, in that Middleton’s antiCatholic and anti-Spanish humour also appeals to emergent discourses of property management. Korda (2002: 4–12) shows that changes in Protestant households led to women taking on more responsibility in the management of goods and generated anxieties about women’s desires for a transgressive ‘superfluity’ of items. These changing contexts for property management overlap in early modern contexts with an emergent colonial discourse of fetishism. The term ‘fetish’ derives from ‘fetissos’, from ‘the Portuguese word “feitiço”’, which in the late medieval period referred to naive modes of ‘“magical practice”, or “witchcraft”’ (Korda 2002: 114, 117; Pietz 1985: 5). Early modern European merchants and travellers deploy this terminology to describe West Africans’ use of objects in order ‘to brand Africans as incapable of estimating the market value of commodities … thereby to rationalize their economic exploitation and exclusion from the prerogatives of ownership’ (Harris 2009: 233 n. 51; Korda 2002: 114). Korda (2002: 128–9) argues that this racist discourse on ‘African fetishism’ is a context for Othello’s fixation on the handkerchief as an ‘occult’ object, given to his mother by an Egyptian ‘charmer’ (3.4.59). This discourse intersects

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with patriarchal assumptions about ‘female extravagance’ so that Othello’s jealousy is also a mode of effeminacy (Korda 2002: 146). Although Iago is revealed as ‘the true source of the handkerchief’s … inflation’, the play nonetheless demonstrates the racialized and gendered nature of discourses on property management and reflects a context in which subjects are excluded ‘from the prerogative of possession due to their supposed inability to recognise value’ (Korda 2002: 158, 113). Furthermore, as Smith (2013: 24) argues, the racialized depiction of the African ‘provenance’ of Othello’s handkerchief shapes Shakespeare’s use of this property as a ‘textile black body’ in a material mode of ‘racial representation’ that positions ‘the black man as chattel, a nonhuman thing with the legal status of moveable property’. These analyses indicate the extent to which early modern attitudes to property and the materiality of corporeality are implicated in racist, colonial ideologies. Such ideologically charged, racialized discourses on value and property shape the assemblages of A Game at Chess, as the play’s pre-modern vibrant materiality merges with emergent ideas about ‘human’ entitlement to possession. The contrast between the ‘fixed’ White House and the rambling, proliferating Black House relies on a sense that the latter body is a chaotic assemblage of out-of-control things. The lack of a governing ‘head’ that for Bennett (2010: 24) is a positive characteristic of the assemblage is here a mark of Spanish and Catholic extravagance and its threat to English Protestantism. Middleton’s depiction of characters as human–non-human gatherings of multiple materials therefore also provides grounds for the mockery of Catholicism as the site of ‘skewed relations to material objects’ (Korda 2002: 113). For example, allusions to the Fat Bishop’s accrued possessions call attention to these objects’ ambiguous detachment from him. Early in the play, the Fat Bishop delights that the Black Knight has looked into his ‘lodgings’ to discover that the Fat Bishop has made lucrative gains through the ‘use’ of his ‘profession’: When he did Vouchsafe to peep into my privileged lodgings, He found good store of plate there, and rich hangings. He knew I brought none to the White House with me. (2.2.43–7) The Fat Bishop is oddly absent from this scene of property accumulation and its discovery: a second-hand voyeur to the Black Knight’s voyeurism who does not appear to be ‘there’ with his possessions. Furthermore, this ‘store’ impresses the Black Knight because none of it moved with the Fat Bishop to the White House. The Fat Bishop’s prior lack of possession therefore resonates more strongly in this speech than the present state of possession that it evidences. Since the Fat Bishop implies rather than specifying the provenance of these items, moreover, he gives  the  impression  that they have accumulated in his temporary home independently of him. Similarly, in the scenes in which the Fat Bishop moves back to the Black House, things precede, propel and exceed him. The Black Knight tricks the Fat Bishop into this movement using a letter which purports, falsely, to be from ‘Cardinal Paulus’,

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that is Pope Paul V, encouraging the Fat Bishop to aim to fill the Pope’s ‘sede vacante’ (3.1.25–39). On reading the letter, the Fat Bishop declares: This was the chair of ease I ever aimed at. I’ll make a bonfire of my books immediately All that are left against that side I’ll sacrifice, Pack up my plate and goods and steal away By night at watergate. (3.1.48–52) Multiple things here make the Fat Bishop move back to the Black House: the Black Knight as chess piece who tricks him, the letter that facilitates the trick, and the image of a seat in the papal conclave, figured as the Black Knight’s fistula-easing ‘chair’. The Fat Bishop’s tendency to be moved by other things and to lack control over their movements here overlaps with an evocation of his incapacity for property management, since his intention to burn the ‘books’ he has written against the Black House evidences a destructive underestimation of the value of property that serves the White House’s cause. An urgent sense that the Fat Bishop is not to be trusted with property is one of the White King’s first thoughts when the former announces his defection: [to White House] See his goods seized on.

white king james

fat bishop of spalato

’Las they were all conveyed Last night by water to a tailor’s house, A friend of the Black cause. (3.1.296–8) The movement of the Fat Bishop’s goods participates in the clandestine proliferation of corrupting Catholic things in Protestant contexts, facilitated here by the home of a tailor, a figure that early modern dramatists often associate with sexual transgression (Porter 2013: 41). This evocation of the Fat Bishop’s transgressive relation to property intermingles with the sense that his things move without him, in this case being ‘conveyed’ ahead of him. The Fat Bishop’s ‘goods’ are thus at once his property and objects beyond his control. He is burdened with an excess of beds; he revels in rich furnishings but did not bring them to his home; the chair in the conclave is beyond his reach. When the Fat Bishop does exercise ownership, as with the intended burning of his anti-Black-House books, his actions demonstrate his ‘inability … to assess value’, the characteristic that Korda (2002: 113) argues legitimizes exclusion from entitlement to possession in racialized and gendered early modern accounts of property and fetishism. The moment at which the White Bishop takes the Fat Bishop, who becomes a ‘prize’ to be ‘put … into the bag’, further demonstrates this point (4.4.107–8). The Fat Bishop’s movement from outof-control assemblage to bagged property embodies the denial of ‘personhood’ that attends vilification of those deemed as ‘attached in the wrong way … to material objects’ in early modern colonial contexts (Korda 2002: 113).

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Interaction between this colonial, patriarchal discourse and Middleton’s use of assemblage-like configurations in part generates the political significance of the play’s conclusion, when all remaining Black pieces are placed in the bag along with the previously ‘lost’ members of that House (5.3.178SD). Taking the Black House as an assemblage characterized by the chaotic proliferation of things, their entry into the bag indicates exclusion from entitlement to possession. Since the Black House stands, allegorically, for Spain, Middleton merges figures of non-human agency with emergent discourses on ‘human’ ownership to frame an imperial power as unentitled to property. Significantly, Bennett (2010: 23) uses ‘assemblage’ as an alternative to ‘Empire’, among other phrases, to name ‘the kind of relation obtaining between the parts of a volatile but somehow functioning whole’. Middleton, meanwhile, figures imperial Spain as an assemblage to symbolically disempower it and construct a fantasy of Protestant English ‘winner-like’ imperial entitlement (5.3.218). In this example, pre-modern materialism contributes to the circulation of harmful ideologies that New Materialist work often seeks to resist. This test case analysis of A Game at Chess indicates the potential that a combined New Materialist and historicist approach holds for our understanding of the political significance of the plays and their importance for histories and philosophies of materialism. Such an approach is particularly appropriate because the material culture of the early modern stage operates at a tipping point between openness to the ‘protean agency’ of the non-human and the emergence of a racialized, gendered ‘commodification of the subject’ that intertwines with imperialist accounts of what constitutes the ‘human’ (Bennett 2010: 13; Smith 2013: 7). The plays pivot significantly around this tipping point as the lively function of objects onstage contributes to playhouses’ participation as ‘markets’ in the period’s global mercantilism (Bruster 1992: 9–10). Importantly, attention to this context does not necessarily entail a return to critical focus on the plays as the site of the development of the ‘subject’. Instead, examination of the significance of early modern contexts for New Materialist historiography permits new interpretations of the agency of the non-human onstage. As scholars look increasingly to the place of material culture in constructions of race and empire, the vibrant materiality of the early modern stage has an important role to play.

REFERENCES Agnew, J. (1986), Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theatre in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Agnew, J. (1994), ‘Coming up for Air: Consumer Culture in Historical Perspective’, in J. Brewer and R. Porter (eds), Consumption and the World of Goods, 19–39, London and New York: Routledge. Appadurai, A., ed. (1986), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Belsey, C. (1985), ‘Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies’, in J. Drakakis (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares, 166–90, New York: Methuen. Bennett, J. (2010), Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham: Duke University Press.

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Berek, P. (2011), ‘“Looking Jewish” on the Early Modern Stage’, in J. Hwang Degenhardt and E. Williamson (eds), Religion and Drama in Early Modern England: The Performance of Religion on the Renaissance Stage, 55–70, Farnham: Ashgate. Bloom, G. (2018), Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater, Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Britton, D. (2011), ‘Muslim Conversion and Circumcision as Theater’ in J. Hwang Degenhardt and E. Williamson (eds), Religion and Drama in Early Modern England: The Performance of Religion on the Renaissance Stage, 71–86, Farnham: Ashgate. Brown, B. (2001), ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry, 28 (1): 1–22. Bruster, D. (1992), Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bruster, D. (2003), Shakespeare and the Question of Culture: Early Modern Literature and the Cultural Turn, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Chakravorty, S. (1996), Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton, Oxford: Clarendon Press. De Grazia, M., M. Quilligan and P. Stallybrass (1996), ‘Introduction’, in M. De Grazia, M. Quilligan and P. Stallybrass (eds), Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, 1–16, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fisher, W. (2006), Materialising Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fuchs, B. (2012), ‘Middleton and Spain’, in G. Taylor and T. Thomas Henley (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton, 404–17, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gamboa, B. and L. Switzky, eds (2020), Shakespeare’s Things: Shakespearean Theatre and the Non-Human World in History, Theory, and Performance, New York and Abingdon: Routledge. Hamling, T. (2010), Decorating the ‘Godly’ Household: Religious Art in Post-Reformation Britain, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Harman, G. (2002), Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects, Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court Press. Harris, J. G. (2009), Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Harris, J. G. and N. Korda (2002), ‘Introduction: Towards a Materialist Account of Stage Properties’, in J. G. Harris and N. Korda (eds), Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, 1–31, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harris Sacks, D. (2000), ‘London’s Dominion: The Metropolis, the Market Economy, and the State’, in L. C. Orlin (ed.), Material London, ca. 1600, 20–54, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hicks, D. and M. C. Beaudry (2010), ‘Introduction: Material Culture Studies: A Reactionary View’, in D. Hicks and M. C. Beaudry (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, 1–98, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hwang Degenhardt, J. (2010), Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Howard, J. E. (1988), ‘Crossdressing, the Theatre and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 39: 418–40. Howard Hill, T. H. (1995), Middleton’s ‘Vulgar Pasquin’: Essays on A Game at Chess, Newark: University of Delaware Press. Jardine, L. (1996), Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Jones, A. R. and P. Stallybrass (2000), Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jonson, B. (1994), The Devil Is an Ass, ed. P. Happé, The Revels Plays, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Karim-Cooper, F. (2006), Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Karim-Cooper, F. (2021), ‘The Materials of Race: Staging the Black and White Binary in the Early Modern Theatre’, in A. Thomson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race, 17–29, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Korda, N. (2002), Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Latour, B. (1993), We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Lublin, R. I. (2007), ‘“An Under Dubblett Signifying a Spanish Hart”: Costumes and Politics in Middleton’s A Game at Chess’, Theatre Survey, 48 (2): 247–63. Lyly, J. (2000), ‘Midas’, in G. K. Hunter and D. M. Bevington (eds), Galatea: Midas, The Revels Plays, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Marx, K. (1990), Capital: Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, London: Penguin. Middleton, T. (2007), ‘A Game at Chess: A Later Form’, ed. G. Taylor, in G. Taylor and J. Lavagnino (eds), Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Middleton, T. and T. Dekker (1987), The Roaring Girl, ed. P. Mulholland, The Revels Plays, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. (2005), What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Pietz, W. (1985), ‘The Problem of the Fetish, I’, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 9: 5–17. Porter, C. (2013) Making and Unmaking in Early Modern English Drama: Spectators, Aesthetics and Incompletion, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Reid, P. (2016) ‘Eye and Book: Species and Spectacle’, in J. J. Cohen and J. Yates (eds), Object Oriented Environs, 93–102, Earth: Punctum. Reinhard Lupton, J. (2012), ‘The Renaissance Res Publica of Furniture’ in J. J. Cohen (ed.), Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, 211–36, Ethics and Objects, Earth: Punctum. Reinhard Lupton, J. (2016), ‘OOO + HHH = Zany, Interesting, and Cute’, in J. J. Cohen and J. Yates (eds), Object Oriented Environs, 173–8, Earth: Punctum. Richardson, C. (2006), Domestic Life and Domestic Tragedy in Early Modern England: The Material Life of the Household, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Richardson, C. (2011), Shakespeare and Material Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Rublack, U. (2010), Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rycroft, E. (2019), Facial Hair and the Performance of Early Modern Masculinity, New York and Abingdon: Routledge. Shakespeare, W. (2016), Hamlet, rev. edn, ed. A. Thompson and N. Taylor, Arden Shakespeare Third Series, London: Arden Shakespeare. Shakespeare, W. (2016), Othello, ed. E. A. J. Honigman, Arden Shakespeare Third Series, London: Arden Shakespeare. Smith, I. (2013), ‘Othello’s Black Handkerchief’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 64 (1): 1–25. Stelling, L. (2019), Religious Conversion in Early Modern English Drama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Streete, A. (2020), ‘Polemical Laughter in Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess’, English Literary Renaissance, 50 (2): 296–333. Taylor, G., ed. (2007). A Game at Chess: A Later Form, in Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (eds), Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, 1830–85, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tiramani, J. (2010), ‘Pins and Aglets’, in T. Hamling and C. Richardson (eds), Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture and Its Meanings, 85–94, Farnham: Ashgate. Trudell, S. A. (2013), ‘Occasion’, in H. S. Turner (ed.), Early Modern Theatricality, 230–49, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wagner, S. (2020), ‘Towards a Racialized Tamburlaine’, in D. McInnis (ed.), Tamburlaine: A Critical Reader, 126–46, Arden Early Modern Drama Guides, London: Bloomsbury. Williamson, E. (2009), The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama, Farnham: Ashgate. Zollinger, M. (2017), ‘The Rules of Passion and Pastime: The Game of Lurch in a Late Renaissance Poem’, in A. Levy (ed.), Playthings in Early Modernity: Party Games, Word Games, Mind Games, 117–29, Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications.

CHAPTER 4.6

Engendering the stage: Women and dramatic culture CLARE M c MANUS AND LUCY MUNRO

This chapter focuses on the contribution of women, girls and gender non-conforming individuals to the performance and theatrical cultures of early modern England. We draw on the productive unsettling of binary categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ by feminist, queer and trans theorists to include people who might today identify as trans, non-binary, gender-queer or gender-fluid, to use a few of the terms available to us now and which – if available – might have been used by some early moderns who are referred to and indeed refer to themselves as women or men. Where once scholars such as E. K. Chambers and G. E. Bentley examined an ‘all-male stage’ rather bluntly defined as populated by adult men and boy players, the work of queer and trans studies continues to show that these professional categories contain no end of fluidity, malleability and variety in the bodies, genders and sexualities of those labouring on and for those stages (see Chess 2019; Barker and Munro forthcoming; Higginbotham and Johnston 2018). Using a capacious definition of dramatic culture rather than narrower concepts of theatre, drama or acting, we revisit four important areas explored by previous scholarship – performance, theatrical labour, spectatorship and dramatic creation – and reconsider the archival evidence in order to challenge central concepts such as actor, player, owner, builder, author and, indeed, the play.

PERFORMANCE Popular tradition has held that women were barred from the early modern playhouse stage by law  – that an earlier ban must match the requirement in Charles II’s letters patent to the theatre companies that female parts should be played by women This chapter emerges from the work of the collaborative project, Engendering the Stage: The Records of Early Modern Performance. The authors are grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for a Research Project Grant. This chapter was written during the UK lockdowns and restrictions of 2020–1; hence it is heavily reliant on online and open-access sources, for which the authors express their gratitude.

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(TNA, C 66/3013, no. 20; TNA, C 66/3009, no. 3). But no such ban existed. As Dympna Callaghan makes clear, custom and reputation, not legislation, kept women from the stage (2007: 12–13). Crucially, however, it is clear that the activities of women and gender non-conforming individuals inside and outside the playhouse buildings are part of a broad, varied landscape of early modern performance. This landscape is described by William N. West as ‘theatrical playing’, a category ‘wide enough to include tragedy, pratfalls, strange sights, and sword fights’ (2016: 148; Mayne 2020: 120). It encompasses feats of activity, a term that brings together legerdemain or conjuring (aka ‘juggling’), tumbling, acrobatics, vaulting, ropedancing (akin to tight-rope walking) and sword-dancing (Butterworth 2006: 26; Tribble 2017). As West (2016), Erika T. Lin (2012) and Richard Preiss (2014) make clear, early modern plays were themselves cut across by feats of activity, prefaced, followed and punctuated by clowning, acrobatics, rope-dancing, audience interactions and routines of dance, music and physical ability. Women were a crucial part of this varied theatrical landscape, as this chapter will demonstrate. Early modern English and continental European performance culture provides abundant evidence of women’s participation. Female-identified dancers and tumblers performed in Italian commedia dell’arte troupes; Spanish comedia actresses were known for their athleticism and agility (Henke 1997; Mujica 2016). Mixed-gender companies from continental Europe periodically visited England (Brown 2021: 31–49). For example, in January 1578, Elizabeth I’s Privy Council ordered the Lord Mayor of London to license a troupe led by Drusiano Martinelli that included three women to ‘playe within the Cittie and the Liberties of the same’ until the first week of Lent (Dasent 1895: 144). The three women have not been securely identified but are likely to have included some or all of the three women similarly licensed to perform in Madrid in 1587: Drusiano’s wife Angelica Alberghini, Angela Salomona and ‘La Franceschina’, whose name itself points to cross-European theatrical exchange (Katritzky 2005: 127–8). Across Europe, male- and female-identified acrobats and rope-dancers played both inside and outside the playhouses. Female rope-dancers leapt, walked and ran on the tight rope; they spun around the slack rope, hung from it by their legs or feet, or lounged on it in a performance of impossible leisure. As Edward Ward’s description of a Black female rope-dancer in turn-of-the-eighteenth-century London has it, this fair-booth performer began to play at swing-swang with [i.e. to swing to and fro from] a rope, as if the devil were in her, hanging sometimes by a hand, sometimes by a leg, and sometimes by her toes, so that I found, let her do what she would, Providence or Destiny would by no means suffer the rope to part with her. (1993: 185) The apparent impossibility of the rope-dancer’s hyper-able bodily deportment is encapsulated in Ward’s invocation both of the racist early modern association between black skin and devilry and of the way this seems to be ‘solved’ by the grace of ‘Providence and Destiny’ that he imagines keeping this woman on the ropes in place of her own skill. Noémie Ndiaye’s work on embodied racecraft calls

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movement a ‘hitherto understudied dimension of racial impersonation on stage’ and reminds us that we should read the bodily and the gestural in terms of race as well as gender (2021: 122). This Black woman’s performance, which seems to shatter both feminine bodily decorum and the constraints of gravity, elicits a response from Ward that seeks to contain her within a binary of devilry and grace, even as it makes clear the rope-dancer’s skill and her manipulation of the jeopardy of her profession to create an engaging display. Reconfiguring our understanding of playing and the play makes space for the activities of women and challenges the gendered boundaries of both commercial playing companies and playhouse performance. Rope-dancers and tumblers were often members of playing companies, and these links raise the possibility that female-identified performers appeared in the playhouses. An early 1630s playbill for the Rose Inn in Wine Street, Bristol, supports this idea. It advertises that a ‘Mayd of fifteene yeares of age, and another Girle of foure yeares of age doe dance on the lowe Rope; And the said Girle of foure years of age doth turne on the Stage’. Identifying this as the troupe of William Vincent (aka Hocus Pocus), John Astington (2017) traces the company to the Fortune playhouse around five years later, so it is quite possible that the girls, now around twenty and nine years old, respectively, performed there too. The much-studied example of Moll Frith on the Fortune stage in 1611 is a further example of playhouse theatricals, this time by a performer who self-described as a woman but who may also have found appealing some of the present-day gender categories we list at the start of this chapter (Grange 2020; Korda 2005). In 1611–12, Frith was brought before the Consistory Court of London to answer accusations including the allegation that they sat ‘vppon the stage’ at the Fortune ‘in mans apparell & playd vppon her lute & sange a songe’ (Erler 2008: 208–9). Frith’s appearance was probably connected to a performance of Middleton and Dekker’s Fortune play, The Roaring Girl, in which they appear as a character. Its printed epilogue contains something akin to an advert for Frith’s future appearance on the Fortune stage: if what both [writers and actors] have done Cannot full pay your expectation, The Roaring Girl herself, some few days hence Shall on this stage give larger recompense. (2007: Epilogue, 33–6) A singer and instrumentalist, Frith’s provocative interaction with the playhouse audience is a surviving instance of how the seemingly self-contained play is in fact cut across by other performances. Female-identified and gender non-conforming performers also made their livelihoods as mobile itinerant players or ‘unsponsored travelling professiona[ls]’, to use James Stokes’s term (1996: 2, 500–1). Sara Mueller finds in the records of such women evidence of an English ‘tradition of female participation in the professional theatre before 1660’ (2008: 53). While Roberta Barker (2009) and Simone Chess (2019) have traced the fluid gender expression of actors during and after the periods in which they played female roles, performers beyond company hierarchies also

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performed bodily gender non-conformity. Intersex individuals regularly appeared in the fairs that marked the urban geography and temporal calendars of early modern society, including London’s Bartholomew and Southwark Fairs, which were part of professional cultures of display and performance across Europe (Wohlcke 2014). These popular ‘shows’ feature in Margaret Cavendish’s description of the Antwerp fair in the mid-seventeenth century. Among the list of ‘Dancers on the Ropes, Tumblers, Jugglers, Private Stage-Players, Mountebanks … and several Beasts’, we find what she calls ‘Monsters’, a term that highlights the performative ‘showing’ and the insistent othering of gender non-conforming and physically disabled performers (1664: 405). A yet more troubling account appears in a diary entry written by John Evelyn in 1667. Next to a description of a horse-baiting and ‘the famous Italian puppet play’ is a record of a popular ‘show’ in London, from which Evelyn carefully distances himself: ‘There was also now an Hermaphrodite shew’d both Sexes very perfectly, the Penis onley not perforated [i.e. not protruding from the body], went for [i.e. “passed” as] a woman, but was more man, of about 21 years of Age: divers curious persons went to see her, but I would not’ (2000: 3.492). Cavendish and Evelyn’s accounts of these people, the terms that are used, and the contexts in which they are described, provoke crucial questions over their agency, the extent and nature of their consent in their performances and the often prurient interest of spectators who frequented the shows. Similar questions attend the records that suggest that a substantial number of disabled individuals earned their living through performance, but here we have more evidence of individuals controlling their own careers. Mueller examines the case of a Mistress Provoe performing in 1630s Dorset, identifying her as the ‘french woman that had no hands, but could write, sow [i.e. sew], wash, & do many other things with her feet’ who ‘had a commission under the seale of the Master of the Reuelles’ (Hays et al. 1999: 206). Mueller concludes that Provoe’s license proved that she ‘had a sanctioned space within the culture, and she transformed that space into a performance in which she addressed the circumstances of her day-to-day life’ (2008: 70). Bodily hyperability of the kind Provoe displays connects her to the work of tumblers, posture-masters and rope-dancers, whose abilities in turn connect them to non-normative embodiments. The skills Provoe used to earn her living blur distinctions between hyperability and disability, and the presence of performers like her in the archives offers a rich set of case studies for early modern disability studies as well as gender studies (Crawford 2018; Love 2019). Feats of activity produced a flexible, agile and muscularly powerful femininity that challenges assumptions about gendered coding and deportment on the commercial stages; similarly, the productions of the Jacobean and Caroline royal courts – sites for the performance of the court to itself that required rather than only tolerated elite women’s performance  – produced fluid, contested and disruptive depictions of the gendered body (McManus 2002: 1–17). This is particularly evident in a court production like Walter Montagu’s Caroline pastoral, The Shepherd’s Paradise, performed in early 1633 by an all-female cast of Queen Henrietta Maria and her court women, which recalled the female performances that Anna of Denmark sponsored at the Jacobean court. Inigo Jones’s costume designs for the Marchioness

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of Hamilton as Basilino feature a breastplate that sits in the tradition of the classicized Amazonian breastplate worn by Lucy Harrington Russell, Countess of Bedford in Inigo Jones’s design for the 1609 Masque of Queens (Orgel and Strong 1973, nos 257–8, no. 16). As Sophie Tomlinson noted in 1992, the prosthetic beards worn by the women in male roles in The Shepherds’ Paradise reshaped the sexed and gendered body; with the breastplates, they produce a tradition of female masculinity in court performance (Britland 2006; Tomlinson 1992: 189; 2008: 282–3; 2005). Other masques exploit the opposite dynamic such as the breast-shaped swathes of material used in the costumes for Prince Henry’s attendants in Jonson’s Oberon (1611) (McManus 2008). The court masque, then, is a forum for productively queered depictions of gender that lend themselves to fresh interpretation through the lens of queer and trans studies. Other forms of elite theatricals involved women as ‘devisers’  – to use Peter Davidson’s and Jane Stevenson’s term (2007) – of courtly entertainments, such as the 1592 Entertainment at Bisham, devised and written by Elizabeth Russell and casting her daughters, Anne and Elizabeth, as shepherdesses (2018: 92–108). Speaking dialogues in praise of the sovereign, Anne and Elizabeth were not only advancing their status at court but also ‘rewr[iting] Elizabethan courtiership as … about mutual benefit and cooperation between like-minded women with corresponding goals’ (Kolkovich 2016: 71). We might draw a line from the Entertainment at Bisham to Robert White’s masque Cupid’s Banishment, staged in Greenwich for Anna of Denmark in 1617, which was performed by both girl and boy actors and featured one girl, Ann Watkins, in an unusual speaking role (McManus 2002: 179–201; Williams 2014; Williams 2017). In this context, the performance of the tragic heroine of William Davenant’s entertainment The Siege of Rhodes by singer Catherine Coleman looks less like a ‘first’ than it seemed to earlier theatre historians, especially if we adopt a broader idea of ‘acting’ and the ‘actress’ to define the activities of early modern stages (McManus 2013: 225). Moreover, as Roberta Barker’s analysis of the relationship between the elite performing woman and the playhouse boy-actress suggests, the courtly and commercial stages were intertwined, each acutely aware of the other’s innovations and limitations (2015). Through these means, the fluid, exploratory approach to gender that was characteristic of the court stage fed into the representation of femininity in canonical plays written for the commercial stages.

THEATRICAL LABOUR As the research of S. P. Cerasano, Natasha Korda and others has demonstrated in detail, women were also involved in the material production of theatre (Cerasano 1998; Korda 2011). They worked backstage as tirewomen, providing much of the labour that produced the gorgeous costumes of the commercial and court stages, and front of stage as gatherers collecting entrance money at playhouse doors. They inherited and invested in playhouses and even managed playhouses or led touring groups of various kinds. Evidence of these activities comes from a number of different sources. For example, the work of both the gatherers and tirewomen for the commercial stage is registered in an agreement between the shareholders

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in the Children of the King’s Revels in 1608, which mentions ‘the whole Charges of the howse, the gatherers, the wages of the Childrens bourd, Musique, Booke keeper, Tyreman, Tyrewoman, lightes, the Maister of the revelles duties and all other things needefull and necessary whatsoever’ (TNA, C 2/JasI/A6/21). In a metadramatic commentary on the activities of the playing companies, Ben Jonson’s court entertainment, Christmas his Masque, performed at Christmas 1616–17, presents the goddess Venus disrespectfully as a ‘deaf tire-woman’, mother of a Cupid who appears ‘in a flat cap and a prentice’s coat, with wings at his shoulders’ (Jonson 2012a: 85, 23). As Korda has shown, the accounts of the Revels office document detail the work of Venus’s real-life counterparts on court plays and entertainments (2011: 29–41). Perhaps the most influential contributions that women made to performance culture were as theatrical investors and occasionally managers of playhouses and companies. Between the 1560s and the 1650s, most of the English playhouses whose histories have been traced passed at some time through the hands of women. In Bristol, the Redcliffe Hill playhouse was inherited by Sarah Barker, who left it to her son William in her will, dated 31 May 1637, but reserved ‘the Chamber over the well att th’end of the said playhowse’ for her unmarried daughter Eleanor (Pilkington 1997: 242–3). The other playhouse in Bristol, on Wine Street, appears to have been jointly managed by its owner, Nicholas Woolfe, and his wife Margaret, and was probably maintained by Margaret after his death in 1614, when his son and heir, Miles, was under-age (Keenan 2002: 145–51; Pilkington 1997: 160–5, 195–7, 212–14). In London, Herbert Berry and David Kathman have shown that of the four city inns that hosted plays between the 1570s and the 1590s, three were owned or leased by women: the Bel Savage on Ludgate Hill, owned by Margaret Craythorne between 1568 and 1591; the Cross Keys on Gracechurch Street, owned by Alice Layston between 1571 and 1590; and the Bull on Bishopsgate Street, of which Joan Harrison was proprietor between 1584 and 1589 (Berry 2006: 121–43; Kathman 2009a: 144–78; 2009b: 153–67). In the liberties just outside the city walls, Anne Farrant inherited the lease of the first Blackfriars playhouse after the death of her husband, Richard Farrant, in November 1580, later engaging in litigation against her tenants, William Hunnis and John Newman, to protect her investment (Wallace 1912: 152–68). Women also had a financial stake in the later second Blackfriars theatre. Winifred Burbage inherited an interest in its ownership after the death of her husband, Richard, and a number of women claimed ownership of a share in the two leases that Burbage made. The first, which Burbage originally made to Henry Evans in 1600, was claimed by his daughter, Margaret Evans Hawkins Panton; shares in the second, which Burbage originally made to a consortium of male investors in 1608, were claimed at various points by women such as Thomasine Ostler – widow of the actor William Ostler and daughter of another actor, John Heminges – and Elizabeth Condell, widow of the actor Henry Condell (Munro 2019a). The histories of the suburban playhouses were similarly shaped by women as owners and investors. In the late 1570s, Margaret Brayne was said to have laboured herself on the construction of the Theatre with her husband John, the financial

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partner of James Burbage. One witness claimed that ‘in the latter end of the fynishing [of the Theatre] the said Braynes and his Wyfe … were dryven to labor in the said workes for saving of some of the charge in place of ijo laborers’ (TNA, C 24/226/11; Wallace 1913: 141). After John’s death in 1586, Margaret pursued her claim to part-ownership of the playhouse in the face of the hostile James Burbage, who allegedly ‘knew that the woman had A right in the same by her husband and that it was her husbandes welthe that builded the Theater as every bodye knoweth’ but answered ‘hang her hor [i.e. whore] … she getteth nothing here lett her wyn it at the Commen lawe and bring the Shiref with her to put her in possession’ (TNA, C 24/228/11; Wallace 1913: 100). When she died in 1593, Margaret was still fighting for her share of the Theatre and its profits (Honigmann and Brock 1993: 61). The successor of the Theatre, the Globe, built in 1599, was subject to the financial claims of Anne Phillips (widow of the actor Augustine Phillips), Winifred Burbage and Elizabeth Condell, among others (Munro 2019a: 257–8). The Boar’s Head and Red Bull playhouses, converted from existing buildings in 1598 and around 1605, respectively, were ultimately owned by women, Jane Poley and Anne Bedingfield (Berry 1986, 23–6; Griffith 2001; 2013: 37–48). Shares in the leases of the Boar’s Head were inherited by at least two women: Susan Woodliffe, widow of the investor Oliver Woodliffe, and Susan Browne, widow of the actor and company leader Robert Browne (Berry 1986: 69–71). Susan Browne later married Thomas Greene of Queen Anna’s Men; on his death she claimed a right not only to his interest in the Curtain and Red Bull playhouses but also to his company share  – unusually because company shares were usually reabsorbed into the company and were not generally treated as assets that could be inherited (Griffith 2013: 10–11, 69, 83–91, 226–35; Sisson 1954). Having married for a third time to James Baskerville, she was later among a large number of women who held shares in the lease of the Fortune playhouse, rebuilt in 1621–3 after a disastrous fire, many of whom seem actively to have invested their money in the project rather than simply inheriting shares (Cerasano 1998). Susan Baskerville’s sustained involvement in playhouse and company finance over a period of over forty years is remarkable, but her position as a female theatre investor was far from unique. Perhaps the most important of these women who inherited or invested in playhouses is Elizabeth Beeston, wife of Christopher Beeston, the owner of the Cockpit playhouse. Beeston not only left his lease of the building containing the playhouse to Elizabeth when he died in 1638 but also bequeathed to her two shares in the company that performed there, asking her to ‘prouide and finde for the saide Company, a sufficient and good stock of apparell fitting for theire vse; shee allowing and paying to my … sonne William … for his Care and industrie in the said Companie Twenty poundes of lawfull money of England per Annum’, the latter bequest being altered in a codicil to a half share in the company (Honigmann and Brock 1993: 193; Matusiak 2014).1 In June 1639, the Cockpit was referred to by a group of indignant Drury Lane residents as ‘Mrs Beestones Playhouse’ (Matusiak 2014: 163, quoting TNA, SP 16/424, f. 240). She retained the lease until it expired in 1656. Christopher Matusiak describes her as ‘the first recorded woman to own and manage one of London’s major purpose-built commercial playhouses’

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(2014: 164). Her alleged response to an unsatisfactory negotiation, described in a lawsuit in 1656, gives a flavour of her approach to business dealings: ‘if that is all you will doe I thanke you for nothing’, she said and then ‘kissed her hand & made a legg like a man & went hir way’ (TNA, C 24/798/82). In this moment, a middleaged woman calculatedly and perhaps playfully marshals a set of masculine gestures to help her negotiate an environment that was male-dominated but never ‘all male’. We see a counterpart to Elizabeth Beeston in the touring theatre of the 1630s, where evidence of women’s performance may cast light on alternative structures for playing companies. The children performing at Bristol’s Rose Inn might suggest either child exploitation or a troupe structured around kinship, the latter of which raises potential comparisons with the use of this structure in Spain and Italy (Carrión 2016). One of the most extensive examples of a woman leading a performance troupe in England, an equivalent to the Spanish auctora, comes from tumbling. Though her career has been obscured by both the mechanisms of historical recording and the priorities of theatre history, for a short time a woman nonetheless seems to have led one of the most famous and long-lived performance companies of its day. In 1631, the Master of the Revels, Sir Henry Herbert, issued a licence to ‘Sisley Peadle; Thomas Peadle her sonne Elias Grundling and three more in theire Company to vse and exercise daunceing on the Roapes, Tumbling, Maulling and other such like ffeates which they or any of them are practized in or can performe’ (Klausner 1990: 539–40; see Eccles 1992: 299–300; Butterworth 2006: 30–1). Named at the head of the troupe, in the position conventionally taken in touring records by the company leader, is Sisley or Cicely Peadle (Mueller 2008: 60). Herbert’s formulation, ‘which they or any of them are practized in or can performe’, is not defined along gender lines and quite plausibly includes her as a performer as well as company leader. Cicely was married to William Peadle Jr., himself the son of William Peadle Sr., and it is around these men that a well-established family troupe of tumblers and rope-dancers based in London and Flusshing, in the Netherlands, coalesced. By 1631, the Peadles had toured southern England and the Midlands for over thirty years, counting James VI and I and Anna of Denmark among their royal patrons. Cicely Peadle, then, looks very much like the female performer-manager of a multi-generational, transnational group of rope-dancers and tumblers. The troupe’s fame was attested to as late as 1654 when Mercurius Fumigosus compared William Peadle Jr. favourably to another rope-dancer, the ‘Turk’ or ‘Albion Blackamoor’, in an important record of a performer of colour in early modern London that further highlights the connection between feats of activity and diverse, often othered performers, like the Black female rope-dancer of Southwark fair (Mercurius Fumigosus 1654: 126).2 Cicely’s near-hidden career combines a set of cultural, geographical and bodily mobilities that are an important part of the history of English performance.

PATRONS AND SPECTATORS Women also exercised a decisive influence on the early modern stage as patrons and spectators of drama. The most important sponsors of drama for over fifty years, between 1554 and 1603, were women, Mary I and Elizabeth I; under James I and

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Charles I the queens consort, Anna of Denmark and Henrietta Maria, maintained companies in their own names, as did James’s daughter, Elizabeth of Bohemia. Fragmentary records of Anna and Henrietta Maria’s direct support of commercial theatre survive in the shape of payments for court performances and direct payments to the companies (see Munro 2019b). These records also occasionally allow us to place their patronage of commercial theatre in broader contexts. In 1618, for instance, Anna’s accounts record payments to morris dancers, a pair of welsh harpers, ‘a Blynd boye that played on a Gittron [i.e. cittern]’, drummers and trumpeters, and various other musicians, alongside ‘her majesties Players’ (TNA, LR/7/80). Some of Henrietta Maria’s responses to plays at court were recorded alongside those of her husband by Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels – in November 1633, for example, Herbert noted that James Shirley’s The Young Admiral was ‘likt by the K.  and Queen’ (Malone and Boswell 1821: 3.234). Other elite women also sponsored playing companies, such as Katherine Willoughby, married first to Charles Brandon, Earl of Sussex, and second to Richard Bertie, who patronized players for more than twenty years between the early 1540s and the mid-1560s, and Lettice Knollys, wife successively of Walter Devereux, first Earl of Essex; Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester; and Sir Christopher Blount, who supported companies of players and musicians in the mid-late 1570s (REED Patrons & Performances). Henrietta Maria appears to have broken new ground as a royal woman by attending plays in the commercial playhouses as well as at court; the earliest of these visits on record took place in April–May 1634, when she saw Lodowick Carlell’s The Spartan Ladies and Philip Massinger’s Cleander at the second Blackfriars playhouse (Bawcutt 1996: 188). Women of less elevated social standing had been going to the playhouses for decades, often in groups with family or friends (Gurr 2004: Appendix I; 2008). In August 1612, for example, the recently widowed gentlewoman Elizabeth Wybarn attended a play at the Globe with her niece, accompanied by Dudley Norton (newly appointed Secretary for Ireland and one of the executors of her husband’s will), Norton’s servant Joseph Mulis and another gentleman who has not been identified (Blackstone and Louis 1995: 556–71, citing TNA, STAC 8/289/3). We know about this visit because Elizabeth was violently accosted by a suitor, Sir Ambrose Vaux, leading to a trial in the Court of Star Chamber, but similar visits to the playhouses by gentlewomen have probably gone unrecorded. Although they link play-going disproportionately with sexual misdemeanour, a rich set of records from the Bridewell Prison attest to the play-going of ordinary women. Alice Pinder, who described herself as a gentlewoman and appears to have been a high-status sex worker, was said in November 1600 to have met one of her clients as she left a play, while the unhappily married Elizabeth Everys fell prey to a predatory man, Benjamin Gunston, at a play at the Bull in early 1578 (Capp 2003: 160–1). Some young women appear to have used play-going as a way of rebelling against parental authority, such as Mary Wene, who was said by the Bridewell authorities in April 1625 to be a regular offender ‘that followeth and haunteth playhouses and will not be ruled by her mother that is an honest woman’, and Katherine Speire, described in 1629 as a ‘lewd young wench [who] will not be ruled by her friends but followeth the company of players and idle company’ (Capp 2003: 160–1). More everyday was the playgoing of women such as Elizabeth Hattrell, a servant in the household of

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Joan Waters, who was in her late teens or early twenties when she testified in the Consistory Court of London in 1611 that John Newton of Prince Charles’s Men ‘is a player at one of the common playe howses … & she this deponent in Whitesone holydayes last past was present at ye Curten in hallowell & sawe the sayd Newton publiquely vppon the stage there playe a parte in a [the] playe there’ (Giese 1998: 118, citing LMA DL/C/220, f. 531). The presence of women in the playhouse, and their influence on the plays staged there, is also acknowledged repeatedly in prologues and epilogues, the points at which playing companies made direct appeals to spectators for favourable responses (Schneider 2011: 93–117). They are occasionally spoken by female characters, such as Rosalind in the epilogue to As You Like It (Chamberlain’s Men, 1599); the female prologue, Flavia, in Lewis Machin’s Every Woman in Her Humour (Children of the King’s Revels, 1607–8), who addresses ‘Gentles of both sexes, and all sortes’ (sig. A2r); and the Nymph who contends with a Shepherd in the prologue to Thomas Randolph’s Amyntas (Children of the Revels, 1630). One of the most potent appeals to women in the audience appears in the epilogue to Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII: I fear All the expected good we’re like to hear For this play at this time is only in The merciful construction of good women, For such a one we showed ’em. If they smile And say ’twill do, I know within a while All the best men are ours – for ’tis ill hap If they hold when their ladies bid ’em clap. (7–14) The epilogue suggests that women might be especially interested in the trajectories and characters of the women within the dramatic narrative  – as Arden editor Gordon McMullan points out, the phrase ‘such a one’ is likely to be a ‘deliberately ambivalent’ reference to one of the play’s major female characters: Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn and the infant Princess Elizabeth (Epilogue, 11n.). It also suggests a dynamic interplay between spectators in the playhouse, in which women’s and men’s responses to drama are intertwined and potentially mutually dependent. It was probably not the case, as the epilogue to the first part of Carlell’s Arviragus and Philicia (King’s Men, c. 1635–6) flatteringly asserts that ‘[t]he gentler sex … can make a Poem live or Poet dye’ (sig. E5r), but the influence of female spectators was a factor in the production and reception of plays produced across the early modern period.

DRAMATISTS Like the plays of the commercial London stages, drama authored by early modern women bears the marks of the multiple activities, skills and forms encompassed by early modern playing and hence available to women and girls as points of

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reference, inspiration and contention. Examples include Jane, Lady Lumley’s midsixteenth-century translation of Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis, the first translation of Euripidean drama by any English writer; Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, which was the first original drama by a woman to be printed in English when it emerged from the press in 1613; Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley’s The Concealed Fancies (c. 1644); and the plays of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, published in a pair of impressive folio editions in 1662 and 1668. The 1668 edition of Cavendish’s plays was published by Anne Maxwell, in a tradition of women’s involvement with the print circulation of drama that stretches back to the early 1590s, when Joan Broome published several of the plays of John Lyly (Smith 2012: 87–134; Wayne 2020). We will pause here on Lady Mary Wroth’s 1621 pastoral play, Love’s Victory, in part because of its own interest and in part because Wroth herself brings together many of the strands of this chapter. She danced in blackface in Ben Jonson’s court entertainment, The Masque of Blackness, in 1605; she perhaps later reflected on the experience in one of the sonnets in her sequence ‘Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’, published in the first part of her two-part romance, Urania, in 1621 (Sonnet 22, in Wroth 1621b: sig. 4B2v; see Larson 2010: 178–9). Jonson also dedicated The Alchemist to Wroth, wrote three poems addressed to her, and appears to have represented her in his own pastoral, The May Lord (2012b-e). Urania itself is suffused with references to playing and theatrical spectatorship, including two explicit references to the boy-actresses of the commercial stage (Barker 2009; Munro 2022; Roberts 1983: 165; Roberts, Gossett and Mueller 1999: 159–60; Shapiro 1989; Wroth 1621b: sig. I2v). Love’s Victory is an example of a female-authored text, written for Wroth’s household and extended circle, that deploys the structures through which women’s performance affects and shapes the representation of femininity on the commercial stage. This marks Wroth’s play as the product of an elite household but also brings it closer to the performances of the London commercial stages, showing the interconnections between the diverse spheres of early modern performance, courtly, commercial, civic and household. Love’s Victory was written in 1619–20 and examines the criss-crossing love affairs of witty, eloquent shepherds and shepherdesses, manipulated by the ruling deity Venus and her son Cupid. The play belongs to a context of female-authored theatrical writing for household performance; it is caught up in familial dynamics (both those of blood relations and the extended household of servants and labourers), patronage (the favour of the lord and lady), education (the instruction of aristocratic girls alongside their male relatives), the spatial dynamics of the household (great house performance spaces and their relationship to the surrounding estate), women’s household networks (including those within which women traded for daily and luxury goods) and dynamics of textual survival. This last point is key: Wroth’s play survives in two manuscripts; she herself wrote a presentation copy which became part of the library of Sir Edward Dering at Surrenden, who, as Paul Salzman points out, may have obtained it to make ‘some sort of contribution towards a performance’ and which demonstrates the value Wroth perceived her writing to have to her circle (Salzman 2017–21; see Findlay, Sidney and Brennan 2021).3

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As Katherine Larson argues in her analysis of the shared features of Love’s Victory and Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, Wroth ‘structures [her plot] … around a series of conversational games’, scattering the acts of her pastoral with ‘ludic encounters’, moments of enactment that offer ‘a cover for courtship … [and] help to alleviate the crises of communication and articulation that plague [her] protagonists’ (2010: 180). These encounters are non-mimetic inserts, constellated activities which must be enacted rather than performed and which refer directly out to the performance context for Wroth’s play. Hence, a singing competition in Act 1 embeds a moment of musical skill and speaks to the household musical environment in which early modern aristocratic women were educated. The exchange of confessional tales in Act 3 and the riddling contest of Act 4, both of which reveal Dalina’s inconstancy, embed the codified and rehearsed practices of social games and wit into the performance and encourage an informed audience to compare and contrast the actors’ skills and those encountered in real life. Act 2’s fortune-telling episode is equally allusive. The aristocratic group pick fortunes from a book, their choices speaking directly to their plight in the play and driving the plot. By encompassing performance that enacts rather than represents an activity, Love’s Victory is both part of the elite household and connected to the wider landscape of early modern playing outlined at the start of this chapter. These connections have been furthered on the twentyfirst-century stage by a Practice as Research performance investigation of Love’s Victory at Penshurst by Alison Findlay (2018, 2016) and expert practitioners from Shakespeare’s Globe’s staged reading series, Read Not Dead, underlining the ways in which Wroth’s work speaks to that of her male contemporaries.

RESEARCH DIRECTIONS The archival evidence in this chapter demonstrates women’s participation in the building, investment and management of early modern theatre and the centrality of their practice as performers to our understanding of the plays of the commercial stages. Further research is needed to analyse archival findings to ensure that theatre history is not simply revised to include gender non-conforming individuals and women but reconceived and rewritten on new terms. Central to this will be innovative methodologies such as the practitioner-led collaborative investigations of women’s drama which in recent years have offered a compelling methodology for exploring questions of gender, both as they are instantiated in early modern playtexts and as they bear on the performance of early modern plays now. We end our chapter with one such example, the workshop designed and led by Peter Cockett and Melinda Gough in collaboration with the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Ontario, as part of the Engendering the Stage project. Held over a week in September 2018 and focused on processes rather than outcomes, the workshop gathered Festival Company artists and guest artists, assembling a group of TwoSpirit, non-binary, trans and cis expert practitioners to explore the embodied production of gender in early modern playtexts (Cockett and Gough forthcoming; Frankland and Kesson 2016–21; Grange 2020). Following Stephen Purcell’s model of ‘co-investigation’ (2008: 15–34) the workshop sought to bring the distinct orders

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of knowledge of practitioners and scholars into collaboration (Billing 2012). Our chosen texts centred on gender non-conforming or female-identified characters acting beyond the bounds of conventional gender norms: Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy (1610–11), Edward ‘Mac’ Test and Marta Alabá Pelegrin’s translation-in-progress of Juan Pérez de Montalbán’s Comedia famosa de la monja alférez (The Famous Comedy of the Lieutenant Nun, 1625), Fletcher and Massinger’s Love’s Cure (1615), and the duel between Moll and Laxton in that stalwart of women’s performance studies, The Roaring Girl (1611, scene 5). The choice of The Roaring Girl certainly centred a gender non-conforming character, but this was not unproblematic (McManus forthcoming). Trans theatremaker Emma Frankland and Stratford Shakespeare Festival company artist Daren A. Herbert both played Moll, with Herbert also playing Laxton, and both explored the duel scene through the gendered prop of the sword. We sought to understand the difference that an awareness of the explosively powerful, muscular and flexible femininity performed by rope-dancers, sword-dancers and tumblers might make to a practitioner performing femininity in an early modern role now. In later dialogue, when the expert practitioners reflected on the scene, the importance of examining it through the embodied expertise and lived experience of Frankland herself emerged as paramount. Given the ‘transgender capacity’ of both the play and its protagonist and the play’s rigid trajectory towards heteronormative marriage, a suspicion grew that The Roaring Girl is a magnet for gender scholars precisely because of the poignant internal balance between a structure that closes down gender fluidity and the way its own discourse resists any such closure (Rubright 2019).4 Frankland’s reflections on the Lab highlighted the problems of seeking out the gender dynamics of profoundly  – if ambivalently  – patriarchal and heteronormative plays and the urgency of what, in a related context, she calls ‘care’, both inside and outside the workroom (Frankland 2020).5 The combination of archival research, trans, queer and gender studies, and practice-as-research is a powerful tool for understanding the place of gender nonconforming and women performers in early modern dramatic culture and the presentday Shakespeare theatre industry. Practice-as-research allows the reassessment of familiar texts, and a much-studied text like The Roaring Girl has more to reveal when explored by inclusive researchers. Furthermore, this combination of archival findings, theoretical and practical analysis reinforces the importance of an inclusive theatre history to the present-day institutions, theatre companies and practitioners who engage with early modern texts, affording female-identified, trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming artists historical precedents with which to contest their marginalization from Shakespearean performance.

NOTES 1 The playhouse lease is not mentioned but was part of the residue of Beeston’s estate left to Elizabeth after the payment of his debts and other legacies. 2 This supplements the records of individuals of colour identified in the crucial work of Imtiaz Habib (2008).

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3 The manuscripts are held at the Huntington Library (HM 600) and at Penshurst. 4 The phrase ‘transgender capacity’ is used by Marjorie Rubright (2019), deploying David Getsy’s ‘keyword’ for transgender studies. 5 Frankland (2020) includes a guidance document for working with trans artists drawn up by Cole Alvis, Samson Bonkeabantu Brown, Rhiannon Collett, Emma Frankland, Cassandra James, Beric Manywounds and Subira Wahogo at the Stratford Festival in 2019.

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Ndiaye, N. (2021), ‘“Come Aloft, Jack-Little-Ape”: Race and Dance in The Spanish Gypsie’, English Literary Renaissance, 51 (1): 121–51. Orgel, S. and R. Strong, eds (1973), Inigo Jones and the Theatre of the Stuart Court, London: Sotheby Park Bernet. Pilkington, M. C., ed. (1997), REED: Bristol, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Preiss, R. (2014), Clowning and Authorship in Early Modern Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Purcell, S. (2018), ‘Whose Experiment Is It Anyway?: Some Models for Practice-asResearch in Shakespeare Studies’, in A. Castaldo and R. Knight (eds), Stage Matters: Props, Bodies, and Space in Shakespearean Performance, 15–34, Vancouver: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. REED Patrons & Performances. Available online: https://reed.library.utoronto.ca (accessed 1 May 2021). Roberts, J. A. (1983), ‘The Huntington Manuscript of Lady Mary Wroth’s Play, Loves Victorie’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 46 (2): 156–74. Roberts, J. A., ed., completed by S. Gossett and J. Mueller (1999), The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomeries Urania, Tempe, AZ: Renaissance English Text Society. Rubright, M. (2019), ‘Transgender Capacity in Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s The Roaring Girl (1611)’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 19 (4): 45–74. Salzman, P. (2017–21), ‘Textual Introduction’, in P. Salzman (ed.), Love’s Victory, Early Modern Women Research Network. Available online: https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/ emwrn/wrothhistory (accessed 9 April 2021). Schneider, B. (2011), The Framing Text in Early Modern English Drama: ‘Whining’ Prologues and ‘Armed’ Epilogues, Aldershot: Ashgate. Sisson, C. H. (1954), ‘The Red Bull Company and the Importunate Widow’, Shakespeare Survey, 7: 57–68. Shakespeare, W. (2000), Henry VIII, ed. G. McMullan, Arden Shakespeare Third Series, London: Arden Shakespeare. Shapiro, M. (1989), ‘Lady Mary Wroth Describes a “Boy Actress”’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 4: 187–94. Smith, H. (2012), Grossly Material Things: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stokes, J. and R. J. Alexander, eds (1996), REED: Somerset, Including Bath, 2 vols, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Tomlinson, S. (1992), ‘“She Who Played the King”: Henrietta Maria and the Threat of the Actress in Caroline Culture’, in J. Hope and G. McMullan (eds), The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After, 189–207, London: Routledge. Tomlinson, S. (2005), Women on Stage in Stuart Drama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tomlinson, S. (2008), ‘A Jacobean Dramatic Usage of “Actress”’, Notes and Queries, 55 (3): 282–3. Tribble, E. B. (2017), Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare’s Theatre: Thinking with the Body, London: Arden Shakespeare. Wallace, C. W. (1912), The Evolution of the English Drama Up to Shakespeare: With a History of the First Blackfriars Theatre, Berlin: Georg Reimer.

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Wallace, C. W. (1913), ‘The First London Theatre: Materials for a History’, University of Nebraska Studies, 13: 1–297. Ward, E. (1993), The London Spy, ed. P. Hyland, East Lansing, Michigan: Colleagues Press. Wayne, V., ed. (2020), Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England, London: Bloomsbury. West, W. N. (2016), ‘Entertainments: Baitings, Dances, Contests’, in B. R. Smith (ed.), The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s World, 1500–1660, vol. 1, 148–55, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, D. (2014), Shakespeare and the Performance of Girlhood, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Williams, D. (2017), ‘Chastity, Speech, and the Girl Masquer’, in R. Preiss and D. Williams (eds), Childhood, Education and the Stage in Early Modern England, 162–83, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wohlcke, A. (2014), The ‘Perpetual Fair’: Gender, Disorder, and Urban Amusement in Eighteenth-Century London, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Wroth, M. (1621a), Love’s Victory, ed. Paul Salzman, Early Modern Women Research Network. Available online: https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/emwrn/wrothhistory (accessed 9 April 2021). Wroth, M. (1621b), The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania, London.

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Matter, nature, cosmos: The scientific art of the early modern English stage JEAN E. FEERICK

TALES OF THE MOON In Act 2, scene 2 of The Tempest, as Stefano stumbles upon an islander he takes to be a ‘mooncalf’ (2.2.105), their first conversation turns curiously to lunar matters. Having already tasted Stefano’s ‘celestial liquor’ (2.2.115), Caliban asks: ‘Has thou not dropped from heaven?’ (2.2.134). Flushed with the effects of wine, Stefano plays along, affirming the outrageous idea in responding ‘I was the man i’th’ moon when time was’ (2.2.135–36). The words of a drunken butler, Stefano’s preposterous assertion yet creates a bond with his interlocutor. Caliban has heard stories of this figure and affirms Stefano’s claim as truth: ‘I have seen thee in her, and I do adore thee! / My mistress showed me thee, and thy dog and thy bush’ (2.2.137–38). Earlier, in dispute with Prospero, Caliban had alluded to the cosmological dimensions of his education at the hands of his ‘master’, recalling how he was taught ‘To name the bigger light and how the less / That burn by day and night’ (1.2.336–37). A moment of enlightenment he seems to value, the progress of his education is yet subsequently curtailed when Prospero charges him with attempting to ‘violate’ (1.2.348–49) Miranda’s honour. But what are we to make of Caliban’s fascination with the moon? A sign of his gullibility or his penchant for idolatry, Caliban’s orientation towards the sky positions this play in relation to major challenges to received wisdom about the cosmos newly circulating at the time of the play’s first performance in 1611.1 A year earlier Galileo published his Sidereus nuncius and delivered a powerful blow to the old cosmology. The version of ancient cosmology most widely available through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance was that transmitted via Aristotle’s Physics, which construed the celestial realm as ontologically distinct from the terrestrial world. In this view the two spheres were made from different materials and governed by fundamentally different principles of motion. As Daniel Garber explains, ‘The sublunar world was a world of things in flux’, defined by the ongoing combination and separation of

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the four elements, whereas the celestial realm was comprised of heavenly bodies made from a fifth element, the quintessence, and constituting ‘an unchanging world of physical perfection’ (2006: 28). Caliban inhabits this traditional world view in believing moons harbour men and clouds distribute riches, implicitly voicing the coordinates of wonder and cosmic clarity that defined this earlier sensibility. His certainty that a benign man oversees the world imparts both the anthropocentric features of this ideology and its faith in an ordered and providential universe (Shapin 1996: 24). But this view was in fast decline at the turn of the century. Galileo’s glassy instrument revealed that the marks that seemed to limn the features of a man in the moon were actually a cluster of hills and valleys.2 In place of the smooth, luminous surface that poets had praised in hymns to a celestial body, he bluntly noted that the moon is ‘rough and uneven’ and, like the earth, ‘full of vast protuberances, deep chasms, and sinuosities’ (Galileo 1880: 8). Stefano signals the unsettled state of cosmic knowledge in hailing Caliban’s vision as residual, evocative of a bygone world ‘when time was’ (Tem 2.2.136). Galileo’s observations of a changeable heavens and a vast universe proliferating with suns and moons were building on earlier discoveries that had gradually chipped away at the traditional wisdom. Copernicus had published his theory of a heliocentric universe in 1543, reaching a broad English audience with Thomas Digges’s 1576 translation, while Tycho Brahe published his observations of a comet firing through what appeared to be a highly changeable celestial canopy in 1577, challenging ‘the solidity of the Aristotelian cosmos’ (Aït-Touati 2011: 18–19). Alongside these astronomical developments, a group of Italian naturalists – including Ficino, Telesio, Bruno and Campanella – were spurred by Plato’s newly accessible works to theorize an alternative view of the physical world, positing an infinite universe and a plurality of worlds.3 In the mid-1580s, while residing in England, the outspoken Bruno issued a direct attack on Aristotle’s claim for a finite universe by asserting, ‘There are no ends, boundaries, limits or walls which defraud or deprive us of the infinite multitude of things’. His repudiation of the Ptolemaic model, which he colourfully compared to having one’s ‘brains’ ‘imprisoned … within Venetian glass ornaments’, circulated at the highest levels of the English court, since two of his books published at this time were dedicated to the courtier-poet Sir Philip Sidney (Bruno 2014: 29). Neoplatonists like Bruno defended an animistic conception of the universe in which stars and planets were understood as ‘mighty living divinities’ capable of working on the lower world through sympathies and antipathies; the anima mundi or world-soul was the link that joined these realms, infusing all creatures and matter (Copenhaver and Schmitt 1992: 288). Bruno mocked Aristotle for being cavalier in rejecting the ideas of pre-Socratics like Pythagoras and Democritus and described his philosophy as a tangle of ‘definitions, notions, certain quintessences, and other fragments and miscarriages of fantastic thought’ (2017: 218). Against such excesses, he promoted ‘the art of speculating upon things lofty as well as base, upon things divine as well as human’ (Bruno 2017: 194) as a more secure path to knowledge, suggesting that imaginative work might compensate for the errors of logic. Brash and unrelenting, Bruno would eventually pay for his beliefs with his life, being executed by the Italian Inquisition, but his cosmological ideas continued to resonate well beyond his death.

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At stake in this swirl of competing theories was the method by which humans could arrive at knowledge of the world and cosmos. Mary Thomas Crane has read the flurry of theories and discoveries in the late sixteenth century as collectively serving to discount an intuitive approach to nature that had been underwritten by Aristotelian philosophy. Little by little, natural philosophers were questioning the ability of the senses to serve as a portal to knowledge, offering instead a highly abstract and mathematical conception of the universe, one largely inaccessible to the layperson (Crane 2014). Empiricists, too, insisted that the senses could not be relied on to deliver accurate information about the immediate world, let alone the celestial realms beyond (Shapin 1996: 85–93). To prop up these fallible human faculties, Bacon urged philosophers to work collectively to gather data of every variety and to embrace artificial experiment as a means of observing the hidden ways of nature (Shapin 1996: 96–100). Like Bruno, he rejected the Aristotelian philosophical model, accusing its followers of being trapped in circular forms of thinking, most especially by positing the ‘end’ or ‘telos’ that any natural thing moved towards. For Bacon, such philosophy deduced the conclusions it ought instead to prove, and he offered his Novum organon as a model of induction to replace the old philosophy. By underscoring the power of art – of humanly crafted enquiries – to reveal nature’s patterns, Bacon rejected Aristotle’s move to cordon off certain knowledge from human activities. As Shapin notes, although Aristotle describes nature as an artificer in his Physics, he did not thereby view it as ‘proper to suppose that the artifice of nature and that of humans belonged on the same plane. Nature … was far superior to human artifice, and it was impossible that humans should compete with nature’ (1996: 31). Elizabeth Spiller echoes these claims in understanding this tendency by Bacon and other empiricists to validate the knowledge delivered by humanly crafted inventions as effecting an important break with the past, even one that is a hallmark of early modernity. As natural philosophers of the day toggled between old and new theories of the world, conceptual space was created for a range of practitioners – scientists and astronomers, but also poets  – to contribute to the new knowledge culture (Spiller 2004: 1–23; 2009). A window between the arts and sciences was thereby opened in this era of late humanism. Indeed, the proliferation of allusions to the man in the moon in plays, prose tracts and fictional travel narratives during the seventeenth century provides evidence that what we, as moderns, think of as discrete domains – the literary as against the scientific  – does not align with the possibilities then alive. Rather, as critics like Spiller have argued, literary and scientific modes of thinking in the late Renaissance overlap in method and goal. To date, critics have mostly observed such intersections  – especially when cosmology is the topic  – in poetry and prose of the period, examining thematic ideas in the poetry of Sidney, Spenser and Donne or the prose works of a physician like Sir Thomas Browne (Spiller 2004; Blake 2019; Crane 2017; Hyman 2017). But attention to the ways drama of the day registered these epistemological innovations warrants more critical attention.4 In this chapter I attempt to move in that direction by exploring how dramatists were actively testing and directing cosmological ideas, transforming the stage into a speculative space to scrutinize theories of the material world. I focus on how such

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ideas gained expression in two plays staged during this watershed moment, famously described by John Donne as one in which ‘new philosophy calls all in doubt’ (Donne 1957: 213). Although separated by genre and theatrical context, the plays I discuss share a deep preoccupation with the skies. I consider Lyly’s Endymion, a comedy that revived a classical myth in shaping the idea of one man’s love for the moon, alongside Shakespeare and Middleton’s Timon of Athens, a generically anomalous play – identified simply as a ‘life’ but leaning towards tragedy – which portrays a man’s cosmic rage at being dislodged from the centre of the universe. Read together, the plays capture the massive cultural shift catalysed by the new science; they also bookend this period of rapid change with their contrasting cosmic sensibilities. Together they demonstrate that the theatre was not a passive bystander to debates about matter, nature and the cosmos. Rather, dramatists indicate they were attuned to the implications of these theories and used the stage to render them concrete. Of course, the name of Shakespeare’s most famous theatrical home – the Globe – announced these connections, first, in calling itself a mini earth and, second, in featuring a canopied roof for the heavens as a feature of its set design. A veritable microcosm, the Renaissance stage proved a powerful medium for disseminating scientific musings to elite and popular audiences. As I argue, the stories dramatists told of the moon should be seen as contributing to the project of ‘making’ knowledge that critics have identified as a unique feature of early modernity, when for a short time scientia and poesis shared a common purpose.

HUMANISM’S OPENINGS Identifying scientific allusions in plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson, of course, is nothing new. Writing in the early twentieth century, when ‘science studies’ was emerging as a discipline, a first wave of literary critics seeking to draw attention to overlapping interests among natural philosophers and poets identified allusions to scientific events, figures or discoveries within the plays, even as they construed science as distinct from imaginative work.5 Despite the innovative angles these critics provided, their approaches tended to flatten the literary text, viewing it as secondary to a more primary scientific ‘context’. Recently, a second wave of critics has construed the relationship between science and literature more dynamically, describing the sharing of ideas and representational strategies as a ‘trading zone’ (Aït-Touati 2011: 6). As Carla Mazzio explains, whereas the earlier tendency was to ‘thematize science’, thereby reducing literature’s relation to science to that of a bystander offering commentary, the second wave of critics has focused on epistemology, on ‘shared procedures of thought’ evident in the work both of philosophers and poets (Mazzio 2009: 6). In an important volume dedicated to exploring these soft disciplinary boundaries for early modernity, Howard Marchitello and Evelyn Tribble assemble work that focuses on the literary features of scientific texts – their narrative strategies and use of metaphor – while also demonstrating how poets and playwrights deploy imaginative strategies like the hypotheses or speculative thinking that are often misconstrued as the exclusive domain of philosophical thinkers (2017).

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Indeed, we should expect to find disciplinary crossings in this era of late humanism, a time that has been described as one that enabled ‘privileged “passages” between the human sciences and the exact sciences’ (Aït-Touati 2011: 3). In contrast to our modern moment, which C. P. Snow famously described as a two-culture system, in which the arts are rigidly cordoned off from the sciences, Renaissance humanism united language and philosophy, scrambling the lines dividing imaginative or factual thought as well as subjective or objective knowledge in ways that our modern paradigm resists (Snow 1988; Latour 1993). As Aït-Touati compellingly argues, science lacked a ‘fixed form’ and was ‘full of scraps taken from traditional marvelous tales and magic’ (2011: 5). What possibilities emerge when we consider knowledge projects through the prism of a humanist paradigm? We should begin by noting that all students receiving a grammar school education were treated to a heavy diet of classical texts, which exposed them to philosophical ideas in colourful form through Ovidian myths, the storied lives of Greeks and Romans, and classical poetry. Given the exercises of double translation and imitation required in these schoolrooms, such ideas were deeply imprinted on even the most reluctant students. When students advanced to the university level, as some but not all did, their training would have followed the studia humanitatis curriculum, which taught them first grammar, rhetoric, poetry and history, before proceeding to natural philosophy, math, metaphysics and logic (Kristeller 1988: 131). This educational system blended fields of knowledge that we moderns tend to put in discrete boxes. In this earlier moment, poetry and language were not cut off from natural philosophy; rather, they were regarded as doorways that led directly to such enquiry. One of the fruits of this educational model was its yield of students equipped to offer translations of Greek materials into Latin or the vernacular, which led to the market being flooded with philosophical ideas embedded in the works of writers as diverse as Plutarch, Plato, Virgil and Lucretius, to name just a few. Aristotle’s theories, dominant throughout the Middle Ages, slowly came to be measured against these other theories of the material world. Indeed, as Michael MacDonald has argued, ‘The early stages of the scientific revolution were less a battle between the ancients and the moderns than a contest between the proponents of one set of ancients against the others’, allowing some to level challenges and explore alternate cosmological models ‘under the banner of Plato and the pre-Socratics’ (1985: 178). Scientists whom we hail today as the forbears of modern science found in ancient texts the ideas that guided them in construing the material world anew. Hence, ‘Copernicus defended his heliocentric universe with an appeal to Pythagoreans’, just as Gilbert’s work on magnetism – first published in 1600 – wove ancient mysticism into his understanding of magnetism as an ‘animistic force that permeates the universe’ (MacDonald 1985: 179). For poets and dramatists of the day, in turn, the philosophical ideas encountered in classical texts provided a mine of material to draw upon in their literary works, with many of them responding by threading philosophical plots and characters into their imagined worlds. In doing so, they constituted the stage as a space of cosmic enquiry. Through their imaginative engagement with the flood of ideas circulating in print culture, they shaped the playhouse into a chamber where philosophical truth

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claims could be tested and explored, where the speculative work of science could occur. Indeed, as Aït-Touati has eloquently argued in exploring the intersections of prose fiction and natural philosophy of the time, the ‘new astronomy’, in particular, necessitated a high degree of imaginative work, since many of its hypotheses could not be empirically observed and were the result of complex mathematical computations (2011: 10–11). Hence, figures like Kepler readily embraced literary modes like the imaginary voyage to the moon to aid astronomical interventions. So, too, the stage was uniquely poised to transform abstractions into concrete and embodied form – to give to ‘airy nothing / A local habitation and a name’ (MND, 5.1.16–17) – and there is abundant evidence that Renaissance dramatists engaged in the ‘thought experiments’ then used by scientists to test theories of the cosmos and humanity’s position therein (Shapin 1996: 84).6

NATURAL PHILOSOPHY ON THE EARLY MODERN STAGE What cosmic speculations, then, can we discern in plays of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries? The linkages between knowledge projects of the Renaissance and the drama are perhaps most evident in plays like Doctor Faustus and The Tempest, which build their plots around characters defined by a will to know the hidden realities of the material world, whether conceived as magical, supernatural or elemental.7 Faustus famously wagers his soul for forms of knowledge that, while requiring the ultimate sacrifice from him, can appear mundane, while Prospero practises an art of knowledge-making that, while limited, yet allows him to reclaim his kingdom.8 Compared to such plays, in which controlling nature by sorcery or science is front and centre, plays like Endymion and Timon may not seem to be fertile ground to find engagements with the upheaval of knowledge then underway. Lyly’s Endymion builds a plot around lovers in a context ruled by the ethereal Cynthia, while Timon brushes up against city comedy in anatomizing the corruptions of ancient Athens. Separated by twenty years, the plays capture two quite distinct political moments – Elizabethan and Jacobean – and are deeply bound in theme and mode to their respective moments. Performed by the Children of St. Paul’s before the Queen in 1588 and printed in 1591, Endymion is a hymn to the chaste Diana so central to Elizabethan drama. Timon of Athens, whose composition editors have placed around 1605 due to its thematic and stylistic overlaps with both King Lear and Volpone, captures a darker Jacobean theme of corrupt patriarchs and patrons (Jowett 2004). But read together, the plays also express a shared tendency to transform court-based politics into the stuff of speculative thinking about the material world, humanity’s place in that world and the status and possibility of worlds beyond. And yet their two quite distinct takes on humanity’s place within a cosmic frame make visible the epistemic shift that they straddle. Lyly’s play expresses a Neoplatonic view of the world, in which a divine spark conjoins the celestial and the terrestrial, anchoring the characters’ sense of inhabiting a morally ordered, hierarchically delimited place in the cosmos. His play bears the strong imprint of Giordano

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Bruno’s theories of an animistic universe, recently published in England after the author delivered a series of lectures at the University of Oxford. Lyly’s patron in the period of the play’s composition was Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, who had returned from a trip to Italy in the late 1570s. In composing this rewriting of a classical myth, Lyly may have aimed at pleasing Oxford, who was known to be a skilled dramatist and poet himself, as much as the Queen, but in choosing an allegory that could be read on many levels, he arguably arrived at a path to flattering both. Shakespeare and Middleton’s much darker play provides an account of Timon’s self-exile from Athens, a city state animated by money, which is also a tale of radical cosmic displacement in a world where the signs of providential oversight are murky at best. Timon’s perspective, which dominates the entire second half of the play, captures a growing awareness of man’s smallness within a vast elemental universe. His confrontation with cosmic forces, the elemental transmutation of matter, conveys a fading confidence in man’s exceptionalism and his ability to access the celestial realm. The play thereby captures the growing sense of alienation from the natural world that Crane identifies with challenges to Aristotelianism. In the same way that Doctor Faustus and The Tempest announce their epistemological interests by placing magicians at the centre of their plots, so Endymion and Timon signal a shared philosophical orientation by setting their action in classical antiquity and staging philosophers. Timon is set in fifth-century Athens, the period when Alcibiades lived and the Peloponnesian Wars raged, while Endymion obliquely asserts its ties to a classical world by referring to Thessaly, Athens and Egypt. Pressing these philosophical connections still further, Endymion features Pythagoras as a character; though given only a few lines in the play, one of them proffers a reminder of the challenges of gaining true knowledge for mortals whose minds are clouded by ‘grossness’ and ‘thickness’ (Lyly 2002: 4.3.47–9). His presence in the play thereby directs us to consider the means of knowing the world. It is notable, too, that at the play’s end, the character Pythagoras opts to remain in Cynthia’s court, suggesting that his philosophical insights have been appropriated by this new Athens. Timon of Athens follows suit in bringing a range of philosophical types onstage, including the cynic Apemantus who condemns Athenian hypocrisy and Timon’s misanthropy. Moreover, the play’s thick engagement with the elemental transactions that comprise the cosmos, an idea traceable to the pre-Socratics, suggests the dramatists’ desire to inhabit these newly revived theories and explore their implications. By foregrounding philosophical theories, both plays contribute to the re-evaluation of the material world then underway.

STITCHING THOUGHT TO STARS Lyly’s Endymion opens with a lover who, like Caliban, is mesmerized by the moon, an allegorical figure gendered female in the play through association with the divine Cynthia. Indeed, the central conflict of Lyly’s play involves the ‘impossible’ love Endymion feels for Cynthia, which persists despite warnings from his friends. He will die, he claims, if he does not ‘possess the moon’ (1.1.17), and as the story proceeds, we watch as his pursuit of this luminous deity consumes seven years of

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his life and then an additional twenty years when a spell traps him in an endless slumber. A Petrarchan cliché, Endymion’s love echoes that of countless lovers caught in a paralysing desire for a lady beyond their reach. Yet Lyly’s lover loves with a difference. As he tells his friend, Eumenides, at the play’s start, ‘My thoughts … are stitched to the stars, which, being as high as I can see, thou mayst imagine how much higher they are than I can reach’ (1.1.4–7). His love for Cynthia, which he here associates with cognition, is unusual for propelling him into the cosmos, out towards the stars, serving as a metaphor for moving beyond earthly realms on a path to gaining cosmic awareness. His love aims ‘high’ in contrast to almost all the other lovers in the play, whose desires are earthly, worldly and lowly. That Endymion’s desire seeks after unworldly realms is evident in the name of the rival for his affections: Tellus – Latin for ‘earth’. To distract him from his attraction to Cynthia, she conspires to ensnare him with ‘untamed thoughts and unbridled affections’ (1.2.64–65), forms of earthly matter that block his access to his beloved. In the classical fable from which the play borrows – as told by Apollodorus, Ovid, Lucian and others – the love dynamic first appeared in inverted form, with the moon presented as the desiring subject, smitten by a shepherd boy. In Lyly’s recasting of the myth, it is key that the mortal be the source of the longing, since the playwright’s project is to explore how humans can know realms beyond through the ‘sweet contemplation’ (5.4.165–66) of ‘impossibilities’ (5.4.162). Tellus puts this orientation succinctly when she names this drive a ‘divine fury’ (5.4.76), implying Endymion’s goal is inaccessible to a mortal like him and ‘breaketh the brains’ (5.4.72). Readings of the play have often interpreted Lyly’s poetical expression of a lover’s incurable longing for Cynthia as a political allegory, professing the dramatist’s devotion to the Queen.9 The 1580s and 1590s were indeed the heyday of Elizabethan love discourse, an idiom that praised the Queen and one that she appropriated for political purposes.10 Certainly, Lyly flatters his royal audience and seeks his own advancement. But the play’s allegorizing signifies on multiple levels, and political readings downplay its more daring philosophical investments. Moreover, although critics of the early to mid-twentieth century did comment on the play’s Neoplatonic resonances,11 they did not consider how these overlaps position the play as itself a speculative instrument or a space of epistemological experimentation, as I do here.12 Like the philosophical works of a figure like Bruno, which offer a blueprint for accessing the cosmic world-soul, Lyly’s courtly play envisions the contemplative quest at various stages, mapping its methods and pathways, but also its obstacles. As such, it establishes the stage as a context for knowledge-making in its own right. Indeed, in positioning Lyly’s play alongside Bruno’s De gli eroici furori, translated as The Heroic Frenzies and published in England in 1585 just a few years before Lyly’s play was performed at court, we can observe the degree to which dramatic text and philosophical tract converge in considering the means and methods by which knowledge comes about. Compellingly, in his poetical-philosophical account of the journey to true knowledge, Bruno frames the relation between mortals and cosmic knowledge as a love affair, identifying the quester who seeks such knowledge as a possessed lover pining for union with the world-soul. Bruno’s text charts the

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arduous process that this lover must undergo to realize his goal, involving the refinement of perceptions and the tempering of distracting thoughts. Along the way, Bruno notes, the lover endures periods of long slumber, when he appears to inhabit a vegetative state, being detached from the stimuli of the world. It is during such moments, he argues, that deep contemplation occurs. The cosmic quest at the heart of Bruno’s creative rendering of philosophical ideas also shapes the content and structure of Lyly’s philosophical play. In the Prologue, Lyly invites his audience to imagine fiction as a path to truth, but he does so in a playful, indirect manner. He first discounts his project’s worth by referring to it as a ‘tale’ (Prol. 2, 5, 12), a kind of ‘Chimera’ that he notes was ‘forbidden in old time’ (Prol. 6). But he subsequently implies that the tendency towards imaginative speculation evident in fiction has value in situations when ‘none under the sun … knows’ (Prol. 9) the truth. Where knowledge is in progress and unsettled, that is, the imaginative powers of the poet can help light the path forward. In the cryptic play on words and concepts that constitute this opening, Lyly identifies three axes for his ‘tale’: method, matter and ‘means incredible’ (Prol. 3–4). Those words, which often appeared as touchstones of philosophical enquiry of the day, convey the purpose of his play: it will tap the unbelievable – the imaginary realm – as a method of revealing how humans come to know the matter of the world. Poetry thereby becomes a partner to natural philosophy. He accomplishes this goal by constructing a set of parallel love plots to flank the central one involving Endymion, imitating Bruno’s identification of nine different types of lovers of truth. Indeed, love plots in the play keep hatching. Sir Tophas, who early on rejects erotic alliances, soon falls into a lovesick stupor and bursts with desire for the play’s least desirable woman, Dipsas. Meanwhile, Tellus feels the pangs of unrequited love for Endymion. So, too, Corsites is spurned by Tellus, while Eumenides is rejected by Semele. Each of these lovesick figures refracts Endymion’s orientation towards the heavenly Cynthia, whose perfection ‘alloweth no companion nor comparison’ (2.1.27–28). In desiring her, then, Endymion outflanks his loving counterparts, who are enamoured of people who deceive, demean and degrade them. Tellus’s love for Endymion is based on a lie that he loves her in return, while Corsites’s love for Tellus is based on a false front she presents him. So, too, Sir Tophas’s love for Dipsas only flourishes amid the illusion that she is unwed and might be his ‘sweet Venus’ (3.3.142). All of these lovers are led astray by their fallible senses, making it clear that only in sleep, when there is a ‘binding of the senses’ (3.3.134–35), will real knowledge be gained. Corsites captures Endymion’s sleep as just such a vegetative state when he observes in trying to move him: ‘What, stone still? Turned … to earth’ (4.3.12–13). Bruno had identified the lover’s perception of cosmic unity amid apparent diversity as requiring just such a withdrawal. When Endymion awakens after twenty years of slumber, having forgotten himself and his dearest friend, we witness an instance of his cognitive readiness. Notably, the only thing the awakened Endymion initially remembers is the contemplative object: Cynthia. Lyly’s highly stylized, allegorical play thus advances a detailed philosophical claim about the material bonds conjoining the celestial and terrestrial worlds, inflecting theories circulating among astronomers, astrologers, mathematicians

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and natural philosophers at the time. Indeed, if Endymion embodies this ideal orientation towards cosmic knowledge at the play’s start, the play’s other characters take more circuitous paths to a similar end, revealing various stages of knowledge acquisition. For Endymion’s friend, Eumenides, the knowledge quest requires that he pierce the mire of a fountain in search of a remedy for his friend (3.4.17, 3.4.22). Neoplatonists, too, sought out secret meanings buried in nature and believed it was the natural philosopher’s role to decode them.13 Like such philosophers, the quest facing Eumenides exacts labour, patience and sacrifice as the price of knowledge. He must decode first one cryptic message in the fountain – ‘Ask one for all, and but one thing at all’ (3.4.84–85) – and then another before being led to the concept of the circle and, thus, to the celestial body of Cynthia. His path to knowledge, like Endymion’s, proceeds slowly, but by piercing worldly illusions, even coming to see his love for Semele as secondary to other forms of love, he is awakened to truth: ‘Now only do I begin to live’ (5.4.210–11). Notably, the play ends comedically as Cynthia guides each of these couples to break through the obstacles that block their union, emblematizing the bond between mortals and cosmic knowledge. In these resolutions, the play affirms the value of aspiring after the ‘impossible’ (1.2.35), despite claims that such pursuits are ‘ridiculous’ (1.1.9) or mere ‘fancies’ (Prol. 8). If the barrage of new theories of the material world made the universe opaque and inaccessible, the stage fashioned itself into a space where such speculative reveries could be made concrete and, eventually, comprehensible.

TIMON’S COSMIC BLUNDER Timon of Athens offers a much darker vision of the universe. This play follows the fortunes of a man who exceeds Endymion’s quest to love the moon by laying claim to the generative powers of the sun, only to be crushed by the knowledge of his own earthly limits. If Lyly’s play traces human advancement beyond earthly constraints to tap cosmic divinity, Timon of Athens exposes the folly of trying to rise above the material realm. Timon’s universe is one that understands human actions as bound by elemental laws, engaging a strand of pre-Socratic thinking that emphasized humanity’s modest place within the cosmos. Compellingly, if the play anticipates the ‘depersonalization of natural knowledge’ that defines the new science (Shapin 1996: 13), surrendering the firm footing of a providential and orderly universe, it also anticipates the insights of ecocritics today. Such critics reject the fallout from a two-culture model, which places humans (and the arts) to one side and nature (and the sciences) to the other,14 urging instead that humanity stop seeing itself as a special case and acknowledge that ‘we are made of the world, and the world is made of us’ (Jones 2017: 12).15 Shakespeare and Middleton arrive at a similar assessment of the physical world and humanity’s place therein not by being ahead of their time but by returning to the past. Like Copernicus, Gilbert and Kepler, these playwrights dabbled in theories and ideas gleaned from the ancient philosophies of Pythagoras and Empedocles. A disciple of Pythagoras, Empedocles popularized a view of the cosmos as a metamorphic, lively and transformative force in a set of poem-fragments that were

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translated into Latin in 1573. His theory understood the four elements  – earth, water, air and fire – as ‘rhizomata’ or roots, viewing them as the building blocks of the universe, itself imagined as a vortex of creativity in which elements wax and wane. The dyad of love and strife that Empedocles names the movers of the universe were popularized by Horace’s epistles, where the concept was translated as concordia discors and would later be picked up by Renaissance poets as a catchphrase to describe their own creative work. Ovid, too, helped to popularize these philosophical theories through his epic poem, The Metamorphoses, which became a staple of Renaissance grammar schools. A compendium of classical myths, Ovid’s poem makes its philosophical stakes evident by concluding with a 400-line oration by Pythagoras, which presents his theory of an elementally infused world and the doctrine of metempsychosis. If Ovid concludes with these ideas, they also serve as the backbone to the poem, given its primary theme of the radical fungibility of all living forms, which the poem’s English translator, Arthur Golding, famously described as the ‘wonderful exchange / Of gods, men, beasts and elements’ (Ovid 2001: Epistle, 13–14). Rooted in the classical world by virtue of both source and context, Shakespeare and Middleton’s play dramatizes the dark side of man’s growing awareness that he is enmeshed in a material world. As the play opens, Timon imagines himself residing above the world, devoted as he is to ways of thinking that position him outside its circuits of conversion, exchange and transformation. A liberal benefactor in Athens, he regards himself as an endless source of resources for his ‘friends’, who receive a steady stream of gifts from him. Though seeming to denote his munificence, Timon’s gifts are problematic for being decidedly linear, expressing his latent desire to rise above mortal limits. An earlier play about Timon, believed to be a source for Shakespeare and Middleton’s tragedy and to have been performed at the Inns of Court in 1601, had made these linkages explicit. In this comedy Timon is repeatedly compared to the mythological gods. His friends hail him as ‘sublunary Jupiter’ (337) and ‘humane Jupiter’ (299), while the woman he woos proclaims: ‘Thou are my Titan, I thy Cynthia; / From thy bright beams my beauty is deriv’d’ (Timon 1980: 316). In Shakespeare and Middleton’s tragedy, however, references to the classical gods are replaced by a materialist version of the cosmos. Instead of styling himself an earthly Jupiter, Timon covets the life-giving powers associated with the sun, defying his own mortal limits and the cosmic principle of exchange. In blocking circuits of exchange, he positions himself as the axis of all life in Athens. This ethos emerges in his refusal to accept repayment of his loans from peers such as Ventidius, Lord Lucius and Lord Lucullus. When these men seek to repay him, their gifts are nullified, with Timon insisting that they be ‘worthily entertained’ (1.2.187) or overwritten by ‘fair reward’ (1.2.194). While appearing beneficent, Timon’s refusal of reciprocity shuts down the possibility that they might transform his gifts – in imitation of the cosmic principle of conversion – into something of their own making. Indeed, even when Timon needs the help of these men, as his finances flounder, his requests for a return on his gifts are less an invitation for them to join the gift-giving circle than an attempt at an extraction that he, once again, controls.

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Indeed, in telling his suitors ‘I gave it freely ever’ (1.2.10), Timon intimates that he is beyond time and space, since his gifts, like himself, are not bound by physical constraints. Later in the play, the Poet will channel Timon’s inflated sense of self when he commends him for his ‘star-like nobleness [that] gave life and influence / To their whole being’ (5.1.61–62). Apemantus has already made a similar association in observing how ‘Men shut their doors against a setting sun’ (1.2.144), as has Lucius in noting: ‘the days are waxed shorter with him’, since his ‘prodigal course / Is like the sun’s, but not like his recoverable’ (3.4.11–13). There is no elemental return for this man who styles himself a sun. In this moment of self-reckoning, when Timon’s human limits are exposed, he flees Athens for the woods where his presumptions about the material world are challenged and subverted. Though seeming an altered man in this altered context, particularly given his embrace of a misanthropic perspective, Timon continues to behave like a god. If earlier he sought to ‘create’ his peers by being the sole source of gifts, he now commits himself to their undoing. He issues one imperative after the next for plagues, blights and monstrosities, seeking to undo the bonds between parent and child, husband and wife, master and servant. His urgent appeals to the sun and heavens seek nothing less than a reversal of creation. Through his shotgun exchanges with Alcibiades, Apemantus and others, it becomes apparent that Timon loathes and assaults the principle of transformation itself, which he considers a feminine principle. Whereas he describes the ‘marbled’ (4.3.190) heavens as ‘crisp’ (4.3.182) and ‘clear’ (4.3.28), emphasizing its bounded and masculine ontology in ways that echoes Aristotle’s concept of an immutable realm, the feminine earth cannot help but be ‘[c]ommon’ (4.3.176) in his eyes. Earth appears to him a source of blighted matter, a breeder of rotten humidity, monstrous animals and excremental life, while man emerges as one of her cursed offspring, kin to ‘the black toad … gilded newt and … venomed worm’ (4.3.180–81). And yet, if Timon views earthly life as damned and depraved, his understanding of cosmic processes also undergoes a shift in this interlude in the woods, after he is granted sustenance from earth in the form of a root. In a moment that marks a first instance of his being positioned on the receiving end of a gift, Timon pauses his tirade to express ‘dear thanks’ (4.3.191) to the earth. From this moment, his appeals to the earth soften, reflecting a world view revolving. In dialogue with the thieves, who have fled Alcibiades’s army due to hunger, we can detect this changing perspective. Timon tells them to use the fruits of the ‘bounteous housewife Nature’ (4.3.415) to satisfy their needs, noting that she offers roots to eat, timbers to build, water to drink and berries to please. Being in the grip of ‘want’, the men dismiss her gifts, seeking the gold they think Timon has. He interrogates their desires, asking, ‘Want? Why want?’ (4.3.416), urging them to limit their appetites. His words also express a growing awareness of the gifts this ‘Common mother’ (4.3.176) has bestowed: food, shelter, water. Nature has met, if not exceeded his basic needs for living. Her ‘commonness’, thus, comes to suggest less a form of degradation than a readiness to widely distribute her wares. So, too, his view of the heavens undergoes a change. The cosmic figure who was earlier hailed by Timon as a ‘blessed’ sun occupying the fixed heavens now

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morphs into a king of ‘thieves’, who robs the vast sea of water. So, too, sun’s ‘sister’, the moon, imitates her brother in being an ‘arrant thief’ who snatches his light. If the sea is another thief for ‘resolving’ the moon to tears, and the earth her own kind of thief in breeding compost from excrement, they take their pattern from the cosmos. Significantly, in this ‘exemplum’ of thievery, adapted from a Greek ode by Anacreon, Timon begins to see the dizzying exchanges of matter as the condition of cosmic generativity. Here even the sun is positioned within the circuit of change, not standing above it as part of a static celestial realm; if the sun provides, it also receives, in a continuum that binds it with sublunary bodies. Earth’s gift emerges as part of a more expansive natural oeconomy, in which matter in the form of water, fire, air and earth passes from one orb to another, from body to body, in a cosmic circuit of making and unmaking. The shift in Timon’s view is detectible in the verbs he here uses to describe these processes: from a thieving body that ‘robs’ or ‘snatches’, he starts to figure cosmic cycling in generative terms, as an act that ‘resolves’, ‘feeds’ and ‘breeds’ (4.3.430–7). The force presiding over this wilderness emerges as a crafting, artisanal agent that freely and creatively transforms matter. Notably, she is not bound by Timon’s controlling bids. When he demands food, she provides gold. When he demands poison, she offers instead a root. Her gifts have a compelling tendency to resist his constraints, as she shapes elemental matter into the vibrant forms of gold, iron, stone, caves, roots, berries and trees. If Timon is often viewed as a man who rejected humanity, I have argued for a reading of him as someone who eventually reclaims his cosmic footing. In that respect, this quirky, collaborative play anticipates the insights of post-humanists, new materialists and ecocritics today. It portrays the nightmare, for man, of discovering that he is not the centre or axis of earthly life but a ‘fellow traveler’. New materialists have challenged assertions of human exceptionalism by foregrounding matter’s immanent vitality and understanding the material world as a ‘multitude of interlocking systems’ that embrace not only the biological and climatic, but the economic and political as well as the artistic and cultural (Coole and Frost 2010: 8–9). Human and non-human, culture and nature cease to function as meaningful divides for such theorists. In their place emerge alliances, networks, assemblages and confederations of matter – that is, horizontal modes of construing living forms that foreground overlap and kinship between human and non-human entities. So, too, Jane Bennett urges us to explore the ‘structural parallels between material forms in “nature” and those in “culture”’ (2010: 99), to question the opposition that positions humans outside of nature. To undo such bifurcations, she suggests we create unholy alliances, invert hierarchies and ally the work of disciplines that modern epistemologies regard as separate. Renaissance texts present a unique opportunity for conducting such enquiries, since the wall between human culture and nature that Aristotle authored and subsequent generations defended was, for a time, softened, the creations of artists seen as analogous to and illuminating of nature’s patterns. So, too, disciplinary divisions allowed for a more expansive cross-fertilization between fields we consider ‘arts’ and those we call ‘sciences’ than is now possible. This chapter serves as a case study that identifies one such intersection, suggesting that Renaissance dramatists participated in contemporary debates about the nature of the

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cosmos, making the theatre a space of philosophical speculation that shared some of the aims visible in imaginary voyages to the moon by natural philosophers like Kepler or Bruno. If critics have been thorough in identifying scientific enquiries in poetry and prose of the seventeenth century, there is more work that remains to be done in culling the epistemological work catalysed by the Renaissance stage.

NOTES 1 For further discussion of the trend in alluding to the man in the moon, see Cressy (2006) and Trevor (2013). See also Nicolson (1948). 2 See Nicolson’s discussion of Plutarch’s account, following Anaxagoras, of the moon as cavernous in his De Facie in Orbe Lunare (1948: 17). 3 For discussion of Plato’s dissemination following Ficino’s translations, see Garber (2006: 33–43). 4 Recent collections focusing on ‘Shakespeare and Science’, such as that pioneered by Mazzio, have begun to redress this imbalance. Turner, too, models an innovative approach in charting the connections between geometry and stage practice (2006), in ways that advance the field beyond an early focus on Galenic medicine and the stage. Compellingly, Ait-Touati argues that while drama has topical overlaps with scientific texts of the day, it does not share, in her view, similar ‘modes of expression’, leading her to omit drama from her study (2011: 8). By contrast, I see signs of compelling connection between Baconian empiricism and tragicomedy and believe these links hold promise for further work (Feerick 2017). 5 For some examples of this first wave, see Empson (1957) and Nicolson (1948). See also the excellent overview of such criticism in the introduction to Marchitello and Tribble eds (2017). 6 For allusions to Lucretian atomism in King Lear, see Crane (2014). For a discussion of alchemical ideas in a wide range of plays, see Eggert (2015). 7 For a discussion of the supernatural physics that inform Doctor Faustus, see Poole (2011). For a discussion of the imprint of natural philosophy on The Tempest, see Cowan (2016). 8 For the explication of such a reading, see Spiller (2009). 9 For such emphases, see, for instance, Pincombe (1996). 10 See the classic argument in Marotti (1982). 11 See, for instance, Lenz (1976). 12 For movement in this new critical direction, see Bozio (2016). 13 For the ‘secrets of nature’ tradition, see Copenhaver and Schmitt (1992: 288). See also Eamon (1994) and Floyd-Wilson (2013). 14 See the classic argument to this effect by Latour (1993). 15 Borlik (2011) makes a compelling case for ecocritical readings of early modern materials, exploring how they build on ideas borrowed from pre-Socratic philosophy.

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REFERENCES Aït-Touati, F. (2011), Fictions of the Cosmos: Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century, trans. Susan Emanuel, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bacon, F. (1825–34), The New Organon, ed. L. Jardine and M. Silverthorne, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Bennett, J. (2010), Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Blake, L. (2019), ‘Lyric and Scientific Epistemologies: Bacon and Donne’, in K. Poole and L. Shohet (eds), Gathering Force: Early Modern Literature in Transition, 1557–1623, 199–214, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Borlik, T. (2011), Ecocriticism and Early Modern English Literature: Green Pastures, New York: Routledge. Bozio, A. (2016), ‘The Contemplative Cosmos: John Lyly’s Endymion and the Shape of Early Modern Space’, Studies in Philology, 113 (1): 58–81. Bruno, G. (2014), On the Infinite, the Universe, and the Worlds, trans. Scott Gosnell, USA: Huginn, Muninn, & Co. Bruno, G. (2017), ‘The Heroic Frenzies’, trans. Paul Eugene Memmo Jr., North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, Raleigh, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. Carter, S. (2006), ‘From the Ridiculous to the Sublime: Ovidian and Neoplatonic Registers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 12 (1): 2.1–31. Coole, D. and Samantha F., eds (2010), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Copenhaver, B. and C. B. Schmitt (1992), Renaissance Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cowan, J. L. (2016), ‘The Imagination’s Arts: Poetry and Natural Philosophy in Bacon and Shakespeare’, Studies in Philology, 113 (1): 132–62. Crane, M. T. (2014), Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth-Century England, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Crane, M. T. (2017), ‘John Donne and the New Science’, in H. Marchitello and E. Tribble (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science, 95–114, London: Macmillan. Cressy, D. (2006), ‘Early Modern Space Travel and the English Man in the Moon’, The American Historical Review, 111 (4): 961–82. Daston, L. and Katherine P. (1998), Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750, New York: Zone Books. Donne, J. (1957), ‘The First Anniversary’, in Sir H. Grierson (ed.), The Poems of John Donne, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eamon, W. (1994), Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Eggert, K. (2015), Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Empson, W. (1957), ‘Donne the Space Man’, The Kenyon Review, 19: 337–99.

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Feerick, J. E. (2017), ‘Poetic Science: Wonder and the Seas of Cognition in Bacon and Pericles’, in H. Marchitello and E. Tribble (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science, 423–44, London: Macmillan. Floyd-Wilson, M. (2013), Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Galileo, G. (1880), The Sidereal Messenger, trans. E. S. Carlos, London: Rivingtons. Garber, D. (2006), ‘Physics and Foundations’, in K. Park and L. Daston (eds), The Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 3: Early Modern Science, 21–69, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hyman, W. (2017), ‘“Deductions from Metaphors”: Figurative Truth, Poetical Language, and Early Modern Science’, in H. Marchitello and E. Tribble (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science, 27–48, London: Macmillan. Jones, G. (2017), ‘Environmental Renaissance Studies’, Literature Compass, 14 (10): 1–15. Jowett, J. (2004), ‘Introduction’, in William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, ed. J. Jowett, 1–153, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Knoll, G. (2014), ‘How to Make Love to the Moon: Intimacy and Erotic Distance in John Lyly’s Endymion’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 65 (2): 164–79. Kristeller, P. (1988), ‘Humanism’, in C. B. Schmitt and Q. Skinner (eds), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, 113–37, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Latour, B. (1993), We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lenz, C. R. S. (1976), ‘The Allegory of Wisdom in Lyly’s “Endimion”’, Comparative Drama, 10 (3): 235–57. Lyly, J. (2002), Endymion, in David Bevington (ed), English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, 80–128, New York: Norton. MacDonald, M. (1985), ‘Science, Magic, and Folklore’, in J. F. Andrews (ed.), William Shakespeare: His World, His Work, His Influence, 175–94, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Marchitello, H. and E. Tribble (2017), ‘Introduction’, in H. Marchitello and E. Tribble (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science, xxv–xlvi, London: Macmillan. Marotti, A. F. (1982), ‘“Love Is Not Love”: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order’, ELH, 49 (2): 396–428. Mazzio, C. (2009), ‘Introduction: Shakespeare and Science, c. 1600’, South Central Review, 26 (1 & 2): 1–23. Nicolson, M. H. (1948), Voyages to the Moon, New York: Macmillan. Ovid (2001), Metamorphoses, trans. A. Golding, ed. M. Foley, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Pincombe, M. (1996), The Plays of John Lyly: Eros and Eliza, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Poole, K. (2011), Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare’s England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Shakespeare, W. (2011), The Tempest, ed. V. M. Vaughan and A. T. Vaughan, Arden Shakespeare Third Series, London: Arden Shakespeare. Shakespeare, W. (2017), A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. S. Chaudhuri, Arden Shakespeare Third Series, London: Arden Shakespeare. Shakespeare, W. and T. Middleton (2008), Timon of Athens, ed. A. B. Dawson and G. E. Minton, Arden Shakespeare Third Series, London: Arden Shakespeare. Shapin, S. (1996), The Scientific Revolution, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Snow, C. P. (1988), The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spiller, E. (2004), Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature: The Art of Making Knowledge, 1580–1670, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spiller, E. (2009), ‘Shakespeare and the Making of Early Modern Science: Resituating Prospero’s Art’, South Central Review, 26 (1 & 2): 24–41. Timon (1980), ed. J. C. Bulman and J. M. Nosworthy, Malone Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Trevor, D. (2013), ‘Mapping the Celestial in Shakespeare’s Tempest and the Writings of John Donne’, in J. H. Anderson and J. C. Vaught (eds), Shakespeare and Donne: Generic Hybrids and the Cultural Imaginary, 111–29, New York: Fordham University Press. Turner, H. S. (2006), The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts 1580–1630, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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CHAPTER 4.8

Early modern race-work: History, methodology and politics JANE HWANG DEGENHARDT

While many scholars are now ready to accept the deeply embedded history of race in the early modern and pre-modern periods, scholarship on race in these periods has enjoyed a relatively short history. And yet much ground has been covered between the initial forays of Eldred Jones (1965) into the representation of Africans on the early modern stage and the current explosion of scholarship emerging in print as well as in conferences, special symposia, podcasts and many online forums. Any scholar wishing to delve into the now substantial body of critical and theoretical work on early modern race will find a wealth of entry points and pathways that diverge and intersect over the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first. In their introduction to Shakespeare Quarterly’s first special issue dedicated to discussions of race (2016), Peter Erickson and Kim F. Hall outline three phases of early modern scholarship following the work of Jones. These include the ‘sustained collective movement of the 1990s’ (4) consisting of foundational work by Ania Loomba (1989), Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (1994) and Kim Hall (1995); an expansive body of more diffused work produced between 2000 and 2015; and the then present and future period of work for which Erickson and Hall suggest a number of possible directions. Dennis Britton’s useful ‘Recent Studies’ on early modern race (2015) provides a comprehensive overview of books and articles spanning from 1965 to 2015. And Urvashi Chakravarty’s subsequent discussion of ‘The Renaissance of Race and the Future of Early Modern Race Studies’ (2020) offers a thoughtful reflection on the state of the field and possible new avenues for future expansion. These are great resources for establishing a critical sense of the field and its genealogical development.1 In our current twenty-first-century moment, there is more new work emerging on early modern drama and race than I can reasonably take account of here  – a gratifying and long overdue development. Notably, non-print venues have proven to be the most hospitable mediums for the publication and dissemination of exciting new work on race, which reflects the protracted timescale of print and the

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historically conservative biases of many academic publishers and journals. A few examples of non-print initiatives include the Folger Shakespeare Library’s 2020–21 ‘Critical Race Conversations’, symposiums organized by the RaceB4Race Collective, the 2018 ‘Shakespeare and Race’ festival at Shakespeare’s Globe and plenaries hosted by the Shakespeare Association of America and other scholarly associations. The start of the pandemic in 2020 also spurred numerous online forums aimed at facilitating emerging research on race. At the same time, work on early modern race is appearing with increasing frequency in scholarly journals as well as monographs and anthologies published by academic presses.2 The wave of new attention focused on early modern race creates many opportunities to change the face and critical tenor of our field. Along with openings for innovative scholarship that breaks through the boundaries of what was previously possible – in terms of the questions we ask, the objectives and values we pursue, and the archive we explore – we also see new challenges around defining the political impact of our work, retaining inclusivity and furthering the collective pursuit of our mutual goals. Rather than attempt to provide an exhaustive survey of scholarly resources, in what follows I offer several reflections on the implications of recent work on race in terms of its archival considerations, recent new directions and methodological innovations. In particular, I consider how the collective expansion of early modern race scholarship invites new methodological approaches to the relationship between past, present and future, as well as creating possibilities for new kinds of intersectional work. More generally, I consider how recent scholarship has opened up different ways of knowing and of determining what counts as ‘evidence’, enabled different voices and discursive registers, and compelled a reconsideration of the boundaries between personal, political and scholarly investments. This chapter is organized around three overlapping and interrelated loci: the archive and the search for different ways of knowing through different voices and discursive registers, the recognition of a related problematic of both blackness and whiteness in recent studies of race, and the importance of intersectional engagements in race and the early modern. Finally, I will seek to bridge the theoretical and the practical by considering some of the disciplinary and institutional implications of early modern race studies, including what effects recent work might have on the ways we do criticism and how and why it matters. How has greater awareness of the importance of race to early modern literary studies corresponded with new attention to the demographics of the field, and how might efforts to shift these demographics impact our field’s values and interpretive practices?3 As Ian Smith asks in ‘We Are Othello’ (2016), what happens when one questions the presumed white male subjecthood of the ‘we’ that receives, identifies with and interprets Shakespeare’s plays? ‘Who are the subjects of this collective “we” and what is its institutional power’ (107)? Encountering Othello, or any early modern play for that matter, is a significantly different experience for those identifying as black, indigenous and people of colour (hereafter BIPOC): how might an awareness of the effects of this difference change the way all scholarship is approached and valued? As Chakravarty observes, the ‘position of neutral inquiry’ is a privileged fiction, compelling each one of us to

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understand our varying positionality in terms of ‘interpellation, even implication’ and to observe how ‘Renaissance studies may operate as a disciplinary apparatus in its own right’ (2020: 17). Early modern race scholarship has disrupted conventional scholarly practices and assumptions, and in doing so it has created openings for new kinds of scholars to enter the field and empowered new ways of doing scholarly work on race in all periods. As we continue to break down the doors and walls of our field, we simultaneously build a richer one that can grow well beyond its current configuration and more fully realize its potential not only to be relevant but to actively contribute to the world. If early modern literary studies thrives in the twenty-first century, it will be only because it is unafraid to take risks, question its purposes and do things differently.

ARCHIVAL CONSIDERATIONS: RACE IS NOWHERE/RACE IS EVERYWHERE As Ayanna Thompson states in the opening to her introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race (2021), her initiation into the field of Shakespeare Studies was beset by the repeated insistence from teachers and scholarly authorities that ‘race did not exist in Shakespeare’s cultural and creative imagination’ (1). Many BIOC scholars leading up to Thompson’s generation, and even beyond it, can relate to this experience. Charges of anachronism, presentism and ahistoricism have been highly effective in obstructing work on early modern race by showing it to be at odds with the dominant methodologies authorized by the field. A bias that equates rigor with historicism – the more precise and modest the claim, the better – and that simultaneously insists that the history of race is a modern phenomenon suggests that early modern work on race can be neither historically substantiated nor adequately rigorous. Such gatekeeping relegated those working on race to the margins or drove them into other fields, while early modern studies preserved the fiction of its antecedence to the history of race. Kyle Grady (2016) has called attention to how the denial of early modern race is akin to claims of a ‘liberal post-racialism’, which ‘overprivileges progressive phenomena as representative of a disappearing racialism’ (72). The impulse to confine race to a discrete period of modern history led early modern studies to cling to a pre-racial identity, claiming a time of innocence not yet sullied by the stain of race. Race is of course a product of racism, of which there is abundant evidence in early modern texts, and yet the denial of racism in the Renaissance has alienated BIPOC scholars and dissuaded them from feeling like they have a place in the field. Matthieu Chapman opens his book on Anti-Black Racism in Early Modern Drama (2017) by quoting the ‘seven words’ that served as the impetus behind the book: ‘There were no black people in England’ during that time – a response that he received from a respected scholar at a conference in 2007 and that was subsequently repeated to him many times as he pursued his project (1).4 Without validation from authorities in the field or the direct evidence of a ready-made archive, BIPOC scholars and those unwilling to accept the denial of what they knew to be true ploughed forward, guided by inner knowing and an inextinguishable sense of purpose.

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In fact, as Imtiaz Habib (2008) has shown, there is ample documentary evidence of the presence of black people in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. However, the undertaking of archival work on black lives in early modern England, or any non-white subjects for that matter, presents a special challenge and requires a unique set of tools, skills and capacities. This is because the same power structures that produce the abundant presence of racism in the archives of early modern England lead directly to profound absences, including partial and complete erasures as well as damaging fictions and distortions of the truth. As a result, the archive of early modern racialized subjects is much less a reliable historical record than it is a fictional re-construction of the past. As Saidiya Hartman (2007) has powerfully articulated, archival absences represent a set of histories that have been wilfully repressed or forgotten, as well as a history of the power structures that have imposed this silencing, rather than an absence of histories themselves. Individual scholars labouring alone in the archives cannot overcome these historical challenges without the shared support and recognition of their field and set of tools with which to work. The field of subaltern studies offers a useful model through its commitment to holding space for the voices and lives that have been lost to dominant historical narratives; it maps a kind of presence by apprehending the absences of those silenced due to race, gender, class, religion and other inequities. To begin to grapple with the archival challenges of this work, early modern scholars must recognize how historical records, or what counts as such, are shaped by the same power structures that upheld colonialism, slavery and other increasingly globalized commercial forms of exploitation. Thus, early modern archival racework requires a set of theoretical and interpretive tools that are borrowed from black feminist studies, subaltern studies and other transhistorical fields of enquiry. In addition, this kind of research requires a certain reading practice that is patiently attendant to minute detail, that is capable of reading around and drawing connections across gaps and inconsistencies, that can make meaning of absences, and that is willing to sit uncomfortably with all that will be forever unknown. In a 2019 talk given for the Shakespeare Association of America’s plenary panel on race, Kim Hall spoke about the personal challenges of what ‘it’s like to follow traces of Othello in archives meant to celebrate white Achievement’.5 For example, after coming across mention of an enslaved boy named Othello listed in an estate inventory, Hall combed through the other items in the list, including things like a sideboard, a gold belt buckle and eighteen felt hats, among which she also found a servant’s bridle, ‘a Negro Musician called Andrew’ and ‘A Negro Woman Nam’d Deliverance’. These innocuous juxtapositions, so neutral in their tone and yet so sparse and suggestive of life stories that have been forever lost, filled her with feelings of longing and rage. The personal demands of such work, especially for BIPOC scholars, demonstrate how archival work on the lives of raced and enslaved subjects requires not only special tools and skills but also a degree of patience, fortitude and emotional labour. Clearly, this kind of archival work demonstrates how the powerful effects of race are undeniable both in the early modern period and today. However, even if scholars are now ready to accept that the history of race is not just a modern phenomenon, the question of what exactly race meant in early modern England

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has been difficult to pin down. Critical studies published in the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century exemplify many different approaches to early modern race that locate its roots in other systems and discourses for understanding difference. These approaches demonstrate how the presence of race is diversely manifested through discourses of geo-humoralism, bloodline and rank, religion, skin colour, embodiment, sexuality and reproduction, geography and ethnicity, and manners and civility. Complementing these approaches are critical studies focused on different kinds of geographically or religiously informed racialized identities, including Turks, Moors, Jews, Muslims, Indians or Southeast Asians, Mongols, Native Americans, pagans and Gypsies. This range of work illustrates the broad history of race in early modern England and its multifarious domains of expression, as well as the unstable ways in which race was frequently intertwined with other categories. The feminist orientation of the first wave of early modern race scholarship, which emphasized intersections between the logics of race and gender, laid the groundwork for a rich body of intersectional approaches. ‘Early’ scholarship tended to emphasize the intersections of race with gender, class and religion, and there is certainly room for more work to be done in these areas.6 In addition, recent scholarship has begun to explore new areas of intersection with sexuality, conduct, servitude and slavery, rhetoric, disability, natural ecologies, animal studies, the post-human and more. I consider some of these intersections below, with special attention to newly emerging directions and opportunities, as part of my discussion of new pathways in the field.

DEFINING ‘RACE’ How might the many ways that race has been understood to have had meaning in early modern England inform our definition of race? Many early modern scholars now embrace the utility of Geraldine Heng’s (2018) working definition, which is intended to reflect how ‘race has no singular or stable reference’ (19): rather, ‘race’ is ‘a name we retain for the strategic, epistemological and political commitments it recognizes – attached to a repeated tendency, of the gravest import, to demarcate human beings through differences among humans that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental, in order to distribute positions and powers differentially to human groups’ (27). Or, as Heng succinctly sums up, ‘race is a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences, rather than a substantive content’ (27). This definition resonates with an earlier discussion by Ania Loomba and Jonathan Burton (2007), which sought to emphasize the fluidity of race and the ‘thick web of associations that is central to racial thought’, as well as to problematize the distinction between culture and biology that is often mapped onto a pre-modern/modern historical divide (6). While underscoring the protean nature of race as one of its most pernicious qualities, these three scholars insist that racial fluidity is not unique to the early modern period. According to Loomba and Burton, there has never been a ‘singular approach to or agreement about human difference, something that is often forgotten by those who emphasize the gap between “fluid” or unformed early modern ideologies and the more rigid modern ones’ (7). More

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recently, Burton (2020) has elaborated an understanding of the ‘polychronicity’ of race that ‘highlight[s] the collaborative diversity of racial discourse at work in any given moment’, thereby replacing a historical narrative of the ‘invention of race’ with an understanding of how race relentlessly reinvents itself (186). His understanding of race’s continual reinvention may be seen to follow a principle of evolution in that race survives by constantly shifting, adapting and proliferating. As he points out, the protean quality of race constitutes its enabling condition in the sense that race ‘thrives by keeping multiple forms in its active repertoire’ and is ‘relentlessly adaptive’ (187–8). By asking us to slice time horizontally, rather than approaching race in terms of past, present and future, Burton performs an intervention into the history of race that replaces our traditionally diachronic or progressive view of history with a synchronic view. But if this approach does important political work by undermining the periodization of race and perceiving the many subtle ways that race rears its ugly head, does it also run the risk of abstraction? Erickson and Hall have cautioned that the tendency to emphasize racial fluidity in the early modern period might shift our attention away from ‘the implications of living as a raced subject then and now, as well as the political urgency many of us feel in doing this work’ (2016: 11). Invoking the historical ways in which women’s bodies have been relentlessly ‘anatomized, dismembered, and repressed’, Joyce Green MacDonald reminds us of the importance of honouring ‘the passionate degree to which race was (and is) believed to inhere in the body and in the bodily’ (2002: 14). For Burton and Loomba, the moving target of race is precisely what makes it so impossible to escape and thus politically crucial to identify. By the same token, while the logic of race may be difficult to pin down, once it attaches to something – or someone – its grip is unrelenting. Early modern scholars working on race must determine for themselves how to meet the imperatives of theorizing a concept whose complexity is rooted in its evasiveness and remembering at the same time that we are also talking about real lives – past and present – and that our theoretical work is done in service of real political causes. The political implications of our work cannot be divorced from the theoretical and must always be owned and managed with intentionality. For many scholars, even to use the term ‘race’ is partly a political commitment, for as Heng puts it, not to do so ‘would be to retain the reproduction of a certain kind of past, while keeping the door shut to tools, analyses, and resources that can name the past differently’ (4).7 And so I return to where I began this chapter: as the field of early modern studies has shifted from an assumption about race’s absence in the period to an awareness of its utter pervasiveness, so also has the archive for conducting race-work expanded. Criticism on early modern drama and performance has been especially prominent, guided by studies such as Loomba’s Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (2002), Thompson’s Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage (2008) and Lara Bovilsky’s Barbarous Play: Race on the English Renaissance Stage (2008), as well as other studies focused on Shakespeare and his contemporaries. However, multi-genre studies and criticism focusing on non-dramatic texts have also paved the way for early modern race studies, beginning with Hall’s Things of Darkness (1995), extending to studies such as Sujata Iyengar’s Shades of Difference

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(2005) and Benedict Robinson’s Islam and Early Modern English Literature (2007), and newly emerging with increased frequency at conferences and events organized by the International Spenser Society, the Sixteenth Century Society and the Modern Language Association. Awareness of the pervasive influence of race at all levels of culture and across all genres of writing suggests that the significance we place on generic divisions needs to be questioned. Scholars conducting research on drama will find their work profitably served by engagement with non-dramatic texts – an awareness set forth by Burton and Loomba’s Race in Early Modern England (2007), which encouraged scholars to consider how different kinds of writing are always in conversation with one another. Within drama studies, critical attention to what have been characterized as ‘Shakespeare’s race plays’ has increasingly expanded to include many other plays in Shakespeare’s canon as well as works by other playwrights that do not necessarily feature non-white characters or thematize race in an overt way.8 While new approaches to Othello and The Tempest will always be of value, the recognition that racial constructions influence the full spectrum of early modern drama provides an opportunity for different kinds of critical race-work. As Burton observes, our previous tendency to locate race ‘almost exclusively around moments of desire and violence’ has led us to dismiss ‘detached, offhand or seemingly archaic instances of racial language … as if there is a kind of threshold that racism must reach before it is worthy of our attention’ (2020: 183). By expanding our focus to a broader range of plays, we confront the destructiveness of quotidian racism and also attend to the ways that the apparent ‘absence’ of race often serves as a bulwark of universality, masking perspectives and privileges that are unaware of their implicit exclusions. To take one example, a play such as As You Like It (1599–1600) takes place exclusively in France and presumably contains only white characters who are native to France. But in its dialogue the play nevertheless betrays a racially informed global consciousness as well as a commitment to sustaining social hierarchies organized around difference, even as it strives to reinvent a new, more inclusive community in the Forest of Arden. The play exemplifies how racism often fuses together with sexism and classism and shows how these categorical judgements are mutually constituted. When Rosalind receives a love letter from the poor shepherdess Phoebe, she protests that it could not have been written by Phoebe because it is clearly ‘a man’s invention’ (4.3.29). Exclaiming, ‘She defies me / Like Turk to Christian. Women’s gentle brain / Could not drop forth such giant-rude invention, / Such Ethiop words, blacker in their effect / Than in their countenance’, Rosalind describes the unwomanly style – and sexually laden content – of the letter in racialized and religious terms of abuse (4.3.32–6). Her reference to how the blackness of the ‘effect’ of Phoebe’s words exceeds that of their ‘countenance’ suggests a dichotomy between inner and outer blackness that is constitutive of the ‘Ethiop’. Further, Rosalind’s lines reflect the ways that violations of gender conventions (through the letter’s un-‘gentle’ desirous language), as well as its trickery or ‘invention’ (based on the assumption that Phoebe could not have written it herself) constitute perversities that find their ideal expression through a language of race. Rosalind’s lines thus demonstrate her ready access to a larger world of difference far beyond the confines of Arden and

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even France – a world whose differences are automatically transposed by her into racist stereotypes of deception and foulness. These judgements are in turn part of the fabric of the new communal world of Arden, which for all its inclusivity is ultimately quite homogenous and bounded by intolerance. The racialized ‘hand’ ascribed to the letter in fact bleeds into Rosalind’s description of Phoebe’s actual physical hand, which Rosalind describes as ‘leathern’ and ‘a freestone-coloured hand’, adding ‘I verily did think / That her old gloves were on, but ’twas her hands’ (4.3.24–26). A racialized sense of skin colour, informed by the geopolitics of a newly globalizing world, seeps into the play’s domestic constructions of class and gender with remarkable ease.

WHITENESS Just as it becomes possible to observe the presence of a racialized worldview even in the ‘whitest’ of plays, scholars in the field have also come to recognize the importance of approaching whiteness itself as a racial category and exposing the ubiquitous strategies and structures that enable its unspoken claim of universality. Beginning with Hall’s (1995) attention to how discourses of ‘fairness’ implied a connection between skin tone and feminine virtue and extending to Arthur J. Little’s forthcoming collection White People in Shakespeare, scholars have increasingly repudiated the tendency to render whiteness transparent in Renaissance England. Discussions of the performance of race, such as the Fall 2009 special issue of Shakespeare Bulletin, interrogate the complex racial implications of blackface and the historically contingent effects of casting white actors in black roles. Studies focused on the visual and material elements of performance demonstrate how race is constructed through the use of cosmetics, costuming, props and staging effects.9 These kinds of approaches similarly invite an interrogation of whiteness and the ways that it is ‘at once enfleshed and performative’, in the words of Christine Varnado (2019: 248). Critically refusing the transparency and neutrality of whiteness and identifying how it is always implicated in representations of blackness – or any racial marking, for that matter  – also means noticing the ways that white bodies enjoy a certain privilege of unmarked mobility on the early modern stage. Thomas Heywood’s Four Prentices of London (c. 1594) indulges an extreme fantasy of unmarked mobility by dramatizing the inability of four brothers – all London apprentices – to recognize one another after they are separated by shipwreck on their way to Jerusalem. Travelling individually over land, the brothers repeatedly cross paths without realizing it, falling into pointless skirmishes with one another and competing for romantic possession of their own sister, whom they also fail to recognize. While not expressed explicitly in terms of skin colour, Four Prentices captures the sense of entitlement – in essence, the prerogative of being unaware – that is germane to white privilege. Only when they reach Jerusalem – and find themselves in direct confrontation with the Muslim enemy they have come to fight – do the protagonists finally perceive their underlying brotherhood and band together in solidarity. Ultimately, their misrecognitions and petty fights along their journey have provided a kind of racial training ground for their unification and perception of their essential difference from the Muslims.

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While born with certain heritable traits, the protagonists must cultivate qualities such as proper discernment and temperance, which the play establishes as constitutive of European white male Christianity in order to earn their victory. In effect, the play teaches its protagonists, as well as members of its audience, how to embrace white privilege. Just as this play may be seen to demonstrate how the racialization of whiteness goes deeper than white skin, there are many critical opportunities for scholars to interrogate the racial privilege of whiteness that permeates the language, ideological engagements and performative effects of early modern theatre. Varnado’s innovative reading of The Merchant of Venice demonstrates how whiteness constitutes ‘a dramatic posture, a set of attitudes, actions, opinions  – qualities: something the characters do’ (2019: 256). Moving beyond whiteness as a function of skin colour, we also begin to appreciate how whiteness might manifest in formal, symbolic and aesthetic registers, thereby returning to Hall’s early observation of how ‘aesthetic concerns easily become a semiotics of race’ (1995: 5). Renewed interest in formalism, and particularly formalist work that is undertaken with a progressive methodology, invites new opportunities for scholars to examine the ways that race permeates the semiotics, speech patterns, prosody, genre and other conventions of dramatic form.10 Such work need not be at odds with a trenchant political purpose. As scholars continue to redress the view of race’s absence in early modern drama by perceiving its presence everywhere, they can retain a clear political focus by naming and exposing the pervasive structures of power that uphold hierarchies of race and always keeping sight of the real lives that are affected by its violence.

EMERGING CRITICAL PATHWAYS: INTERSECTIONALITY AND BEYOND Whereas the early foundations of an intersectional critical practice established by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (1991) and other black feminists sought to capture the reality of intragroup differences and the multiply interactive forms of oppression that affect individuals, emerging intersectional work in early modern studies explores the ways that racial logic itself intersected with other discourses. Some of the most promising new intersectional work on race includes considerations of regional and diasporic contexts, sexuality and queerness, embodied affect, environmental and animal studies, and the history of the ‘human’ and the post-human  – a list that is admittedly selective and incomplete. As the editors of the forthcoming Oxford  Handbook of Intersectionality in Early Modern Literature (Chakravarty, Coles and DiGangi) suggest, early modern studies can offer distinct contributions to intersectionality as a critical method because of its particular historical perspective. The literature of the period provides unique access to histories of global economic expansion, including commerce, chattel slavery, the forced migration of peoples and the early development of the British Empire through colonial exploration and conquest. Increasingly, critical approaches to these histories attempt to decentre England and to counter Eurocentric narratives, not simply by exposing the dominance of non-Western nations and empires in the period, but rather by shifting

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how we centre our perspectives and expanding our use of regional, transnational, inter-imperial and diasporic approaches. Comparative, transnational and transhistorical approaches have always been central to early modern race-work. Early studies tended to focus on transnational encounters between England and Spain, Africa, the Mediterranean, Ireland, the Netherlands, the New World, India, the Spice Islands and the Far East, as well as on the sedimented histories of these relationships implied through England’s acute awareness of the ‘Old World’ or the ‘ancient’ world. These studies emphasized points of identification as well as difference, which were often revealed though representations of mimesis, conflict, conversion and sexual seduction. Carmen Nocentelli’s Empires of Love: Europe, Asia, and the Making of Early Modern Identity (2013), for example, draws upon Dutch, English, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish sources to take account of how European-Asian encounters produced new sexual ideologies that emerged in relation to formations of race. More recently, Alexa Alice Joubin, who is a co-founder of the Global Shakespeares Digital Performance Archive, offers a comparative approach to Asian theatrical and film productions in Shakespeare and East Asia (2021). Other studies set their focus more directly on the influence of imperial and colonial dynamics and the crucial ways they intersected with racial formations. Critics have begun to extend this work by adopting an ‘interimperial’ theoretical framework, which moves away from the binary relationship between centre and margin to consider a more holistic and yet multiply centred ‘political-economic field of several empires operating simultaneously … and in relation to capitalist formations’ (Doyle 2014: 159).11 Inter-imperial analyses offer an opportunity to take stock of the multiply interacting imperial, economic and political forces that impact representations of race in many early modern plays. In a play such as Thomas Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West, Part I (1600), for example, racial dynamics are forged within the crucible of inter-imperial relationships that involve England, Spain, Morocco, the Ottoman Empire and even the New World. Similarly, John Day, George Wilkins and William Rowley’s The Travels of the Three English Brothers (1607) produces its racialized representations of Sunni and Shiite Muslims, as well as Protestants, Catholics and Jews, in relation to complex interimperial dynamics involving the Ottoman Empire, Persia, England, Rome and Spain. While scholarship produced in the wake of the ‘Global Renaissance’ has tended to foreground the global imaginary of early modern drama, critics have also begun to consider alternative racial geographies that do not necessarily align with the imperial and territorial demarcations of power implied by a global understanding of the world. Recent work moves beyond the privileging of globe, nation and empire to highlight regional and diasporic contexts. Sandra Young’s (2015, 2016) work, for example, has drawn attention to the early modern significance of the ‘global south’ and the ways it was distinguished from the ‘north’ according to a racial hierarchy. Regional studies provide an opportunity to consider cultural, territorial and economic networks that transcend political borders and yet retain an internal coherence. Sometimes ‘subnational’ and at other times ‘supranational’, in the words of Marissa Greenberg (2019: 343), regions are not marginal to a centre, nor are they central to a margin: they are worlds unto themselves, dependent upon internal relationships

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and yet always connected to other places. Because regions are not only distinct from the categories of nation and empire but also inform an entirely different set of phenomenological experiences, memories and imagination, they provide particularly rich contexts for pursuing new examinations of race. Inverting the internal coherence of regional formations, diasporic contexts attend to the scattered but nonetheless interconnected lives of racialized persons throughout the world. Diasporic readings of Renaissance plays offer opportunities to map new racial geographies and dramatic canons, as well as foregrounding new collective perspectives that are not anchored by spatial or temporal boundaries. Cassander Smith, Nicholas Jones and Miles Grier’s Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology (2018) provides a rich array of readings that ‘place black lives at the center of inquiry’ and raise the pressing question: ‘what would it mean to have an entire subject/discipline devoted to discussing the many ways in which black lives mattered … not just as part of the story about what Europeans were doing but as the story itself?’ (2). If inter-imperial, regional and diasporic approaches enable us to access new racial geographies, studies focused on the intersection of race with the history of embodiment direct our focus to the bodies that are the targets of these racial mappings. Whereas early work in the field emphasized gendered embodiment as well as geohumoral understandings of the relationship between bodily temperament and environment, recent work suggests opportunities to explore a new range of discursive intersections. The intersections of race and sexuality, for example, have been taken in new directions by scholars such as Melissa Sanchez (2019), Arthur Little (2000), Ian Smith (2009), Abdulhamit Arvas (2021) and Mario DiGangi (2020). These scholars demonstrate how racial constructions intersect with bodily discourses of sodomy, homoeroticism, rape, monogamy and promiscuity, infidelity, and sexual abduction and enslavement. While discourse analysis can tend to shift our attention away from actual bodies, it also compels us to remember that the relationship between discourse and the body is never a simple binary. As Valerie Traub (2016) asserts, embodiment is a critical concept that ‘bridges the material and the discursive, the experiential and the analytical, the sensory, the affective, and the cognitive’ (32). Patricia Akhimie’s (2018) work on the racial implications of conduct and courtesy zeros in on how these discourses impinge on the body in terms of pain, pinches, bruises, stigmatized marks and corporal methods of policing. In addition, emerging work on racialized affect considers the embodied forms of feeling that help to constitute the visceral dimensions of early modern race. Carol Mejia LaPerle’s Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature (2022) is the first collection to use affect theory to explain ‘the nexus of relations, dispositions and sensations that constitute the racialized subject’s lived experience’ as well as the affective responses through which racism takes expression (ix). Its considerations of disgust, shame and ill-will model possibilities for new work that examines the early modern production of racial affects, while discussions of the affective responses generated in and by early modern texts suggest new possibilities for thinking about the formation of affective communities. Closely aligned with investigations of racial embodiment are critical approaches that explore the limits and ontological status of the human  – an area of enquiry

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that offers ripe opportunities for new work on race. Sylvia Wynter has influentially drawn attention to how developments associated with Renaissance humanism contributed to the elevation of the human subject, who assumed the idealized form of a ‘White Man’ – an occurrence connected to ‘the rise of Europe … on the one hand, and, on the other, to African enslavement, Latin American conquest, and Asian subjugation’ (2003: 263). Given the significance of the early modern period to a new understanding of the human and ‘his’ place in the cosmos, it is imperative for critics to interrogate the ways that constructions of the human intersected with the history of race and often relied upon racial (il)logic to demarcate the limits of human ontology. For example, at the climactic moment in The Tempest, the nonhuman spirit Ariel convinces Prospero to forgive Sebastian and his confederates by invoking the ‘tears’ that ‘run down [Gonzalo’s] beard’ (5.1.16) and suggesting that witnessing such suffering would move even Ariel to compassion, ‘were [he] human’ (5.1.20). This moment, in which Prospero is coaxed to demonstrate his inherent humanity through his capacity to be moved to ‘fellow’ feeling by another’s suffering, is set in contrast to earlier exchanges in the play where Caliban’s ‘vile race’ (1.2.359) is deemed to be impervious to ‘humane care’ and ‘kindness’, justifying his confined enslavement and the use of ‘stripes’ to move him (1.2.346–7). In this way, the play reveals a direct intersection between the construction of the limits of the human and the ontologies of race and enslavement. Put simply, the Renaissance history of the human was always also a history of race. The legacy of the Renaissance’s racialized exclusions in shoring up the category of the human remains sharply relevant today. A film such as Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-winning The Shape of Water (2017) makes clear just how deeply attached we remain to aspirational (and moralistic) human ideals in our supposedly post-human cultural imagination. While not conceived in direct reference to The Tempest, del Toro’s film offers a useful intertext for analysing the transhistorical ways in which the boundaries of the human are policed by a capacity for ‘kindness’ – understood in terms of both ‘kind’ (or species) and compassion. At the climactic moment, the mute protagonist Elisa attempts to convince her neighbour Giles, a closeted gay man, to help her rescue an ‘Amphibian Man’ who is being held captive by US scientists after being found in the Amazon by an American drilling company. Giles protests, pleading in exasperation, ‘Look, it’s not even human’, to which Elisa replies in sign language: ‘If we do nothing, then neither are we.’ Like The Tempest, the film seeks to redefine what it means to be human in terms of a capacity for empathy for another’s suffering and endangerment, whether that other be human or not. Aided by Elisa’s black co-worker Zelda, Elisa and Giles free the Amphibian Man, positing an alliance between disabled, queer, black and non-human subject positions. While the film celebrates a kind of post-human ideal that embraces those deemed less-than-human, it flattens out differences of bodily ability, sexual orientation, race and species without acknowledging the divergent ways these categories have been constructed in relation to the human category that stubbornly remains at its centre. Furthermore, the film’s terms of inclusion ultimately fall back on the same distinction of kindness, or capacity for empathy, that Shakespeare’s earlier play uses to justify Caliban’s racialized exclusion from the human. What if the Amphibian Man – or Elisa, Zelda

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or Giles, for that matter – were unkind? Would they no longer be entitled to the same freedoms and right to life? Scholarship on early modern race might turn more frequently to the resources offered by twenty-first-century film, writing and art as productive intertexts for analyzing the legacy of early modern race-making. Reading The Shape of Water against The Tempest illuminates the deeply embedded ways in which claims to humanity are based on an exceptionalism that systematically excludes those deemed less than, other than, or beyond reach. Recent work in early modern animal studies, disability studies, ecocriticism and post-humanism has yet to take full account of how the history of race informs constructions of non-human life, despite the fact that it explicitly seeks to contest the boundaries of the human and often makes a case for human ‘indistinction’. In her study of how transnational discourses of ‘monstrosity’ were used to police bodily normativity and disability, for instance, Elizabeth Beardon gestures to how these discourses also implicated ‘monstrous races of men’ (2019: 12) but stops short of a direct consideration of race. Many opportunities remain to explore the possible intersections between constructions of disability and of race, and recent work by Justin Shaw on networks of care (2019) and Amrita Dhar on sight and blindness (2015, forthcoming) suggests promising new directions. Similarly, influential discussions of human-animal cosmopolities and interspecies relationships by Laurie Shannon (2013), Karen Raber (2013), Erica Fudge (2018) and Holly Dugan (2020) might be productively extended to foreground the relationship between animality and race. Noémie Ndiaye’s (2021) analysis of an ‘animalizing choreographic discourse’ on the early modern stage offers a useful model that registers relational associations between Gypsies, animality, dance and the racialization of Blackamoors. Working in a later field, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson has drawn attention to how ‘antiblackness’, and particularly racialized formations of gender and sexuality, was in fact ‘central to the very construction of “the animal”’ (2020: 17). Jackson argues not for an extension of the human ‘as a solution to the bestialization of blackness’ but rather demonstrates ‘an urgent demand for the dissolution of “human”’ as it is defined ‘within liberal humanism’s terms’ (2020: 18, 21). In addition, Jackson usefully articulates the importance of recognizing how ‘appeals to move “beyond the human” may actually reintroduce the Eurocentric transcendentalism this movement purports to disrupt, particularly with regard to the historical and ongoing distributive ordering of race’ (2015: 215). In other words, whose conception of humanity does the move ‘beyond the human’ presume to move beyond? We must be wary of the costs and pitfalls of embracing a post-human future that too easily effaces the lingering effects of humanism’s complex history and its deep entanglement with the history of race. While studies such as Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano’s Renaissance Posthumanism (2016) seek to contest human exceptionalism by identifying the roots of a non-anthropocentric post-humanism in Renaissance humanism, their realization ‘that we have always been posthuman’ makes no attempt to account for the history and realities of race (which precluded the recognition of the humanity of raced subjects in the first place) or for how a post-humanist praxis might be equipped to combat racism. The emerging ecocritical work of William Steffen (2020, 2018) provides one example

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of what a non-anthropocentric method might offer to a critical history of race. Steffen approaches the distributive agency of early modern theatrical production in ways that direct our attention back to race by considering how the agency of environmentally sourced materials such as imported corkwood and galls contributed to early modern constructions of blackness. Approaching the intersection of natural environment, colonialism and race-making in a different way, John Yargo’s (2022) examination of early modern narratives of environmental catastrophe demonstrates how awareness of a shared human precarity gives way to racialized hierarchies that reveal varying human capacities for attunement and adaptability. As recent seminars and panels at the Shakespeare Associaiton of America demonstrate, the field is ripe for more ecocritical work that foregrounds the significance of race and its crucial implications for our understanding of early modern environments.

CONCLUSION: METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS As scholars reflect upon current directions in the field and speculate on its future, they might productively return to the question of why they are doing this work. What are our objectives and how might these objectives prompt us to question and expand our current methodologies? Do our current methods line up with our objectives? When we make a case for the value of excavating early modern histories of race, we might take the opportunity to re-examine our understanding of how early modern race-work orients itself to the present – and how it views the relationships between past, present and future more generally. It seems clear that knowing about the histories of early modern race better equips us to approach its legacies today. Scholars might also consider the ways that their heightened awareness  of the present-day realities of race equips them to attain a fuller understanding of the early modern past. As Melissa Sanchez has observed, ‘When we begin to notice and care about injustices in the present  – when we become, in current parlance, “woke” – we also begin to notice and care about aspects of the past that we may not have seen before, even if they were right under our noses all along’ (2020: 138). In this sense, our work on early modern race is warranted not just by how it might serve the present but also by how it serves to revise and expand our understanding of the past. It behoves us to recognize that the goal of early modern race-work is not simply to better understand the history and operations of race but rather to reconfigure the field of early modern studies around the importance of race and its pervasive influences, and in doing so to transform our own present institutional and historical moment. By the same token, we must avoid falling into the trap of assuming a ‘more progressive’ awareness of race that entitles us to reconstitute the past however we see fit or to presume that the past is less complex and varied than our own time. As Sanchez astutely observes, ‘Recognizing that the present is neither exceptional nor inevitable allows us to live otherwise in the future’ (140). Only by perceiving how race inhabits (all) time with a violent dynamism that casts its lessons both forwards and backwards can we come to a fuller appreciation of the value of early modern race-work.

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In recognizing the ways that race refuses to conform to periodized divisions, scholars might continue to expand their methodologies to encourage more transhistorical race-work. This might take the form of intertextual analysis, as I have suggested in my discussion of The Tempest and The Shape of Water, above, which pairs together disparate texts to illuminate points of resonance and yield new discoveries in each.12 How much might we gain by setting early modern texts in conversation with texts outside the field and being open to what might happen? In addition, we should continue to draw from and invite conversations with scholars of critical race studies working in later periods. How might we continue to learn from black feminist studies, diasporic studies, postcolonial and subaltern studies, and Afro-pessimism? Opening to these approaches unlocks us not only from the temporal restrictions of our field but also from its methodological and geographical constraints. The editors of Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology (Smith, Jones and Grier 2018) suggest that by ‘reconceptualizing the time and geography of racial blackness – as well as the methods for assessing the impact of black Africans on early modernity’, an integrated approach to early modern studies and Black studies has the potential to ‘transform both fields’ (1). Perhaps most compellingly for early modern studies, adopting an Afrocentric perspective disrupts Eurocentric epistemologies and allows us to re-examine what we think ‘we know about the early modern period’ and to open to ‘a different epistemological sensibility, one that allows us to acknowledge and accept, as one example, the realms of the spiritual and the paranormal as archives of knowledge’ (3). Early modern scholars of race must take seriously the challenge to re-examine the biases of their own perspectives and to question their own epistemological assumptions about what constitutes knowledge and evidence. As we continue to debunk the narrow and intolerant approach to historicism that denied the presence of early modern race, how might we expand our reading practices and methodologies to become more open, more curious, more creative and more radical? How can we bring more awareness to what we are looking for when we ‘read for race’? By shifting our orientation to early modern texts and expanding our methods, we might discover new ways in which our work can serve the purposes of social justice. For example, Kim Hall’s (2019) examination of John Edward Bruce (1856–1924) and the links between the black performance of Shakespeare and black freedom movements reveals a hidden history of how the study of Shakespeare was used to provide intellectual tools for black advancement and resistance. This approach presents a stark contrast to standard readings of Shakespeare from not so long ago that concerned themselves with the question of whether or not Shakespeare was racist or anti-Semitic. Moving away from the question of what we can learn or know about Shakespeare, we might ask: What can Shakespeare do for the world? How can we use Shakespeare in service of performing anti-racist work in the world? The recent Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Social Justice (Ruiter 2021) as well as Shakespeare and the 99% (O’Dair and Francisco 2019) and Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare (Eklund and Hyman 2019) begin to address such questions. We need more public-facing work to shift the inward-turning

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orientation of our scholarly conversations. Early modern scholars of race must seize the opportunity to define as clearly as possible their own goals and intentions. This involves doing an inventory that addresses a set of pointed questions: What do you really care about? What do you want to change? How can your scholarship work towards this change? Having done this, scholars might also reconsider their own writing practices and target audiences. Effective early modern race-work lends itself to many different possible discursive registers and forums, including testimonial writing, creative scholarship and broad public engagement. Anna Wainwright and Matthieu Chapman’s forthcoming Race in the European Renaissance: A Classroom Guide foregrounds pedagogical applications. Other scholars have contributed to racework through the less formal mediums of blogs or social media. Increasingly, scholars are thinking and writing in collaboration, sometimes across disciplines and time periods. The RaceB4Race Collective has committed to bringing forward the work of early career scholars. Ultimately, as we align our scholarly theories with our practices, we productively challenge, dismantle and revise our disciplinary standards for evaluating the quality and impact of scholarship. Some of the most important implications of early modern race-work lie in its potential to make institutional change. These institutional changes in turn help position the academy to address the problems of the world that extend beyond its intellectual community. The imperative of diversifying our field and our scholarly approaches is matched only by the need to create institutions and scholarly cultures where BIPOC can thrive. For many who choose to embrace the challenges and opportunities of early modern race-work, the work of scholarship is also a personal journey. While these priorities may seem quite removed from the question of how to conduct research on early modern race, they are crucial to bear in mind as one seeks to understand the political significance of this work and its inseparability from the lived realities of race in our world.

NOTES 1 See also Orkin and Joubin (2019) for a broad historical introduction to race that considers multiple global contexts spanning from the classical period to the present. 2 The Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) Press has recently undertaken initiatives to publish research that fills this gap. 3 On the urgent need to diversify the field, see Coles, Hall and Thompson (2019). 4 This experience resonates with a fictional moment represented in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) when a teacher explains that the Dark Lady of the Sonnets could not have been black because ‘[t]here weren’t any … well, Afro-Carri-bee-yans in England at that time, dear. That’s more a modern phenomenon, as I’m sure you know’ (226). 5 Hall’s speech was subsequently published as an article in 2020, as ‘I Can’t Love This the Way You Want Me To: Archival Blackness’. 6 Akhimie (2018) and Coles (2022) represent a few recent studies that continue to probe these intersections.

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7 We might note that some scholars place quotation marks around ‘race’ in order to signal the methodological debate around the term, as well as to reflect the underlying fact the race itself is a fiction, even though its effects in the world are, of course, real. 8 Scholars such as Chapman (2017: 106–7) and Brown (2019) have argued for broadening our sense of which Shakespearean plays are ‘race plays’. 9 See Karim-Cooper (2019) and Stevens (2013). 10 Dowd (2020) makes a compelling case for this work. For an insightful study of the relationship between comic form and the production of racial logic, see Kae (2022). 11 For a theoretical description of inter-imperiality, see Doyle (2014 and 2020). 12 Varnado’s (2019) discussion of The Merchant of Venice and the 1924 silent film The Thief of Bagdad offers another innovative model of intertextual criticism.

REFERENCES Akhimie, P. (2018), Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World, New York: Routledge. Arvas, A. (2021), ‘Leander in the Ottoman Mediterranean: The Homoerotics of Abduction in the Global Renaissance’, English Literary Renaissance, 51 (1): 31–62. Beardon, E. (2019), Monstrous Kinds: Body, Space and Narrative in Renaissance Representations of Disability, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bovilsky, L. (2008), Barbarous Play: Race on the English Renaissance Stage, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Britton, D. A. (2015), ‘Recent Studies in English Renaissance Studies’, English Literary Renaissance, 45 (3): 459–78. Brown, D. S. (2019), ‘White Hands: Gesturing toward Shakespeare’s Other “Race Plays”’, Plenary Panel Talk, Shakespeare Association of America. Burton, J. (2020), ‘The Reinventions of Race’, Renaissance Drama, 48 (2): 183–205. Campana, J. and S. Maisano, eds (2016), Renaissance Posthumanism, New York: Fordham University Press. Chakravarty, U. (2022), Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Chakravarty, U. (2020), ‘The Renaissance of Race and the Future of Early Modern Race Studies’, English Literary Renaissance, 50 (1): 17–24. Chakravarty, U., K. A. Coles and M. DiGangi, eds (forthcoming), Oxford Handbook of Intersectionality in Early Modern Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chapman, M. (2017), Anti-Black Racism in Early Modern Drama, New York: Routledge. Coles, K. A. (2022), Bad Humor: Race and Religious Essentialism in Early Modern England, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Coles, K. A., K. F. Hall and A. Thompson (2019), ‘BlacKKKShakespearean: A Call to Action for Medieval and Early Modern Studies’, Profession. Available online: https:// profession.mla.org/blackkkshakespearean-a-call-to-action-for-medieval-and-earlymodern-studies/ Crenshaw, K. W. (1991), ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color’, Stanford Law Review, 43 (6): 1241–99.

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Dhar, A. (2015), ‘Seeing Feelingly: Sight and Service in King Lear’, in Sujata Iyengar (ed.), Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body, 76–92, New York: Routledge. Dhar, A. (forthcoming), ‘When They Consider How Their Light Is Spent: On Intersectional Race and Disability Theories in the Classroom’, in A. Wainwright and M. Chapman (eds), Race in the European Renaissance: A Classroom Guide, Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Press. DiGangi, M. (2020), ‘Rethinking Early Modern Sexuality through Race’, English Literary Renaissance, 50 (1): 25–31. Dowd, M. (2020), ‘Breaking Form in Early Modern Studies’, English Literary Renaissance, 50 (1): 40–6. Doyle, L. (2020), Inter-Imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance, Durham: Duke University Press. Doyle, L. (2014), ‘Inter-imperiality: Dialectics in a Postcolonial World History’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 16 (2): 159–96. Dugan, H. (2020) ‘Renaissance Gorillas’, Criticism, 62 (3): 387–410. Eklund, H. and W. Hyman, eds (2019), Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Erickson, P. and K. F. Hall (2016), ‘“A New Scholarly Song”: Rereading Early Modern Race’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 67 (1): 1–13. Fudge, E. (2018), Quick Cattle and Dying Wishes: People and Their Animals in Early Modern England, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Grady, K. (2016), ‘Othello, Colin Powell, and Post-Racial Anachronisms’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 67 (1): 68–83. Greenberg, M. (2019), ‘Critically Regional Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 37 (3): 341–63. Habib, I. (2008), Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677: Imprints of the Invisible, New York: Routledge. Hall, K. F. (1995), Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Hall, K. F. (2019), ‘“Intelligently Organized Resistance”: Shakespeare in the Diasporic Politics of John E. Bruce’, in Eklund and Beth Hyman (eds), Teaching Social Justice through Shakespeare, 85–94, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hall, K. F. (2020), ‘I Can’t Love This the Way You Want Me To: Archival Blackness’, postmedieval, 11 (2–3): 171–9. Hartman, S. (2007), Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route, New York: Farrar: Straus and Giroux. Hendricks, M. and P. Parker (1994), Women, Race, and Writing in the Early Modern Period, New York: Routledge. Heng, G. (2018), The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heywood, T. ([c 1594] 2020), ‘The Four Prentices of London, ed. William West’, in J. Lopez (ed.), The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama, 195–266, London: Routledge. Iyengar, S. (2005), Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Jackson, Z. I. (2015), ‘Outer Worlds: The Persistence of Race in Movement “Beyond the Human”’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21 (2–3): 215–18. Jackson, Z. I. (2020), Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, New York: New York University Press. Jones, E. (1965), Othello’s Countrymen: The African in English Renaissance Drama, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Joubin, A. A. (2021), Shakespeare and East Asia, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kae, Y. (2022), ‘Racial Poetics: Early Modern Race and the Form of Comedy’, PhD diss., University of Massachusetss Amherst. Karim-Cooper, F. (2019), Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama, rev. edn, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. LaPerle, C. M. (2022), Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature, Tempe: Arizone Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Press. Little, A. J. (2000), Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-Visions of Race, Rape and Sacrifice, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Little, A. J., Jr. (forthcoming), White People in Shakespeare: Essays on Race, Culture and the Elite, London: The Arden Shakespeare, Bloomsbury Academic. Loomba, A. (1989), Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Loomba, A. (2002), Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Loomba, A. and J. Burton (2007), Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion, New York: Palgrave. MacDonald, J. G. (2002), Women and Race in Early Modern Texts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ndiaye, N. (2021), ‘“Come Aloft, Jack-Little-Ape!”: Race and Dance in The Spanish Gypsie’, English Literary Renaissance, 51 (1): 121–51. Nocentelli, C. (2013), Empires of Love: Europe, Asia, and the Making of Early Modern Identity, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Orkin, M. with A. A. Joubin (2019), Race, New York: Routledge. Raber, K. (2013), Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Robinson, B. (2007), Islam and Early Modern English Literature, New York: Palgrave. Ruiter, D., ed. (2021), The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Social Justice, London: Bloomsbury. Sanchez, M. (2019), Queer Faith: Reading Promiscuity and Race in the Secular Love Tradition, New York: New York University Press. Sanchez, M. (2020), ‘Woke Renaissance Studies?’ English Literary Renaissance, 50 (1): 137–44. Shakespeare, W. (2006), As You Like It, ed. Juliet Dusinberre, Arden Shakespeare Third Series, London: Arden Shakespeare. Shakespeare, W. (2011), The Tempest, ed. A. T. Vaughan and V. M. Vaughan, Arden Shakespeare Third Series, London: Arden Shakespeare. Shannon, L. (2013), The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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The Shape of Water (2017), [Film] Dir. G. Del Toro, USA: Fox Searchlight Pictures. Shaw, J. (2019), ‘“Rub Him About the Temples”: Othello, Disability, and the Failures of Care’, Early Theatre, 22 (2): 171–83. Smith, C. L., N. R. Jones and M. P. Grier (2018), ‘Introduction: The Contours of a Field’, in C. L. Smith, N. R. Jones and M. P. Grier (eds), Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology, 1–15, New York: Palgrave. Smith, I. (2009), Race and Rhetoric in Renaissance England: Barbarian Errors, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Smith, I. (2016), ‘We Are Othello: Speaking of Race in Early Modern Studies’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 67 (1): 104–24. Smith, Z. (2000), White Teeth, New York: Random House. Steffen, W. (2020), ‘Hewers of Wood, Drawers of Gall: The Wooden Economies of Race in Titus Andronicus and Lust’s Dominion’, Renaissance Drama, 48 (2): 157–81. Steffen, W. (2018), ‘Globalizing Nature on the Shakespearean Stage’, PhD diss., University of Massachusetts Amherst. Stevens, A. (2013), Inventions of the Skin: The Painted Body in Early English Drama, 1400–1642, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Thompson, A. (2008), Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage, New York: Routledge. Thompson, A. (2021), ‘Introduction’, in A. Thompson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Traub, V. (2016), ‘Introduction: Feminist Shakespeare Studies’, in V. Traub (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment, 1–37, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Varnado, C. (2019), ‘The Quality of Whiteness: The Thief of Bagdad and The Merchant of Venice’, Exemplaria, 31 (4): 245–69. Wainwright, A. and M. Chapman, eds (forthcoming), Race in the European Renaissance: A Classroom Guide, Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Press. Wynter, S. (2003), ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument’, CR: The New Centennial Review, 3 (3): 257–337. Yargo, J. (2022), ‘Saturnine Ecologies: Environmental Catastrophe in the Early Modern World, 1542–1688’, PhD diss., University of Massachusetts Amherst. Young, S. (2015), The Early Modern Global South in Print: Textual Form and the Production of Human Difference as Knowledge, New York: Routledge. Young, S. (2016), ‘Race and the Global South in Early Modern Studies’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 67 (1): 125–35.

CHAPTER 4.9

Sexualities, emotions and embodiment HOLLY DUGAN

In October of 1561, Elizabeth I entertained French diplomats at her court in Whitehall with a Masque of Virgins (Wiggins and Richardson 2012: 1.358). Performed in the evening by her maids of honour, the masque likely dramatized the biblical parable of the ten virgins from the Gospel of Matthew. In the parable, ten ‘virgins’ wait at night for an unnamed bridegroom to arrive. Some are more prepared than others: the ‘wise’ virgins ‘took oil in jars along with their lamps’ to last throughout the night and ‘the foolish ones’ took only their lamps. When the bridegroom is late, the ‘foolish’ women are left in the dark. The wise ones refuse to share their oil and light, advising the others to go and purchase more. They leave to do so, and the bridegroom arrives and shuts out all who were not waiting for him. The lesson of the parable is simple: ‘Watche therefore: for ye know neither the day, nor the houre, when the Sonne of man will come’ (The Bible and Holy Scriptures 1560: sig. DD2v). The parable emphasizes light, connecting its material conditions to faith and knowledge. Candles and lamps were important signals of devotion, and the pious were encouraged to provide for them through charity (Baum 2019; Milner 2011: 103–4). But it is also ostensibly about vigilance, offering gendered lessons about chastity (Gibson 2001: 2). The women in the parable must wait for the bridegroom and defend against dangers of darkness, while also maintaining sexual ignorance about what such dangers entailed. As historian Laura Gowing emphasizes, ‘this was a culture in which it was positively virtuous not to be able to describe sex’ (2003: 83). Chastity was instead imagined to be both legible on the body and visible to others. The performance of the parable at court likely drew on these associations, exploiting them through stagecraft (Streitberger 2016: 89). Whereas in the parable, the foolish women who are left in the dark are condemned, in performance, darkness is linked to revelry: the queen’s entertainments likely emphasized the pleasures of dancing and the spectacular dimensions of stagecraft. When French author Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme, recorded his impressions of the masque years later, he recalled both the ornateness of the silver lamps and the beauty of the women who held them.1 Brantôme is not alone in making this connection. There are many allusions to light as chastity and virginity in the period

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(Hellwarth 2013: 61–88). The first anthology of English Women’s Writing The Monument of Matrones (1582), published in London, for instance, is subtitled: ‘Containing Seven Severall Lamps of Virginitie’. Its compiler, Thomas Bentley, opens the book with a prayer to almighty God, who in mercy ‘ordained these lamps’ for his ‘chosen virgins’, commanding ‘that with our loines girt about, and our lamps burning bright,’ all should be ready ‘to execute the charge … to watch full warilie and continuallie’ (Bentley 1582: sig. v). Bentley interprets the parable of the virgins through the optics of light in which the faithful not only shine bright but all must watch ‘full warilie’. In 1561, the young queen was entertaining the ambassadors to a number of powerful royal suitors, including her brother-in-law, Philip II of Spain, and the newly crowned Erik XIV of Sweden. At this point in her reign, Elizabeth I’s political power had not yet solidified into the political allegory of virginity; at twenty-five (and then twenty-eight), the queen was expected to marry. The general lesson of this masque in particular – that light is the medium of faith and that wise women should guard theirs appropriately – spotlighted the queen’s virtue and the sexual politics of such negotiations. Elizabeth I’s maids of honour were young, aristocratic women, usually at least sixteen years old, though some were as young as twelve (Howey 2009). The parable’s central premise – that some women are ‘wise’ and others’ foolish’ – likely took on additional valences in performance. Hand-held lamps provided a visible focus point, illuminating some women’s faces, even as the extra lumens the lamps provided required participants’ eyes to adjust, making what was previous visible harder to see. More than a metaphor, the lamps signalled a physical shift in the environment, enabling action and obscuring vision. The optics of performance likely influenced how the politicians viewed – and treated – the women entertaining them, especially those positioned in the dark. The Swedish ambassador, for instance, who was likely in attendance, later reported to his King that he ‘saw no signs of an immodest life’ in the queen, only many signs of ‘chastity’, ‘virginity’ and ‘true modesty’. He concludes: ‘I would stake my life that she is most chaste’ (Chamberlin 1921: 273). His assessment of the Queen’s chastity depends on the performance of her maids, scripted into a sexualized choreography defined through comparison and performed through manipulating light levels. The archival records of this performance do not document what happened during or after the play (Chambers 1923: 79; Wiggins and Richardson 2012: 1.348). We do not know how the ambassadors treated the women; nor do we know if the casting was deliberate or haphazard. Given the parable’s symbolism of piety and chastity as light and given the Masque’s revelry in optics, the lost Masque of Virgins raises questions about theatre history as an archive of histories of sexuality, emotions and embodiment. In it, light is both a theme and a prop, rendering some women highly visible and relegating others to the shadows. As such, it provides a useful reminder of the role of optics in shaping histories of embodiment. In what follows, I apply its lessons about the optics of chastity in performance to Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, a play equally obsessed with women’s bodies, emotions and sexuality. Reading Hero and Margaret in conversation with Elizabeth’s wise and foolish maids

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of honour, I argue that both plays reveal the investment of early modern English drama in scripting sexual norms and affect through visibility. Since the turn of the millennium, affect studies has emerged as a vibrant, interdisciplinary field, connecting insights from literature, history, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, religion and art to cognitive science and psychology (Massumi 2002). Though the study of emotions as discrete and measurable entities is not new, the ‘affective’ turn in the humanities and social sciences has redefined the relationship between embodiment and cultural power, emphasizing not only new insights about emotions but also new methodologies for understanding their cultural iterations in the past (Ahmed 2013: 2–4). Building on the scaffolding of feminist, queer and critical race theories, affect studies represent a methodological approach to embodiment (Mejia LaPerle 2022). ‘Affect names a conceptual problem’, Ann Cvetkovich argues, as well as ‘a tangible thing’ (2014: 13). What we now term as ‘emotion’ describes mostly positive or negative states of being; these are grouped into primary and tertiary sets of emotional experience. Emotions such as disgust, shame and fear are believed to be core emotions, rooted in our biological animality (De Waal 2019: 55); others are defined as secondary, the result of complex associations learned over time and thus are much more varied in terms of cultural and social expression (Crowell 2020: 88). But these concepts have a history as well, rooted in our language of emotion (Robinson 2014, 2021: 5–6). Although we communicate our emotions through both physical and linguistic cues, the history of emotion is mostly based on discursive accounts (Wetherell 2013: 353). We may thoughtfully describe emotional experience to others, sharing private and subjective states of being, but we may also communicate them through body language. Emotions are thus biological, social, cultural and historical. The study of sexuality has been intricately linked with the study of emotions and embodiment; the influence of psychoanalysis on feminism, queer and critical theory expanded what constituted sexuality, including thoughts and feelings as well as physical acts (Ahmed 2006; Traub 2016b: 25–30). As Valerie Traub notes, attending to the ‘social and psychic meanings of sex stems from a wish to do justice to its complexity as a social and collective, and not merely physical or individual, phenomenon’ (2016b: 143). Desire, Traub reminds us in her early work, was linked to appetite in the Renaissance, connecting it to core emotions (2015: 83); as an embodied feeling of longing, desire is an expansive and almost universal experience, especially if it is detached from particular objects and outcomes (Ahmed 2006, 2013). Literature provides a tremendous record of cultural beliefs about embodied, emotional experience (Robinson 2021: 4); a systematic focus on language and representation provides useful details to measure change across time, without conceding the individuated, subjective and embodied aspects of emotion. And as Eve Sedgwick argues, these discursive iterations are linked to queer performativity, a ‘strategy for the production of meaning and being, in relation to the affect shame and to the later and related fact of stigma’ (Sedgwick and Frank 2003: 61). How characters perceive one another and how they in turn are perceived by those around them provide important texture to these fictive worlds, whether realistic or not.

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The history of Shakespeare’s plays in performance, however, includes profound elisions and gaps (Korda 2016), and these absences can implicitly code the history of emotion and sexuality as able-bodied and white (Little 2016; Wilson 2017). As recent work in early modern queer studies and pre-modern critical race studies emphasizes, historicism, as a methodology, can be limiting in its approach to embodiment in the past when it is wielded too bluntly and without attention to its structures of feeling (Erickson and Hall 2016; Menon 2008). Yet embodiment, as a heuristic, remains useful for it ‘may enable scholars to take better stock, and make better use, of the heterogeneity that propels the crosscurrents, border crossings, conflicts, and contradictions within Shakespeare studies today’ (Traub 2016a: 32). The three terms of my title – sexuality, emotions, the body – remain useful as conceptual categories (Scott 1986), but they also have been expanded by scholars to include new iterations, especially in relationship to one another. Defining sexuality as a central part of human emotional experience, for instance, was an important way in which scholars challenged stigmas surrounding such topics, especially histories of non-normative desires (Love 2009); yet such a definition implicitly defines the absence of desire as an almost unthinkable human condition. Likewise, to discuss affect without also analysing its racialized and gendered expression can reproduce whiteness as a universal norm rather than a historical and socially constructed phenomenon. White women’s tears (or white men’s rage) function as affective and agentic performances of power: the visceral is social (Anderson 2020; Phipps 2021). The overlap between critical race, feminist and queer theory, including interventions from scholars working on transhistory and in disability studies, requires that we reexamine our methodologies as well as our affective investments in them. It also invites us to rethink the structure of our research, finding ways to work collaboratively with others in and outside of the academy (Sarkar et al. 2021). Emotions are, of course, embodied and experienced, but they also emerge through patterns of communication and literary tropes (Robinson 2021; Sopory 2005). Early modern literature thus provides a powerful way to understand wider networks of connection (Bailey and DiGangi 2017). In particular, early modern languages of emotion developed in tandem with new theories of health connected to global exchange (Mejia LaPerle 2022). As Katherine Craik argues, Shakespeare wrote his plays just as new language for describing the body/mind emotional interface was emerging (2020: 2). Even the word ‘emotion’ itself suggests its physical power: as Craik notes, its Latin root (emovere) emphasizes movement, including physical shifts and powerful transformations. Within classical and medieval understandings of embodiment, Galenic physiology provided practitioners with a comprehensive and dynamic tool of understanding for physical and subjective emotional experience: the body was comprised of fluids and imbalances between them dramatically influenced health. Practitioners of Galenic theory approached the body as an entity in flux (Paster 2004: 2). Describing someone as sanguine or choleric, or as melancholic or phlegmatic, was both descriptive and prescriptive; such terms offered medical practitioners both a theory of diagnosis and cure. Early modern emotion was the language of ‘affections and passions’ (Paster et al. 2004; Robinson 2021). That these terms retain their valency in describing erotic

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embodied experience emphasize how intertwined the history of sexuality is with the history of emotions and how both are defined by cultural, social and political networks (Ahmed 2013). As Shakespeare’s plays remind us, characters can become ‘sick’ with love just as they could be seized by lust (Dawson 2008), yet the impact of these emotions on the social world of the play varies widely depending on their gender, race, ethnicity and class. Passions are unruly; as Bridget Escolme has argued, ‘many of the early modern treatises on the passions figure them as turbulent movements impossible to control’ (2014: xv). Passion comprised a powerful threat to social stability (xxii). Theatre, in particular, was seen as a mechanism to mobilize such force (Hobgood 2014: 11, 27–8). Anti-theatricalist writers imagined staged emotion to be contagious, infecting playgoers and corrupting their bodies and souls (Hobgood 2014: 41). For these writers, the Aristotelian notion of emotional catharsis became something sinister, especially if it was believed to stir up dangerous feelings defined as sinful (Hobgood 2014: 26; Orgel 2013: 143–4; Rist 2013: 138). The unruliness of the passions and theatre’s role in scripting it shapes the plot of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. Like the Masque of Virgins, it posits both that virtue is visible and that it can be performed. This paradox opens up a host of complex problems in the social world of the play, as characters plot to unite and separate romantic attachments. As feminist and queer readings of the play emphasize, Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing foregrounds the social pressures of adhering to sexual norms (McEachern 2016). Characters not only imagine themselves as if they were playing roles in a play, they use stagecraft in order to forge or break erotic bonds. The play’s two plots – Don Pedro’s plot to trick Beatrice and Benedick into falling in love and Don John’s plot to trick Claudio into thinking Hero has been unfaithful – create tension in terms of the genre of the play, so much so that critics have wondered about how fully realized the original playtext may be (McEachern 2016: 150–1). That has not, however, influenced its reception especially in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries: by the end of the eighteenth century, it was the ‘seventh most popular of Shakespeare’s plays’, and ‘between 1879 and 1964 it was staged thirty-five times at Stratford-upon-Avon’, almost once every three years (McEachern 2016). Katherine Prince argues that Much Ado ‘has, until recently, resisted the modern tendency to darken, deepen, and complicate Shakespeare’s comedies to reflect the perspectives of political criticism’ (2018: 41). As Deborah Cartmell and Peter Smith surmise, the play’s beloved status in recent performance history may stem from its ‘relatability’, in large part because of the comic subplot (Cartmell and Smith 2018: 3). Much Ado About Nothing creates a generic tension through its staging of heterosexual, binary logics. As McEachern explains, the play’s popularity is linked to a core question about its plot: ‘to what degree is the war between the sexes (comedy’s usual topic) a “merry” one, or a conflict with real casualties to minds and hearts?’ (2016: 84). McEachern’s astute framework demonstrates how the genre of the play helps to resolve the deeply ambivalent questions about gender, sexuality, and social norms embedded in its plots, reminding us to question the mechanisms

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that produce its ‘happy’ ending. As Jean Howard argues, Much Ado About Nothing is a play that stages social transgression through the mechanisms of theatre (1987). Both of Don John and Don Pedro’s romantic plots depend on staged illusions: ‘The play is full of instances in which characters perceive each other indirectly, and hence often erroneously’ (McEachern 2016: 62). The ‘prevalence of noting’, McEachern argues, ‘gives the sense of a community, claustrophobically knit together’ (2016: 62). Both plots exploit these community norms. Whereas Don John’s plot threatens social order, Don Pedro’s bolsters it. But, as Howard emphasizes, Don John’s plot wins out: even Don Pedro, ‘the initiator of so much of the play’s disguise and theatrical cozenage, cannot see through the pageant staged at Hero’s window’ (1987: 174). Like the foolish women scripted to dance in the dark in the Masque of Virgins, Margaret’s participation in both plots of Much Ado About Nothing reveals the affective fault lines of the play’s gender and sexual politics. Don John’s theatrical trick relies on the cultural assumptions of misogyny in lieu of staged spectacle: ‘The trick at the window silently assumes and further circulates the idea that women are universally prone to deception and impersonation’ (Howard 1987: 175). It reveals and exploits an early modern paradox about gender and chastity: if, as the Parable of Virgins posits, chastity is rendered visible on the body, then it can also be performed and manipulated through optical illusions. This double-edged notion of chastity is at work in the play, creating an obsessive structure of ‘noting’ women’s bodies in Leonato’s household even as they seem to be interchangeable and replaceable for one another. As feminist literary critics have argued (Dowd 2011; Henderson 2010), Margaret is key to averting the tragedy of the play. She is defined relationally: Margaret ‘functions as a demonized double for Hero’, embodying the threat of duplicity associated both with the literary legacy of her name and with the free-floating misogyny about women’s constancy in Elizabethan culture (Howey 2009: 152). Her actions  – whatever they were  – near her mistress’s window provide evidence for not only what Claudio has come to expect of women but also what Shakespeare’s audience may have expected as well. She functions in the play as ‘a sexual substitute’, her actions defining and influencing another woman’s reputation (Suzuki 2016: 152). The play does not provide Margaret an opportunity to express her own motivations, scripting only a troubling silence that functions as an ‘all-purpose index of her duplicity’ (Suzuki 2016: 152). Likewise, as Caroline Latta argues, Margaret functions ‘as a potent symbol of the play’s division between the happy community of some and the uncomfortable exclusion of others’ (2021: 75–6). Margaret’s complicity in Borachio’s (and Don John’s) plot to malign her mistress is never fully revealed. As Leonato argues at the end of the play, she is ‘in some fault’ even though he deems the act was ‘against her will’ (Dowd 2011: 140). Even the ‘act’ itself is confusing. The play does not stage the incident in question; rather, it is described no less than five separate times in the play, each offering slightly different narratives (Dugan 2017). Such inconsistencies in plotting may suggest that Shakespeare simply changed the play as he was writing it (Wells 1980). But it also raises questions about her role in gulling Claudio. Margaret and Ursula, as servants,

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remain masked at the end of the play, silently witnessing Hero and Beatrice’s coupling with Claudio and Benedick. Such heteropatriarchal sociality fixates on her body as an object to be scrutinized and as a stand in for Hero’s, even as it scripts them as interchangeable. If Hero’s reputation emerges intact at the end of the play, it is because Margaret’s does not: chastity is a zero-sum game in Messina. Though Margaret is neither a ‘plain-dealing villain’ like Don John (1.3.29–30), nor a liberal one like Borachio, she is, to borrow Sara Ahmed’s formulation, a feminist killjoy, in that she is a character who works against the play’s generic arc towards a happy ending (2013: 20). She also remains a troublesome outsider within most feminist and queer readings of the play. In what follows, I explore how Margaret’s view of Messina provides a different trajectory for thinking about sexuality, emotions and the body. Scholars have attended to the many ways that the play asserts a heteropatriarchal ending, conscripting two characters committed to single life into coupledom (Blake 2020; Orvis 2018; Pellegrini 2011); critics have also analysed the way in which the play’s focus on chastity shapes the performance of gendered embodiment: the play’s ending requires the audience to suspend disbelief – about Claudio’s remorse, about Benedick’s desire for Beatrice and about what any of the women want in this play (Cook 1986). Claudio’s ‘passions’ remain unstable, and it is likely that his fits of passion will continue even when they are married. As Emma Smith argues, ‘Much Ado is a play profoundly uneasy about female sexuality and its assumed duplicity’; those working for and against marriage share strategies, including surveillance and theatrical deception (2012: 132). That it is the work of policing that brings to light the harm done to Hero’s reputation and thus the comic resolution of the play only magnifies the tensions at the heart of its plot. Many of Shakespeare’s comedies are, of course, deeply transgressive and queer: plays like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night have been foundational to the field of early modern queer history and theory (Orvis 2018: 305). But, as David Orvis notes, this has not been the case for Much Ado About Nothing: its heavy investment in ‘patriarchal heterosociality’ has precluded most queer readings of the play, with a few exceptions (Dugan 2017; Menon 2008; Orvis 2018: 305; Pellegrini 2011). Though characters express poignant and deep homosocial bonds, these bonds are reframed by the misogyny at the heart of the play. Feminist Shakespearean critics have shown how gender structures the plot of the play through cruxes of militarism, theatricality, aurality and class (Cook 1986; Dowd 2011; Henderson 2010; Howard 1987), including its investment in marriage. Given this structure, Much Ado, like the Masque of Virgins, spotlights some women characters more than others, including Hero and Beatrice. Its heterosexual marriage plot foregrounds masquerades and theatrical entertainments as part of sexual coupling. The first quarto’s title page (1600) announced that it had been ‘sundrie times publickely acted by the Right Honorable, the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants’, likely at the Theatre. Its earliest record of performance, however, was at court in 1613, one of fourteen plays performed as part of Elizabeth Stuart’s wedding celebrations to Frederick V of Bohemia (‘The  Accompte of the Right Honoble the Lo. Stanhope of Harrington’ 1612). Most of these plays involved

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dramatic theatrical spectacles, including plays that foreground jealous fantasies, including A King and No King, The Winter’s Tale, and Othello, along with plays about politics and magic. Collectively, these plays reveal an investment in an optics of power, both symbolic and theatrical. Elizabeth and Frederick were married upon a stage, and Elizabeth’s wedding attire was designed to create spectacular effects: her gold crown was ‘made Imperiall by the pearls and diamonds thereupon placed, which were so thicke bestet they stood like shining pinnacles upon her amber-coloured haire’ and ‘diamonds of inestimable value’ were ‘embrotherd upon her sleeves, which even dazzled and amazed the eies of the beholders’ (Bergeron 1991: 114). The masques that entertained guests also involved spectacular displays of otherness, including imperial depictions of Jove and Jupiter as well as antimasques that staged ‘Moores’, ‘Indians’ and ‘Baboons’, connecting racialized otherness with animality (Bergeron 1991: 114). Elizabeth’s marriage was key to James’s political policy: he had arranged both Protestant and Catholic royal matches for his children in the hopes of navigating early seventeenth-century European geopolitics. The untimely death of the Prince of Wales in November of 1612, however, intensified the pressure and scrutiny on Elizabeth’s match and wedding ceremony; King James spent over £100,000 on the nuptial events. There were plays at court every night, and, on behalf of the company, John Heminges received £40 in May of that year for presenting six of them, with a £20 bonus (Murray 1910: 180). Like her godmother, Elizabeth was scrutinized for visible signs of honour: raised apart from her father since 1603, she was often described as the king’s ‘jewel’. Advisors assured James that Elizabeth was ‘in every way a child of such hope that when the King shall be an eye-witness it will be much to his comfort’ (Bergeron 1991: 109) The iconographic power of her godmother also shaped her legacy: commentator Thomas Rosa compared her to Elizabeth I in 1608, noting that ‘whatever was excellent or lofty in Queen Elizabeth, is all compressed in the tender age of this virgin princess’ (Bergeron 1991: 111). The performance histories of all of these plays demonstrate how theatrical optics were connected to cultural norms of chastity and deployed in performance. Elizabethan notions of beauty defined through comparison (Hall 1995: 100) became spectacles in performance. If chastity is ordained for some women and not for others, then these performances reveal how this works in terms of spectatorship. For instance, when Claudio asks Benedict if he ‘noted’ Hero’s beauty (1.1.154), Benedict’s replies: ‘I noted her not, but I looked upon her’ (1.1.156). Benedict rejects Claudio’s romantic gaze, choosing instead to highlight her physical appearance in what he believes to be objective terms: she is ‘too low for high praise, too brown for a fair praise and too little for a great praise’, and though she is not ‘unhandsome’, he does ‘not like her’ (1.1.163–7). Benedict’s reply mocks the genre of the play, drawing on racist and misogynistic Elizabethan qualities of beauty. Yet Claudio remains insistent, connecting the physical aspects of vision to the emotional qualities of love: ‘in mine eye she is the sweetest lady that ever I looked on’ (1.1.177–8). Such qualifications matter: this is not love at first sight. Claudio has seen Hero before, but then he looked ‘with a soldier’s eye, /

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That liked, but had a rougher task in hand’ (1.1.279–80). His comment emphasizes how affect influences the male gaze as well as the genre of narrative. Like the Masque of Virgins, Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing uses a dramatic scheme to render gendered signs of honour visible. When Claudio ‘notes’ his bride later in the play, he looks for signs of dishonour. Describing Hero as a ‘rotten orange’, whose blight is below the skin, Claudio commands those around him to fix their gaze upon her and to see her as he does: Give not this rotten orange to your friend; She’s but the sign and semblance of her honour. Behold how like a maid she blushes here! O, what authority and show of truth Can cunning sin cover itself withal! Comes not that blood as modest evidence To witness simple virtue? Would you not swear, All you that see her, that she were a maid, By these exterior shows? But she is none; She knows the heat of a luxurious bed. Her blush is guiltiness, not modesty. (4.1.30–40) Claudio's argument evokes both the audience standing in church and at the theatre: he calls upon them to notice the ways in which women’s beauty is deceiving even as he himself is deceived. Noting the ways in which appearing maidenly – and fair for that matter – is an act of deception, Claudio asserts other kinds of truths: the heat of her cheeks is linked to that ‘of a luxurious bed’ (4.1.39) She is, famously, ‘but the sign and semblance’ of honour (4.1.31). This affective way of ‘looking’ at women becomes the norm in Messina. After Don Pedro and Claudio leave the wedding scene, Leonato turns on Hero as well, decrying her ‘foul-tainted flesh’ (4.1.143) and querying: ‘Why ever wast thou lovely in my eyes?’ (4.1.130). The Friar, for instance, interprets Hero’s innocence not by her appearance but rather by the ‘fire’ in her eyes (4.1.162). Her active looking is challenged by Leonato, who, outraged by her will not to die immediately from shame, queries, ‘Dost thou look up?’ (4.1.119). Defined by Claudio’s vision of her, Hero’s lack of shame now defines her, posited as an invisible blight on the surface of her body. Boracchio’s moral vice is imagined to be visible in his eyes. ‘Let me see his eyes’, Leonato commands, ‘[t]hat when I note another man like him / I may avoid him’ (5.1.249–51). Boracchio replies: ‘If you would know your wronger, look on me’ (5.1.252). The play stages this exchange, allowing Boracchio not only to answer Leonato’s accusation but also to meet his gaze. In seeking exculpation for his daughter, Leonato also demands that Borachio be brought ‘face-to-face’ with Margaret in order to reveal her role in the plot: ‘This naughty man / Shall face to face be brought to Margaret, / Who I believe was packed in all this wrong, / Hired to it by your brother’ (5.1.287–90). Orchestrating yet another plot, Leonato imagines

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that the two lovers’ relationship will be visible to all who witness it. Borachio’s reply – ‘No, by my soul she was not’ – defines her as ‘just and virtuous’, a victim to his deception (5.1.290, 292). The dynamics of looking  – and of being looked at  – are imagined as integral to the play’s moral and generic resolution. Characters repeatedly reference both their ability to see clearly and also the ways in which their view is limited by their perspective. When her uncle commends her shrewd apprehension, Beatrice quips that she has ‘a good eye, uncle; I can see a church by daylight’ (2.1.73). But the play also stages another kind of vision, one dependent upon one’s physical and emotional vantage point. In the final scene, Benedick emphasizes to Leonato, ‘Your niece regards me with an eye of favour’ to which Leonato replies: ‘That eye my daughter lent her?’ (5.4.22–3). Benedick replies: ‘And I do with an eye of love requite her’, which Leonato emphasizes is the result of his plotting: ‘The sight whereof I think you had from me, / From Claudio and the prince’ (5.4.24–6). Though the men posit that ‘will’ can supersede optics (5.4.26), the play’s ending suggests otherwise. Whether or not Hero is virtuous depends on one’s vantage point. What she knows – and what Margaret knows as well – does not matter, as both women remain eclipsed by the other in Leonato, Claudio and Don Pedro’s point of view. This obsession with noting and nothing is not limited to this play; many women are surveilled in Shakespeare’s plays, their bodies scrutinized. In Measure for Measure, for instance, the Duke interrogates Mariana, Angelo’s ex-fiancée, attempting to place her on a continuum of femininity. duke

What, are you married? mariana

No, my lord. duke

Are you a maid? mariana

No, my lord. duke

A widow then? mariana

Neither, my lord. duke

Why you are nothing, then: neither maid, widow nor wife! (5.1.170–6) Mariana’s veiled truth is revealed, and she swears, ‘As there comes light from heaven and words from breath, / As there is sense in truth and truth in virtue, / I am affianced this man’s wife as strongly / As words could make up vows’ (5.1.222–5). As Dennis Britton argues about the racial affect of Measure for Measure, Angelo’s actions in the play are violent, and they dilute the racialized meanings of fairness as purity in powerful ways. Beatrice’s description of Claudio as ‘civil as an orange,

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and something of that jealous complexion’, Britton argues, offers just one example (2021: 113). Claudio’s own description of Hero as inwardly foul provides another: O Hero! what a Hero hadst thou been, If half thy outward graces had been placed About thy thoughts and counsel of thy heart! But fare thee well, most foul, most fair. Farewell, Thou pure impiety and impious purity. (MA 4.1.100–104) Claudio’s grief articulates the binary structures of gender, sexuality, race, vision and narrative that gird the romantic plot of the play: what appeared fair, pious, and a ‘hero’ was an illusion. Seizing on optical illusions as justification for his misogyny Claudio emphasizes that he will now view all women with a jaded, racist and violent perspective: ‘For thee I’ll lock up all the gates of love, / And on my eyelids shall conjecture hang / To turn all beauty into thoughts of harm’ (4.1.105–107). If he is referring to self-harm, such a threat passes quickly. Critic Carol Cook argues that even Claudio’s grief is short-lived: Not only is Claudio not grief-stricken when we see him next (5.1), he is rather giddy. He shows no shame when Leonato accuses him of killing Hero through his villainy … It is not until he learns of her innocence that Claudio’s feeling changes; the issue is no longer a matter of forgiveness now but only of getting the facts straight. (1986: 196) His vitriolic hatred of women, especially those he deems unchaste, is not shortlived. Performance records from the play document that hand-held candles helped to create the illusion of night, illuminating Claudio’s grief for the audience and preparing for the optical illusions to come. As Don John’s quip reminds all, ‘There is not chastity enough in language’ to defend oneself from such accusations (4.1.97). The play’s willingness to provide Claudio with a second chance requires a new avatar: ‘another Hero’ (5.4.62), whose innocence can comport to the cultural and personal demands of her husband and father’s misogyny. Though these men learn that they are wrong about Hero, this knowledge does nothing to interrupt or challenge the cultural paradigms; rather, aspersions linger, casting shame on Margaret, revealing the play’s investment in the policing of white women’s chastity. Despite Borachio’s claims of Margaret’s innocence in his plot, Leonato insists on bringing the watch to her door: ‘Bring you these fellows on. We’ll talk with Margaret, / How her acquaintance grew with this lewd fellow’ (5.1.319–20). Later, Leonato also insists that Beatrice’s mouth be forcibly stopped with a kiss (Blake 2020). Both commands emphasize the force of the play’s heteropatriarchal gravitational pull as well as its racial politics. Kim Hall has shown how the play’s investment in aristocratic alliances relies on race-making to render its contours visible (Hall 1995: 100, 195). Beatrice defines and argues for her single status by referencing her own skin colour as debased and ‘sunburnt’, using it as an excuse to ‘sit in a corner and cry “Hey-ho” for a husband!’ (2.1.293–4; Hall

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1995). Leonato’s description of slandered Hero as having ‘fallen / Into a pit of ink’ (4.1.139–40) suggests how sexual taint metaphorically darkens her. Beatrice’s strategy attempts to use racist structures of beauty and theatrical optics as a tool of sexual power, negotiating for her singlehood, but as Blake’s analysis demonstrates, it only works for so long (2020). As an aristocratic white woman, Leonato demands that she marry. Likewise, Benedick’s statement that the world must be peopled is also defined by his own racialized illusions, a point that is made much clearer after Kenny Leon’s 2019 production at the Public Theatre: when set against the broader political landscape of the #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements, the ‘merry’ war between the sexes and even the play’s investment in heteropatriarchal futurity resonates differently when it is set within a Black political landscape. Whereas in Shakespeare’s playtext, Benedick’s insistent call for music and merriment in the final lines of the play is enough to hold tragedy at bay, Leon’s 2019 production interrupts the final dance with the sound of police sirens. Reimagined as protesters, the soldiers of Much Ado march off to meet the police surrounding Leonato’s house, carrying signs that state ‘I am a person’. Rather than festive, the final sounds of the play are mournful, as the women sing a gospel-inflected version. Leon’s production shows how theatre producers might disrupt the play’s implicitly white gaze and its gendered structures of vision through soundscapes. In their engagement with this production, writers Arsh Dhillon, Philip Michalak, Bernadette Loone, Sonia Kangaju and Charles Onesti argue that the success of the Public’s Much Ado demonstrates how the play’s generic hybridity allows it to become a vehicle for affective and political change when staged by Black theatre artists and interpreted by Black audiences and critics. They note: ‘just as the Public made new meanings of this old play, our voices can signal newer, younger, better ways of thinking about Shakespeare that help us to uncover truth, gain empathy, and take responsibility for racism’ (Dhillon et al. 2020). More political and specifically anti-racist performances and scholarship will help to map new affective responses to old scripts. It also may help us see histories of race, gender and sexuality in equally enriching ways, bolstered by feminist and queer work that preceded it but also unpinned from cis matrixes that defined such work. Much Ado About Nothing requires that audiences ignore substantial plot inconsistencies in order to achieve its comic resolution, raising questions not only about the history of characters that audiences routinely and collectively ignore (such as Margaret) but also those on whom the play fixates (Hero). Read alongside of the Masque of Virgins, Much Ado About Nothing also demonstrates how theatrical lighting is key to structuring not only theatrical attention but also collective experiences of affect. Happiness unfolds, as Sara Ahmed argues, alongside of contingency: it is ‘a promise that directs some people towards certain outcomes even as it positions others as obstacles in the way’ (2009: 31). In this way, happiness is ‘end oriented’. In a play like Much Ado, this is scripted through positioning women as obstacles to one another’s happiness. Margaret’s unsettling, silent presence makes her a queer, anti-racist, feminist killjoy, disrupting the play’s happy ending. As Claire McEachern

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notes, Much Ado ‘is the only play of Shakespeare’s explicitly to end with a dance for the general company’, noting that the ‘harmonious conclusions in dance and reunion’ may be ‘precarious and provisionally engineered’ (2016: 356). As Latta argues, Margaret is summoned to appear in the play’s final scene even as she is left unattended, along with Don Pedro and Leonato, to watch the others celebrate their ‘happy’ ending. Some recent productions look for ways to include Margaret in the happy revelry, including having Hero hug Margaret as a sign of forgiveness (Latta 2021). But as the earlier Tudor play reminds us, such inclusion does little to unsettle the play’s optics. Rather than seeking vectors inside the play’s damaging and violent vision of heteropatriarchal sociality, a sociality choreographed to perform a compulsively happy ending, we might embrace what Margaret seems to know that Hero does not, that is, how to navigate the ever-present male scrutiny that defines Messina. As Ahmed reminds us, to kill joy is ‘to open a life, to make room for life, to make room for possibility, for chance’ (2017). Margaret, like the foolish women dancing in the shadows of the Masque of Virgins, has been scripted and cast to define the virtue of others. Yet her presence suggests the power in a more expansive approach to gender, one that looks beyond the confines of white heteropatriarchal sexual norms and the virtue politics they always seem to demand, towards a horizon that’s just out of view.

NOTE 1 ‘Ces lampes estoient d’argent fort gentiment faictes est elabourées et les dames estoient très-belles, bien honnestes et bien apprises qui prindrent nous autres François pour dancer’ [‘These lamps were of silver, and very beautifully and elaborately made, and the ladies who invited us Frenchmen to dance were very beautiful, very noble and well-trained.’] (Reyher 1909; trans. Leah Chang).

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Gibson, J. (2001), ‘The Logic of Chastity: Women, Sex, and the History of Philosophy in the Early Modern Period’, Hypatia, 21 (4): 1–19. Gowing, L. (2003), Common Bodies: Women, Touch, and Power in Seventeenth-Century England, New Haven: Yale University Press. Hall, K. F. (1995), Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hellwarth, J. W., ed. (2013), The Reproductive Unconscious in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, New York: Routledge. Henderson, D. (2010), ‘Mind the Gaps: The Ear, The Eye, and the Senses of a Woman in Much Ado About Nothing’, in L. Gallagher and S. Raman (eds), Knowing Shakespeare: Senses, Embodiment and Cognition, 192–215, Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hobgood, A. P. (2014), Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Howard, J. (1987), ‘Renaissance Antitheatricality and the Politics of Gender and Rank in Much Ado About Nothing’, in J. E. Howard and M. F. O’Connor (eds), Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, 163–87, New York: Routledge. Howey, C. (2009), ‘Fashioning Monarchy: Women, Dress, and Power at the Court of Elizabeth I, 1558–1603’, in A. J. Cruz and M. Suzuki (eds), The Rule of Women in Early Modern Europe, 142–56, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Korda, N. (2016), ‘Shakespeare’s Laundry: Feminist Futures in the Archive’, in A. Loomba and M. E. Sanchez (eds), Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies: Gender, Race, and Sexuality, 93–111, New York: Routledge. Latta, C. (2021), ‘Silence, Mishearing, and Indirection in Much Ado’, in L. Magnus and W. W. Cannon (eds), Shakespeare’s Auditory Worlds: Hearing and Staging Practices, Then and Now, 75–98, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Little, A. L. (2016), ‘Re-historicizing Race, White Melancholia, and the Shakespearean Property’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 67 (1): 84–103. Love, H. (2009), Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Massumi, B. (2002), Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham: Duke University Press. McEachern, C. (2016), ‘Introduction’, in C. McEachern (ed.), Much Ado About Nothing, rev. edn, 1–182, Arden Shakespeare Third Series, London: Arden Shakespeare. Mejia LaPerle. C., ed. (2022), Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature, Tempe, AZ: ACMRS Press. Menon, M. (2008), Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature and Film, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Milner, M. (2011), The Senses and the English Reformation, New York: Routledge. Much Ado About Nothing (2019), [Theatrical performance] Dir. K. Leon, New York: The Public Theater. Murray, J. T. (1910), English Dramatic Companies 1558–1642, London: Constable and Co. Orgel, S. (2013), The Authentic Shakespeare: And Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage, New York: Routledge.

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Orvis, D. (2018), ‘Queer Comedy’, in H. A. Hirschfeld (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy, 298–312, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Paster, G. K. (2004), Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Paster, G. K., K. Rowe and M. Floyd-Wilson, eds (2004), Reading the Early Modern Passions, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Pellegrini, A. (2011), ‘Closing Ranks, Keeping Company: Marriage Plots and Will to Be Single in Much Ado About Nothing’, in M. Menon (ed.), Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, 245–54, Durham: Duke University Press. Phipps, A. (2021), ‘White Tears, White Rage: Victimhood and (as) Violence in Mainstream Feminism’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 24 (1): 81–93. Prince, K. (2018), ‘Performance History: Landmarks, Tendencies, Outliers and Recursions in the Performance History of Much Ado About Nothing’, in D. Cartmell and P. J. Smith (eds), Much Ado About Nothing: A Critical Reader, 39–66, London: Arden Shakespeare. Reyher, P. (1909), Les masques anglais: étude sur les ballets et la vie de cour en Angleterre (1512–1640), Paris: Hachette. Rist, T. (2013), ‘Catharsis as “Purgation” in Shakespearean Drama’, in K. A. Craik and T. Pollard (eds), Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England, 138–54, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robinson, B. (2014), ‘Disgust c. 1600’, ELH, 81 (2): 553–83. Robinson, B. (2021), Passion’s Fictions from Shakespeare to Richardson: Literature and the Sciences of Soul and Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sarkar, D., H. Eklund, A. Thompson and J. Park (2021), ‘Becoming Undisciplined: A Venture in Collaborative Criticism’, conference presentation at the Shakespeare Association of America, Austin, TX. Scott, J. W. (1986), ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, The American Historical Review, 91 (5): 1053–75. Sedgwick, E. K. and A. Frank (2003), Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Durham: Duke University Press. Shakespeare, W. (1600), Much Adoe About Nothing, London. Shakespeare, W. (2016), Much Ado About Nothing, ed. C. McEachern, rev. edn, Arden Shakespeare Third Series, London: Arden Shakespeare. Shakespeare, W. (2020), Measure for Measure, ed. A. R. Braunmuller and R. N. Watson, Arden Shakespeare Third Series, London: Arden Shakespeare. Smith, E. (2012), The Cambridge Shakespeare Guide, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sopory, P. (2005), ‘Metaphor and Affect’, Poetics Today, 26 (3): 433–58. Streitberger, W. R. (2016), The Masters of the Revels and Elizabeth I’s Court Theatre, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Suzuki, M. (2016), ‘Gender, Class, and the Ideology of Comic Form’, in D. Callaghan (ed.), A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, 2nd edn, 137–61, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.

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Traub, V. (2015), Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama, New York: Routledge. Traub, V. (2016a), ‘Introduction: Feminist Shakespeare Studies: Cross Currents, Border Crossings, Conflicts and Contradictions’, in V. Traub (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race, 1–38, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Traub, V. (2016b), Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Wells, S. (1980), ‘Editorial Treatment of Foul-Paper Texts: Much Ado About Nothing as Test Case’, The Review of English Studies, 31 (121): 1–16. Wetherell, M. (2013), ‘Affect and Discourse – What’s the Problem? From Affect as Excess to Affective/Discursive Practice’, Subjectivity, 6 (4): 349–68. Wiggins, M. and C. Richardson, eds (2012), British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue, Vol. 1: 1533–1566, 9 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilson, J. R. (2017), ‘The Trouble with Disability in Shakespeare Studies’, Disability Studies Quarterly, 37 (2).

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CHAPTER 4.10

Religion and religious cultures BENEDICT S. ROBINSON

Not every language encodes a concept correlative with ‘religion’. In fact, according to Emile Benveniste, that concept has a distinct point of origin: it is a Latin innovation, without precedent in prior Indo-European languages, giving linguistic and conceptual space to ‘religion’ as a sphere separate from the rest of life ([1969] 2016: 526–7; Derrida 2002: 66–7). The OED translates Latin religio as ‘supernatural feeling of constraint’ (‘religion, n.’); Lewis and Short gloss it as ‘Reverence’ and ‘fear of God’ and by extension ‘conscientiousness’, ‘religious scruples’, ‘religious awe’, as well as the objects of such feelings: ‘the holiness, sacredness, sanctity inhering in any religious object’ (Lewis and Short 1879, ‘religio’).1 The OED, Lewis and Short, and Benveniste record a dispute over the word’s origins, tracing it either – with Cicero – to relegere or ‘read over again’, suggesting, per OED, a ‘painstaking observance of rites’, or – with Lactantius and Augustine – to religare, ‘to tie up or back, to restrain, bind fast’, so that religion is ‘that which ties believers to God’.2 In the early modern period, Augustine’s endorsement weighed in favour of the second etymology. In a book printed by the English Catholic press at Douai, Thomas Fitzherbert notes that Augustine derives ‘the name of religion’ from ‘relegando’ or ‘tying together’, ‘because saith he, it tyeth and vniteth our soules with God’ (1610: sig. A3r). He is joined in this by the Protestant theologian Heinrich Bullinger, who cites Lactantius – ‘With this bond of godlinesse we are streightly bound and tied vnto God, whervppon religion … tooke her name’  – and Augustine: ‘Let religion tye vs vnto one God almightie, whereof it is beleeued to bee named religion’ (1577: sig. 3G3r). The affective emphasis in the oldest meanings of religio persists in early modern lexica despite the seemingly objective character of the tie that binds (Benveniste [1969] 2016: 531). Thomas Elyot (1538) glosses religio as ‘a reuerende drede’, Thomas Cooper (1578) as ‘true worshipping of God’ but also ‘solicitous care and feare’, ‘reuerende feare and doubt of conscience’. Some of the semantic terrains the word traverses correspond closely with early modern disputes about religion. Is religion a state of feeling, a personal orientation to the divine? Does it consist rather of diligence in practical devotion or adherence to the institutions and communities that organize such devotion?

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‘It was not possible to evolve a clear conception of what religion is or to devise a term for it until it was clearly delimited and had a distinct domain,’ Benveniste writes, ‘so that it was possible to know what belonged to it and what was foreign to it’; but ‘in the civilizations which we are studying’  – that is, for Benveniste, pre-Christian Indo-European civilizations  – ‘everything is imbued with religion, everything is a sign of, a factor in, or the reflection of, divine forces’ ([1969] 2016: 526). Comparable claims about the pervasiveness of religion are often made about early modern England as well, as we’ll see in a moment. In some ways even to name religion is to circumscribe it, as a figure against a background. That itself suggests that there may be no neutral standpoint from which to assess what does, and what does not, belong to ‘religion’. Even to speak about religion is to give it some separate existence.

* The last two decades have seen a boom in scholarship on religion and early modern drama. In 2004 Ken Jackson and Arthur Marotti announced a ‘turn to religion’ in early modern studies; in 2014 and 2015 David Scott Kastan and Brian Cummings both argued that religion had become a major topic in Shakespeare criticism. All of this is part of a turn to religion across a series of fields, announced by Stanley Fish in a 7 January 2005 opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Fish claimed that religion would be the new ‘center of intellectual energy in the academy’ and told the story of a reporter who sought him out after the death of Jacques Derrida in 2004 to ask ‘what would succeed high theory and the triumvirate of race, gender, and class’ in the academy: ‘I answered like a shot: religion.’ The sneer audible in the word ‘triumvirate’ – which both expresses resentment at the ostensible dominance of race, class and gender as analytic categories and figures religion as a victorious Caesar consolidating power over a divided Rome – presumably belongs to Fish rather than this reporter. As stated, Fish offers a false choice: thinking about religion does not mean not thinking about race, gender or class; and Derrida’s version of ‘high theory’, especially in its later, ethical and political forms, has shaped some versions of the turn to religion (Derrida 2002; Lupton 2006: 146). Before exploring what that turn has meant for early modern drama criticism, it is worth taking account of exactly what Fish was arguing. He did not mean that there would be more studies of religion. He meant that the academy needed to take account of actual living belief. Invoking 9/11, he accused what he calls ‘liberalism’ of failing to think about religion in a real way.3 ‘[I]t is one thing to take religion as an object of study’, Fish opined, ‘and another to take religion seriously’. ‘Announce a course with “religion” in the title’ and you will have ‘an overflow population’, but at least some of those students will be there for ‘guidance and inspiration’, not ‘knowledge’. Religion, he concludes, is ‘now where the action is’. It is ‘where the action is’, for Fish, because Enlightenment secularity has failed. It is where the action is in the academy because it is where the action is in contemporary life. At least, that was Fish’s claim. I think it is useful to track the nature of that claim because it opens up questions sometimes left implicit in recent scholarship

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on religion and early modern drama. That scholarship generally presents itself in historicist terms. It argues that we should study religion because religion was inescapable in the period. ‘Though the attempt has often been made’, Allison Shell writes, ‘it is impossible to consider English Renaissance drama in isolation from the religious culture of the time’ (2010a: 44). ‘Religion’, David Loewenstein and Michael Witmore argue, ‘permeates Shakespeare’s plays’ (2015: 16). For Kastan, ‘[r]eligion provides Shakespeare with the fundamental language of value and understanding in the plays’ (2014: 6). There is of course another way to respond to the religious content of early modern plays: we might look to those plays to meditate on or represent questions we relate to as our own living concerns. But perhaps the real question is this: Can these two stances entirely be kept apart? Do claims about historical fact sometimes quietly imply claims about value?

* In some ways this was clearer in an earlier moment. Despite the rhetoric of a ‘turn’ to religion, religion was not absent from criticism of the drama before the 2000s. A full history is beyond my scope here, but a few key moments can be identified. In 1904 A. C. Bradley claimed that ‘[t]he Elizabethan drama was almost wholly secular’ (25). The following year saw the publication of George Santayana’s essay ‘The Absence of Religion in Shakespeare’ (1905: 149). But in the early 1940s E. M. W. Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture critiqued accounts of the period – associated, tellingly if also a little strangely, with Virginia Woolf – that presented it as ‘secular’ and as defined by a ‘new humanism’, against which Tillyard insisted on a ‘solidly theocentric’ culture in which rival factions like ‘Puritans’ and ‘courtiers’ were ‘more united by a common theological bond than they were divided by ethical disagreements’ (1943: 1–2, 5–6). Tillyard sees this consensus as threatened by various forces: Machiavelli, Copernicus, a ‘new commercialism’, the English civil wars. He is telling a story of decline from a lost common culture. It is not hard to hear behind that a set of mid-twentieth-century anxieties. Turning to C. S. Lewis’s 1964 ‘Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature’, titled The Discarded Image, or to Robert Ornstein’s assertion, four years earlier, that ‘[t]he total evolution of Elizabethan culture … was a slow but steady progress to the secular’ (1960: 13), it becomes clear that we are dealing not just with competing historical claims but with competing values. The debate often centred on Shakespeare. Irving Ribner’s 1964 essay ‘Shakespeare, Christianity, and the Problem of Belief’ describes a divided terrain: those who ‘have denied the relevance of belief, and specifically Christian belief, to Shakespeare’s tragedies’; and those who ‘have reasserted the Christianity of Shakespeare and argued that his plays must be seen in terms of Christian belief’ (1964: 101). Ribner seeks a third way: he wants to create space for a critic who ‘believes firmly in the moral statement inherent in all great literature’ and yet ‘who is himself not a Christian’ (1964: 102; see also 1961: 9). Ribner quotes J. A. Bryant’s claim, from a 1961 book, that ‘[o]ne does not have to be a Christian to understand Romeo and Juliet’ but ‘one does have to accept certain Christian presuppositions in

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order to make sense of Cymbeline’ (Bryant 1961: 194; qtd. from Ribner 1964: 102). As Ribner clearly understood, the issue here is who is, and who is not, a legitimate interpreter of Shakespeare. This becomes still more explicit in Janet Adelman’s 2008 recollection of a 1968 conversation in which she was told that ‘Jews shouldn’t be allowed to teach Renaissance literature because Renaissance literature was Christian literature’ (Adelman 2008: 1). The question of ‘religion’ entails a further question about religions: religious differences, religious identities, religious communities, including the community of interpreters of the drama. Fish is wrong to polarize religion against issues of identity: problems of ‘belief’ are inseparable from the multiplicity of beliefs and of believers.

* From the standpoint of contemporary scholarship, arguments about ‘Christian belief’ or ‘Christian presuppositions’ look crude. Recent work offers much more reticulated accounts of the period’s religious landscape. Religion in early modern England is not just a matter of Protestants and Catholics or ‘Anglicans’ and ‘puritans’ or even Lutherans and Arminians.4 It also includes more esoteric-sounding entities: ‘avant-garde conformists’, ‘church papists’, ‘parish Anglicans’.5 The study of religion opens up a whole world of beliefs, practices and positions. The event in the study of Renaissance drama that did the most to encourage scholarship on religion was almost certainly the rise of New Historicism. This may seem paradoxical, since the new historicists themselves did not initially show much interest in religion (Jackson and Marotti 2004: 175; Kastan 2014: 8). But in the longer term, a renewed emphasis on the historical contexts of the drama also brought renewed attention to religion. It did so, however, in new terms: religion was now treated as a field of discourses, not a question of active belief. And yet that is clearly not the whole story. One early sign of a turn to religion in early modern studies, as Cummings, Jackson and Marotti, and Kastan note, was interest in early modern English Catholicism. In history departments this began earlier: books like Christopher Haigh’s The English Reformation Revised (1987) and Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars (1992) challenged received accounts of the Reformation, emphasizing the vitality of late medieval religion; describing the piecemeal, contingent and hard-fought nature of the English Reformation; and underscoring the resilience of ‘recusant’ groups in officially Protestant England. (A recusant is anyone who refuses to attend Church of England services, though in practice the term tends to be reserved for Catholics (Kastan 2014: 21)). Scholarship on the drama began to pick up on such issues in the 1990s in a burst of speculation that Shakespeare was Catholic whose high-water mark came with books like the 2003 collection Theatre and Religion, edited by Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay and Richard Wilson, and Wilson’s 2004 Secret Shakespeare, the publisher’s description of which bills ‘Shakespeare’s Catholic context’ as ‘the most important literary discovery of the last century’.6 The concerns driving this work were in no sense disinterested. Catholics had been written out of English history; the aim was to restore them to it. This is not necessarily an issue of belief, per se, but it is an issue

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of cultural and confessional identity. Shakespeare’s Catholicism matters because Catholicism matters. Claims about Shakespeare’s Catholicism have subsided since: the consensus is now that the evidence is equivocal at best.7 Perhaps Shakespeare offers a ‘bigtent’ Christianity (Kastan 2014: 29–30, 75) or a hybrid one (Hunt 2004; Mayer 2006). But the debate produced new attention to elements of Shakespeare’s plays that seem not to fit with Protestant principles, like the references to purgatory in Hamlet. This stands in contrast to the anti-Catholicism of other early modern plays: for example, the corrupt cardinals in John Webster’s tragedies, The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi. When the former stages Cardinal Monticelso’s elevation to the papacy (2019: 4.3) or the administration of last rites to Bracciano by two supposed Capuchins (5.3.134–56) – scenes for which Webster evidently did research – it invites us to see the institution of the Catholic Church as complicit in criminality. It stages ostensibly Catholic rituals in order to empty them of any hint of sacredness.

* On the other side of the religious spectrum, early modern drama has often been associated with satire of ‘puritans’ or hard-line Protestants.8 (‘Puritan’ is a term of abuse: no one would self-identify as such; they would call themselves Christians (Coffey and Lim 2008: 1–3)). Malvolio in Twelfth Night is called ‘a kind of Puritan’ (2.3.136); Angelo in Measure for Measure is called ‘precise’, another code word for radical or ‘forward’ Protestants (1.3.50). Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair features Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, a would-be reformer of the fairground who in the play’s penultimate scene confronts a puppet with the well-worn anti-theatricalists’ accusation of cross-dressing  – ‘you are an abomination; for the male among you putteth on the apparel of the female, and the female of the male’ (Jonson 2004: 5.5.90–92)  – and is confuted when the puppet ‘takes up his garment’ (99 SD), revealing its lack of genitalia. Anti-puritan satire was sometimes billed even in the titles of plays, as with the 1607 The Puritan, ascribed on the title page to ‘W.S.’, and the 1608 Family of Love, perhaps by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, which bears the name of a radical Protestant sect. But anti-theatricalism was not necessarily ‘puritan’. Stephen Gosson, author of the 1579 The Schoole of Abuse and the 1582 Playes Confuted, was a conforming clergyman (Kinney 2007). Even William Prynne, author of the 1633 Histriomastix, has a complex relationship to puritanism: in the 1630s, he stood for a return to the Calvinism of the pre-Caroline church; in the early 1640s, he embraced Presbyterianism; later he turned against it, defended the king, and found a place in the post-Restoration Church of England (Lamont 2011). The stage’s supposed hostility to puritanism has also been questioned. For one thing, ‘puritan’ is a moving target: one person’s puritan is another person’s godly Protestant; between the radical sectary and the Protestant who believes in the necessity of a ‘further Reformation’ there is a real gap. The ostensibly puritan leaders of London embraced theatre in the form of public pageants written by playwrights like Webster and Thomas Middleton. It has even been argued that such dramatists speak for a ‘City’ culture defined by

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middling-sort social values and moderately ‘puritan’ religious views (Heinemann 1980). Anti-theatrical tracts, incidentally, offer some of the strongest claims for the power of theatre: the capacity of mimetic performance to encourage imitation in the auditors; theatre’s contagious affective force; its capacity to transform persons, reshape character, solicit desire and compel sin. These texts are among the best resources we have for an early modern theory of theatre: as with Plato’s critique of poetry – which shapes Gosson’s arguments – the hostile witness can be a useful one (Halliwell 2002: 37–147). Recent criticism has turned Tillyard’s ‘solidly theocentric’ culture inside-out: the emphasis now is more likely to be on the complexity of the religious terrain and the multiple and sometimes surprising divisions and connections that define it. ‘[I]n the period of English history I consider’, Huston Diehl wrote in 1997, ‘religion was neither a stable nor a unifying influence, but rather the very “center and source of stress” in English society’ (1997: 3, quoting the anthropologist Clifford Geertz). The continuing vitality of such lines of thought is apparent in Musa Gurnis’s 2018 Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling, which places the drama in a ‘polyvocal confessional scene’ (1). A historicist approach to early modern religion tends to recover not the univocality of ‘Christian belief’ but dissent, conflict, debate. Here too, though, questions of historical fact can double as questions of value: the world we recover is at least partly the world we want to recover. Jackson and Marotti (2004:176) contrast a new historicist tendency ‘to render religion an alien other’ against Debora Shuger’s work, which ‘articulates more fully the intellectual traditions’ at stake.9 They praise Shuger for having a better account, but it is not hard to see that the opposite of treating religion ‘as an alien other’ is treating it as something pertaining to oneself. A better account of religion means one with which the critic identifies. To write about religion is to take up a position with respect to it.

* Some of the richest efforts to connect religion and the drama have traced the impact of theology on literary form. Debates over the Eucharist – as real presence, co-presence or mere symbol  – are one place to see the literary implications of theological questions: Eucharistic debates have an obvious relationship to the terrain of metaphor, symbol and allegory.10 The concept of the figural, classically analysed by Erich Auerbach, invites a similar crossing ([1944] 1959); Lisa Freinkel has argued that authorship in the early modern period was itself constituted in figural terms (2002: xx–xxii). Iconoclasm also engages the field of representation: the injunction against making graven images interferes with classical rhetorical and poetic theories centred on the image and the work of imagination.11 Debates about predestination open up questions vital to narrative structure (Shell 2010b: 120–74). Then there is Shuger’s account of the ‘Christian grand style’ or Valerie Forman’s analysis of tragicomic ‘redemption’ as a theologically inflected way of thinking about the productivity of loss (Forman 2008; Shuger 1988). In some cases, the relationship of religion to literature is direct; in others, analogical. All of this work recognizes that theology itself provides material for a theory of literature.

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Much recent scholarship on religion extends well beyond theology, or connects theology to other areas of cultural and political significance. Frances Dolan’s Whores of Babylon (1999) pursues the relationship between representations of women and representations of Catholics. Dennis Britton’s Becoming Christian (2014) connects the theology of baptism to the history of race. Melissa Sanchez’s Queer Faith (2019) reads ‘the Pauline theology of the divided will’ as ‘a neglected resource for queer theorizations of desire and subjectivity’ (3). The complexity of what it means to think about religion in the period can be exemplified by Measure for Measure, a play that invites us to connect confessional identities in surprising ways, as the ‘precise’ Angelo is paralleled with an Isabella who wants to enter a nunnery and even wishes ‘a more strict restraint / Upon the sisterhood’ (1.4.4–5). The story of Duke Vincentio, who in disguise engineers the play’s resolution, invites connecting sovereign power, and the power of the dramatic plot, to the God of Matthew 6:4 who ‘seeth in secret’. Thinking about religion in this play also means thinking about the state regulation of sexuality. Vincentio places Angelo as his surrogate in order to enforce moral legislation he has let lapse, as well as to test how the man who ‘scarce confesses / That his blood flows’ (1.3.51–52) will behave when in power. The first of Angelo’s acts that we hear about is a ‘proclamation’ that the ‘houses’ – the brothels – ‘in the suburbs of Vienna must be plucked down’ (1.2.90–3). In the main plot, the power of laws to serve as ‘needful bits and curbs’ (1.3.20) is paralleled with problems of internal self-governance that are if anything still more intractable. In Angelo, the play suggests that internal self-control  – the religio or scruple he feels in the face of moral infraction – becomes an incitement to the most vicious violations. After meeting Isabella, Angelo asks himself, ‘Dost thou desire her foully for those things / That make her good?’ (2.2.176–7). If this proves to him that ‘Blood’ is ‘blood’ (2.4.15) – that sexual desire is an ineradicable part of human nature – it also suggests that the strength of his self-regulatory mechanisms paradoxically produces an errant desire: he desires Isabella ‘foully’; later he calls that desire ‘sweet uncleanness’ (2.4.53). His desire manifests itself to him as filth, but that feeling does not dissuade him from pursuing Isabella with violence: it urges him on.12 To think about religion in this play is also to think about politics, psychology, gender, sexuality (see also Kastan (2014: 65–76); Shuger (2001)).

* Religion’s relation to politics is the issue that has probably done the most to propel it to critical attention. Here criticism of the drama opens onto historiographical debates. An earlier moment in criticism – marked, for example, by Margot Heinemann’s 1980 Puritanism and Theatre with its argument for an ‘opposition drama’ grounded in ‘puritan’ critiques of the court  – followed historians like Christopher Hill ([1972] 1991; see also Walzer 1965) in connecting puritanism and parliamentarianism, reading disputes over religious policy as the seed of a constitutional crisis that would erupt in the English revolution of the 1640s. In history departments, this account of the seventeenth century was challenged in and after the 1970s by ‘revisionists’ associated with Conrad Russell, for whom there was no constitutional conflict in

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early Stuart England and certainly no party-politics-style division between absolutists and constitutionalists. For the revisionists, the period was marked by a broad political consensus and the causes of the civil war were to be sought in local, essentially factional disputes.13 While revisionists perhaps had a reasonable case that scholars like Hill were reading modern politics into early modern history, their own explanations of the English civil war were less compelling: it began to look like an accident or like something that never happened at all. Religion provided them with a better account. According to John Morrill (1993: 68), the English civil war was not ‘the first European revolution’ but ‘the last of the Wars of Religion’ (see also Burgess (1998); Taylor and Tapsell (2013)). There was opposition after all, but it was religious, not political. Drama criticism has not explicitly pursued revisionist arguments. But perhaps one effect of revisionism was to encourage critics to treat religion as an at least partly autonomous domain, rather than – as it was for Hill, and as it remained to some extent for Heinemann – a proxy for social and political divisions.

* In the early 2000s, the relationship of religion to politics took another form under the term ‘political theology’. In part this meant renewed contact with Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies, subtitled A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology though its first chapters focus on early modern texts: Edmund Plowden’s Reports and Shakespeare’s Richard II. Prior to Kantorowicz, the phrase ‘political theology’ was associated with the ultra-conservative and later Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, whose 1922 Political Theology argued that all political concepts are secularized theological concepts: this was the first of a series of arguments critiquing liberalism by grounding all politics on the distinction between friend and enemy and by asserting that there is an irreducible core of dictatorship even in the most liberal democracy (see Schmitt [1922] 1985a, [1923] 1985b, [1932] 1995). Kantorowicz, whose book appeared in 1957, is too circumspect to name Schmitt, only referencing ‘the horrifying experience of our own time in which whole nations … fell prey to the weirdest dogmas and in which political theologisms became genuine obsessions’ ([1957] 1997: viii).14 But his account of the ‘body politic’ as a ‘political Incarnation’ shows Schmitt’s influence, even as it turns away from the absoluteness of sovereignty to a broader idea of the corporate body (445; see Kahn (2009): 84). The distinction between the king’s two bodies – the physical body of the monarch and the immaterial and immortal body politic of the realm – was translated into scholarship on early modern drama by Marie Axton’s 1977 The Queen’s Two Bodies, subtitled Drama and the Elizabethan Succession.15 A more highly theorized ‘political theology’ emerged in the early twenty-first century under the influence of Giorgio Agamben – who fused his reading of Schmitt with a line of thought derived from Walter Benjamin (Agamben 1998) – but also by way of a return to Kantorowicz. ‘[P]olitical theology’, Julia Lupton wrote in 2005, aims ‘to capture the strange hybridization of political and religious thinking in the Renaissance’ (5). Of course, Schmitt’s claims were not really historical but normative. Contemporary exponents of political theology are similarly not interested in the relationship of politics and religion simply as a historical fact but rather as a

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challenge to liberal narratives of secularization and modernity. In 2006 Lupton called this a ‘third way’ in the study of religion, identical with neither ‘old’ nor ‘new’ historicism, emphasizing ‘religion’s … claims to universal rather than merely local cultural validity’ (146); Jackson and Marotti distinguish historicist studies of religion from those that treat religion as ‘a transhistorical reality’ and thereby ‘challeng[e] the still standard Enlightenment divisions between the religious and the secular’ (3). At this level, political theology should be linked with other forms of ‘postsecularity’, a term that has gained enough traction that it has its own Routledge companion (Beaumont 2019). Already in the mid-twentieth century, the concept of secularization was vigorously debated (Blumenberg [1966] 1993; Löwith [1949] 2011). In the 1990s and early 2000s, critiques of modernity and secularity issued especially from postcolonial studies by theorists who saw that ‘modern’ and ‘secular’ were normatively understood to mean ‘European’ (Asad 2003; Chakrabarty 2000). Similar critiques have emerged in both feminist and queer scholarship, Sanchez notes (15). Because Renaissance studies was from the start pegged to ideas about modernity – for Jakob Burckhardt the Renaissance was ‘the leader of modern ages’ ([1860] 2002: 387) – such arguments have the potential to encourage a fundamental rethinking of the field. This rethinking comes with risks, embodied most notably in Schmitt himself. Hammill and Lupton call him ‘the conservative jurist’ (2004: 3), a phrase that sidesteps his Nazism. When Lupton first mentions Schmitt in 2005, she suggests that the phrase ‘political theology’ has another genealogy in Spinoza’s TheologicalPolitical Treatise (4). That book in fact works to separate the two terms of its title: the only thing religion has to teach is obedience to basic moral norms; theology confuses religion with philosophy; above all, politics must be kept separate from religion, a point urged against those Calvinists who were colluding with William of Orange to destroy the Dutch republic and return it to a more theocratic and monarchical state (see Nadler (2011): 45–51). Spinoza, a Jew whose name became synonymous with rationalism, atheism and materialism, is exactly the kind of figure whose legacy Schmitt wants to destroy. Does the project of a ‘left Schmittianism’ look a little different in the current moment, when explicitly fascist movements are again on the rise? It may also be that arguments for the necessary relation of politics to theology in the early modern period over-read their evidence. For Lorna Hutson, early modern drama evidences neither the staging nor subversion of sacral monarchy, but rather the conceptual consolidation of a body politic distinct from the monarch and realized in the always-uncertain work of interpreting legal statutes, by way of a sixteenthcentury humanist return to ancient theories of equitable interpretation. What we should see in the drama is not ‘the doctrine of the state as corpus mysticum’ (Hutson 2001: 167) but a more secular conception of the body politic.

* Everything I have discussed so far has centred on intra-Christian issues. This is often an explicit presupposition: early modern England, Allison Shell writes, ‘was almost completely a Christian world’ (2010b: 4). Perhaps  – depending on what ‘almost

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completely’ means. It does not mean ‘completely’: the population of England was more diverse than has often been claimed (Adelman 2008: 4–5; Habib 2007: 243, 255). A key development of the past twenty years has been criticism that opens the question of religion beyond Christendom. This is not without precedents, most importantly in studies of the representation of Jews in plays like Marlowe’s Jew of Malta and Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.16 The late 1990s and early 2000s also saw a new concern with representations of Muslims. Two orientations can be discerned in this work. One emphasized forms of positive cultural influence emanating from the Ottoman Empire (Jardine and Brotton 2000). The other analysed Islamophobic discourse, tracing representations of ‘Saracens’ or ‘Turks’ and often placing those in the frame of critiques of imperialism and capitalism (Matar 1998; Vitkus 1997, 2002). With that came accounts of the relationship of religion to race, sometimes drawing on the work of medievalists like Geraldine Heng.17 In terms like ‘Saracen’ and ‘Turk’, Islamophobic discourse is also a race-making discourse, negotiating both the boundaries of a conflicted Christendom and the boundary between an ostensibly white Europe and the world beyond (Britton 8–9, 27–8; Degenhardt 7–9; Robinson 2007: 5, 13–14). This work has engaged both canonical texts like Othello and overlooked plays like Philip Massinger’s The Renegado (Massinger 2010). Set in Tunis, The Renegado emplots an encounter between Christians and Muslims: a ‘renegado’ is a Christian who has ‘turned Turk’ or converted to Islam; the renegado of the title is a pirate named Grimaldi, but the threat of being seduced to convert is centrally embodied in Vitelli, an Italian gentleman disguised as a merchant who falls in love with the Turkish princess Donusa and nearly gives up his religion for her. He ends up instead converting her: religion and sexuality are again intimately entwined. Shuger has recently argued that the play emplots Christian ideas: it stages ‘the immense difficulty of remaining constant’ in the face of ‘temptation’ (2018: 125); it makes ‘the case for Christianity’ by insisting that ‘[t]rue religion makes possible true courage’ (126). This is surely true, but it also evacuates any concrete, historically defined religious positions from the play. For Shuger, Massinger’s ‘Turks’ are exactly like the ‘pagans’ of Massinger and Thomas Dekker’s The Virgin Martyr: there is nothing Muslim about these Muslims. Her Christians are also without specific confessional identities. The play’s climactic events in fact depend on some highly disputable issues: the theology of baptism; the activities of a Jesuit.18 There are competing ways of turning to religion: as part of an account of contingent historical conflicts and as the embodiment of an ostensibly unified structure of thought and feeling held up against a fragmentary, self-doubting modernity. The choice between those approaches may not finally be an analytic one. Scholarship on drama and religion has done much less to extend itself beyond the so-called Abrahamic faiths. What about early modern encounters with and representations of forms of animism, a topic that might connect questions about religion, race and environment? What about forms of heterodoxy that extend beyond the boundaries of any one faith? What about encounters with Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism? The early modern religious world is wider than past criticism has acknowledged. To say so is not simply to make a historical claim: it is

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also to raise again Ribner’s project of making space for non-Christian interpreters of the drama. When the topic is religion, the question of how to read early modern plays is never separable from the question of who is reading and what they are reading for.

NOTES 1 See Barton and Boyarin (2016); Derrida ([1996] 2002: 66–7); Benveniste ([1969] 2016: 530). 2 Cicero, De natura deorum 2.28.72; Lactantius, Divinae institutiones 4.28; Augustine, Retractationes 1.13.9. See Benveniste ([1969] 2016: 527–8). 3 For the prehistory here, see Fish (1972) and Fish ([1967] 1998). 4 The most useful starting points are Lake (1988) and Milton (1995). 5 For the first term, see Lake (1991) and McCullough (2017); for the second, Walsham (1993); for the third, Haigh (1993: 291) and Kastan (2014: 37). 6 Qtd. from https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9780719070259/. 7 Kastan (2014: 7–8, 16–40); Cox (2006: 556). See also Shapiro (2005: 148); Shell (2010b: 2–3). 8 Patrick Collinson argues that ‘puritanism’ was invented by dramatic and extradramatic satire: see Collinson (1995). 9 The primary reference seems to be Shuger ([1990] 1997), which insists that ‘[r]eligion is, first of all, not simply politics in disguise’ (6), but see also Shuger (1988). 10 E.g. Dawson (2001); Diehl (1997: 94–124); Mukherji (2018: 3–36); Netzley (2011); Zysk (2017). 11 Diehl (1997: 9–39); Gilman (1986); O’Connell (2000). On imagination, see Roychoudhury (2018); Robinson (2021: 31–5, 39–44, 87, 92–4). 12 See Robinson (2014: 573); I discuss Measure for Measure more extensively in an asyet unpublished second part of that argument. 13 See Kenyon (1992), reviewing among other things Russell (1990) and Cust and Hughes (1989). 14 Kantorowicz’s care in not naming Schmitt may derive from the reception of his own first book, on which see Kahn (2009: 78–9). 15 See also the important critique of Kantorowicz in Hutson (2001). 16 See especially Shapiro (1996) and Adelman (2008); for an earlier history, see Lipton (2014). 17 See Burton and Loomba (2007: 12–13), citing Heng (2003); Britton (2014: 5–13). See also Heng (2018). 18 On baptism, see Britton (2014); on the play’s position in confessional divides, see Robinson (2007: 127–43).

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REFERENCES Adelman, J. (2008), Blood Relations: Christian and Jew in ‘The Merchant of Venice’, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Agamben, G. ([1995] 1998), Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Asad, T. (2003), Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Auerbach, E. ([1944] 1959), ‘Figura’, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, 11–76, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Axton, M. (1977), The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession, London: Royal Historical Society. Barish, J. (1985), The Antitheatrical Prejudice, Berkeley: University of California Press. Barton, C. and D. Boyarin (2016), Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities, New York: Fordham University Press. Beaumont, J., ed. (2019), The Routledge Handbook of Postsecularity, New York: Routledge. Benveniste, E. ([1969] 2016), Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society, trans. E. Palmer, foreword G. Agamben, Chicago: Hau Books. Blumenberg, H. ([1966] 1993), The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. R. M. Wallace, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bradley, A. C. (1905), Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on ‘Hamlet’, ‘Othello’, ‘King Lear’, ‘Macbeth’, 2nd edn, London: Macmillan. Britton, D. (2014), Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance, New York: Fordham University Press. Bryant, J. A. (1961), Hippolyta’s View: Some Christian Aspects of Shakespeare’s Plays, Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Bullinger, H. (1577), Fiftie Godlie and Learned Sermons, trans. H. I., London. Burckhardt, J. ([1860] 2002), The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. H. Holborn, New York: Random House. Burgess, G. (1998), ‘Was the English Civil War a War of Religion? The Evidence of Political Propaganda’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 61 (2): 173–201. Burton, J. and A. Loomba (2007), Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion, New York: Palgrave. Carey, J. (1981), John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art, London: Faber and Faber. Chakrabarty, D. (2000), Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Coffey, J. and P. Lim (2008), The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collinson, P. (1995), ‘The Theatre Constructs Puritanism’, in D. L. Smith, R. Strier and D. Bevington (eds), The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London, 1576–1649, 157–69, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cooper, T. (1578), Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae, London. Cox, J. (2006), ‘Was Shakespeare a Christian, and If So, What Kind of Christian Was He?’, Christianity and Literature, 55 (4): 539–66.

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Cummings, B. (2015), ‘Afterword’, in D. Loewenstein and M. Whitmore (eds), Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion, 300–4, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cust, R. and A. Hughes, eds (1989), Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603–1642, London: Longman. Dawson, A. (2001), ‘Performance and Participation’, in A. Dawson and P. Yachnin (eds), The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England, 11–37, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Degenhardt, Jane Hwang (2010), Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Derrida, J. ([1996] 2002), ‘Faith and Knowledge’, reprinted in J. Derrida, Acts of Religion, ed. G. Anidjar, 40–101, New York: Routledge. Derrida, J. (2002), Acts of Religion, ed. G. Anidjar, New York: Routledge. Diehl, H. (1997), Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theatre in Early Modern England, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Dolan, F. (1999), Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Duffy, E. (1992), The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400–c.1580, New Haven: Yale University Press. Dutton, R., A. Findlay and R. Wilson, eds (2003), Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Elyot, T. (1538), The Dictionary of Sir Thomas Elyot, London. Fish, S. ([1967] 1998), Surprised by Sin: The Reader in ‘Paradise Lost’, 2nd edn, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fish, S. (1972), ‘Reason in The Reason of Church Government’, in Self-Consuming Artifacts, 265–302, Berkeley: University of California Press. Fish, S. (2005), ‘One University Under God?’ Chronicle of Higher Education, 7 January 2005. Available online: https://www.chronicle.com/article/One-University-UnderGod-/45077. Fitzherbert, T. (1610), The Second Part of a Treatise concerning Policy, and Religion, Douai. Forman, V. (2008), Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and the Early Modern English Stage, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Freinkel, L. (2002), Reading Shakespeare’s Will: The Theology of Figure from Augustine to the Sonnets, New York: Columbia University Press. Gilman, E. (1986), Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gurnis, M. (2018), Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling: Theater in Post-Reformation London, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Habib, I. (2007), Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677: Imprints of the Invisible, New York: Routledge. Haigh, C. (1993), English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Halliwell, S. (2002), The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hammill, G. and J. Lupton (2006), ‘Sovereigns, Citizens, and Saints: Political Theology and Renaissance Literature’, Religion & Literature, 38 (3): 1–11.

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Heinemann, M. (1980), Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heng, G. (2003), Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy, New York: Columbia University Press. Heng, G. (2018), The Invention of Race in the Middle Ages, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hill, C. ([1972] 1991), The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, London: Penguin. Hunt, M. (2004), Shakespeare’s Religious Allusiveness, Burlington: Ashgate. Hutson, L. (2001), ‘Not the King’s Two Bodies: Reading the “Body Politic” in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2’, in V. Kahn and L. Hutson (eds), Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe, 166–98, New Haven: Yale University Press. Jackson, K. and A. Marotti (2004), ‘The Turn to Religion in Early Modern Studies’, Criticism, 46 (1): 167–90. Jackson, K. and A. Marotti, eds (2011), Shakespeare and Religion: Early Modern and Postmodern Perspectives, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Jardine, L. and J. Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Jonson, B. (2004), ‘Bartholomew Fair’, in Michael Jamieson (ed.), ‘Volpone’ and Other Plays, 325–460, London: Penguin. Kahn, V. (2009), ‘Political Theology and Fiction in The King’s Two Bodies’, Representations, 106 (1): 77–101. Kantorowicz, E. ([1957] 1997), The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kastan, D. (2014), A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kenyon, J. (1992), ‘Revisionism and Post-revisionism in Early Stuart History’, Journal of Modern History, 64 (4): 686–99. Kinney, A. (2007), ‘Stephen Gosson (bap. 1554, d. 1625)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Lake, P. (1988), Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker, London: Allen & Unwin. Lake, P. (1991), ‘Lancelot Andrewes, John Buckeridge, and Avant-Garde Conformity in the Court of James I’, in L. L. Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, 113–33, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lamont, W. (2011), ‘William Prynne (1600–1669)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Lewis, C. S. (1964), The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lewis, C. T. and C. Short (1879), A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon. Lipton, S. (2014), Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography, New York: Henry Holt. Loewenstein, D. and M. Whitmore, eds (2015), Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Löwith, K. ([1949] 2011), Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Lupton, J. (2005), Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lupton, J. (2006), ‘The Religious Turn (to Theory) in Shakespeare Studies’, English Language Notes, 44 (1): 145–9. Massinger, P. (2010), The Renegado, ed. M. Neill, London: Methuen. Matar, N. (1998), Islam in Britain, 1558–685, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mayer, J.-C. (2006), Shakespeare’s Hybrid Faith: History, Religion and the Stage, New York: Palgrave. McCullough, P. (2017), ‘“Avant-Garde Conformity” in the 1590s’, in A. Milton (ed.), The Oxford History of Anglicanism, Volume 1: Reformation and Identity, c. 1520–1662, 380–93, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Milton, A. (1995), Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morrill, J. (1993), ‘The Religious Context of the English Civil War’, in The Nature of the English Revolution, 45–68, London: Longman. Mukherji, S. (2018), ‘Crossroads of Knowledge: Literature and Theology’, in S. Mukherji and T. Stuart-Buttle (eds), Literature, Belief and Knowledge in Early Modern England: Knowing Faith, 3–36, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Mullaney, S. (1988), The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nadler, S. (2011), A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Netzley, R. (2011), Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist in Early Modern Religious Poetry, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. O’Connell, M. (2000), The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early-Modern England, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ornstein, R. (1960), The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Ribner, I. (1960), Patterns in Shakespearean Tragedy, Abingdon: Routledge. Ribner, I. (1964), ‘Shakespeare, Christianity, and the Problem of Belief’, Centennial Review, 8 (1): 99–108. Robinson, B. (2007), Islam and Early Modern English Literature: The Politics of Romance from Spenser to Milton, New York: Palgrave. Robinson, B. (2014), ‘Disgust c. 1600’, ELH, 81 (2): 553–83. Robinson, B. (2021), Passion’s Fictions from Shakespeare to Richardson: Literature and the Sciences of Soul and Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roychoudhury, S. (2018), Phantasmatic Shakespeare: Imagination in the Age of Early Modern Science, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Russell, C. (1990), Unrevolutionary England, 1603–1642, Hambledon: Hambledon Press. Sanchez, M. (2019), Queer Faith: Reading Promiscuity and Race in the Secular Love Tradition, New York: New York University Press. Santayana, G. (1905), ‘The Absence of Religion in Shakespeare’, in Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, 91–101, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Schmitt, C. ([1922] 1985a), Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. G. Schwab, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Schmitt, C. ([1923] 1985b), The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. E. Kennedy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Schmitt, C. ([1932] 1995), The Concept of the Political, trans. G. Schwab, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shakespeare, W. (2008), Twelfth Night, ed. Keir Elam, Arden Shakespeare Third Series, London: Arden Shakespeare. Shakespeare, W. (2020), Measure for Measure, ed. A. R. Braunmuller and R. N. Watson, Arden Shakespeare Third Series, London: Arden Shakespeare. Shapiro, J. (1996), Shakespeare and the Jews, New York: Columbia University Press. Shapiro, J. (2005), A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, 1599, New York: HarperCollins. Shell, A. (2010a), ‘Tragedy and Religion’, in E. Smith and G. A. Sullivan (eds), The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy, 44–57, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shell, A. (2010b), Shakespeare and Religion, London: Methuen. Shuger, D. (1988), Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Shuger, D. ([1990] 1997), Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Shuger, D. (2018), ‘The Absence of Epistemology, or Drama and Divinity before Descartes’, in S. Mukherji and T. Stuart-Buttle (eds), Literature, Belief, and Knowledge in Early Modern England: Knowing Faith, 111–32, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Taylor, S. and G. Tapsell, eds (2013), The Nature of the English Revolution Revisited: Essays in Honour of John Morrill, Woodbridge: Boydell. Tillyard, E. M. W. (1943), The Elizabethan World Picture, London: Chatto and Windus. Vitkus, D. (1997), ‘Turning Turk in Othello: The Conversion and Damnation of the Moor’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 48 (2): 145–76. Vitkus, D. (2002), Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, New York: Palgrave. Walsham, A. (1993), Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England, Woodbridge: Boydell. Walzer, M. (1965), The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Webster, J. (2019), The White Devil, ed. B. S. Robinson, London: Bloomsbury. Wilson, R. (2005), Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion, and Resistance, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Zysk, J. (2017), Shadow and Substance: Eucharistic Controversy and English Drama across the Reformation Divide, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

PART THREE

New directions

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CHAPTER 5.1

Diversifying early modern drama 1: Early modern disability studies and trans studies GENEVIEVE LOVE

Let’s begin by imagining a city-comedy mash-up in which two main characters, Cripple from The Fair Maid of the Exchange ([1607] 2020) and Moll Cutpurse from The Roaring Girl (Middleton and Dekker [1611] 2002), meet at a site of exchange: [aside] I’ll now turn provident. I’ll to my shop And fall to work. (2.2.204–5) moll [aside] I go but to th’next shop. I am going to buy a shag ruff. (2.1.225, 209–10) cripple

cripple

Welcome, honest friend. What’s thy will with me? (3.2.4) moll

I come to buy. … Let me see a good shag ruff. (2.1.242, 230) […] moll

I cannot stay now, i’faith. (2.1.209) cripple

And so farewell! I can no longer stand To talk with you: I have some work in hand. (3.2.140–1) In the similar London cityscapes of their plays, Cripple and Moll both play central yet peculiar roles. Cripple is a pattern-drawer with a shop in London’s Royal Exchange (he outlines patterns on cloth for others to embroider); Moll is an avid consumer of fashion and luxury goods with money to spend. During the course of their respective plays, though, we never see Cripple sell or Moll buy. Indeed, the ‘[…]’placed at the centre of the mini-scene above marks their distinctive relationships to exchanges, economic and otherwise, in their plays: there’s an absence of exchange in this exchange.

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Scripting Cripple and Moll to interact reveals the degree to which, though one is a seller and one a buyer, they play similar roles in these scenes of consumption. Cripple is at his shop to sell and Moll at the ‘rank of shops’ to buy; their respective interlocutors neither buy Cripple’s goods nor sell goods to Moll. Characters flock to Cripple’s shop in the Exchange, Phyllis to insinuate her interest in him: ‘Yonder’s his shop … instruct the cripple to find out my love!’ (2.2.206, 208). And Frank seeks Cripple’s advice in other matters of the heart: ‘This is the shop! … Now let me have thy aid / To gull my brothers of that beauteous maid’ (3.2.1; 51–2). Moll strolls the rank of citizens’ shops – the tobacco shop, the feather shop, the sempsters’ shop – as a consumer: ‘’tis very good tobacco. How do you sell an ounce?’ (2.1.206–7). Their transactions are stymied, though, by the intersecting discourses of rumours about Moll’s sexual behaviour – ‘Get you from my shop!’ (2.1.241) – and Moll’s knowledge of the citizens’ and their wives’ sexual indiscretions – ‘Prithee, tend thy shop and prevent bastards’ (2.1.399). Cripple’s and Moll’s strengths in matters of exchange play out in sites other than the shop, and these capacities in trade and substitution are linked to their affiliations with, respectively, disabled and trans identities. Both disability studies and trans studies are concerned with how various kinds of human variation and difference interact with the variable social, cultural and representational determinations, expectations and frustrations of difference. ‘Disability studies’, in Simi Linton’s definition, ‘takes for its subject matter not simply the variations that exist in human behavior, appearance, functioning, sensory acuity, and cognitive processing, but, more crucially, the sense we make of those variations’ (1998: 2). The field has countered the ‘medical model’ of disability, which conceives of ‘individual impairment [as] a personal matter … disability needs to be “cured” and … “sufferers” crave the “health” and normativity that medicine might provide’ (Hobgood and Wood 2013: 4), promoting instead constructivist models that ‘distinguish between an impaired body and the environment that disables that body. Disability is not a problem intrinsic to a body needing correction, but a register of how the world is built to accommodate some bodies and not others’ (Williams 2020: 265). The troubling of a set of presumed relationships involving the body and the social is elaborated further in Susan Stryker’s definition of transgender studies: ‘transgender studies is concerned with anything that disrupts, denaturalizes, rearticulates, and makes visible the normative linkages we generally assume’ among the ‘sexually differentiated human body’, ‘a gendered sense of self’, ‘social roles’, and the subjective experience of these taken together (Stryker 2006: 3). The encounter between Cripple and Moll invented above gestures to the work of locating sites of affiliation and productive exchange between disability studies and trans studies – which may share space with certain sites where the relationship of the non-normative body to social space is especially urgent. Cripple and Moll seem to move with facility through the London of their plays. In the scene imagined above they meet in a public space where their encounters are both enabled and frustrated by their disabled and trans identities. Disability studies and trans studies also meet in a particular potent, fractious social space: the public bathroom. As Cassius Adair writes, ‘working at the nexus of trans and disability

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theories’ pointedly includes the ‘issue of bathroom politics’ (2015: 465). Because bathrooms ‘are not always accessible for people with disabilities, or safe for people who transgress gender norms’ (Chess et al. 2004: 217), ‘“peeing is political” for both trans people and people with disabilities’ (Adair 2015: 465). Chess et al emphasize the vital issue of access, which, for those with ‘nonnormative embodiment’, can be ‘both physical … and social’ (Adair 2015: 467): ‘bathroom accessibility is an important issue for a lot of different people … Bathroom activism is a multiidentity endeavor’ (2004: 220). Yet they also acknowledge a split that emerges at the bathroom meeting of trans and disability: ‘queer disability activists and scholars have drawn attention to the ableism that thrives within queer communities, and to the homophobia and transphobia that reside within disability circles’ (2004: 224). Disabled folks may resist affiliation with the queer community, whose bathroom use has sometimes been pejoratively associated with public sex; transpeople may resist identification with non-normativity as a determinant of bathroom use. Lest this all seem far distant from Cripple, Moll and early modern theatrical concerns, Sawyer Kemp reminds us that the modern theatre, where we now see early modern plays performed, is a space in which ‘control of the body is given over to the theater by the implicit consent of the audience’ and correspondingly one that is ‘functionally obsessed with restroom usage’ (2019: 266–7). Recent work in early modern literary studies has been energized by the interventions of disability studies and trans studies. Both fields go back at least to the 1980s and 1990s; early modern literary studies took up both rather recently. The avowed ‘first’ early modern literary disability studies and trans studies interventions came ten years apart, both in special issues of journals: the 2009 ‘Disabled Shakespeares’ issue of Disability Studies Quarterly edited by Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood, and the 2019 ‘Early Modern Trans Studies’ issue of The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies edited by Simone Chess, Colby Gordon and Will Fisher.1 As they self-consciously bring disability and trans studies into early modern studies of English literature, the issues’ introductory essays share a few gestures, including a resounding call to address gaps in the field. Noting their firstness, the latter editors also ‘acknowledge that, in some respects, we are a little late to the party. It is surprising that it has taken so long for early modern studies to explicitly engage with the analytic lenses offered by trans studies, a well-established and thriving academic discipline’ (Chess, Gordon and Fisher 2019: 2). Hobgood and Wood’s 2009 special issue likewise responds to the ‘paucity’ of work in early modern literary disability studies; their 2013 edited collection Recovering Disability in Early Modern England furthers this response, moving from the ‘unexamined ubiquity of Shakespearean disability representations’ to the ‘ubiquity of early modern disability representations across the literary record, in canonical and noncanonical works alike’ (2013: 11). This emphasis on the extent to which early modern studies has failed – or refused – to engage with vibrant contemporary theoretical paradigms is accompanied by an excavation of early modern cultural models and methods. The 2013 and 2019 collections consider a range of early modern cultural materials, especially non-Shakespearean texts; the methodologies also vary, from historicist to presentist, from performance-based to archival and philological.

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The 2009 and 2019 special issues finally share the hope that connecting each of the two fields, disability studies and trans studies, to early modern literary studies will be a relationship that is mutually beneficial. ‘We suggest’, Chess, Gordon and Fisher write, ‘that the methods, topics, and insights of trans studies have the potential to recalibrate critical work on gender in Renaissance texts. At the same time, the essays in this special issue beautifully indicate that early modern studies has a great deal to offer trans studies in return’ (2019: 1). Likewise, Hobgood and Wood aim ‘to reveal the utility of disability studies to early modern scholarship while advocating that Renaissance cultural representations of non-standard bodies might provide new models for theorizing disability that are simultaneously more inclusive and specific than those currently available’ (2009: n.p.). In the years following Hobgood and Wood’s two collections, a number of monographs in early modern literary disability studies appeared: Genevieve Love’s Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability (2018), Lindsey Row-Heyveld’s Dissembling Disability in Early Modern English Drama (2018), Elizabeth Bearden’s Monstrous Kinds: Body, Space, and Narrative in Renaissance Representations of Disability (2019), Hobgood’s own Beholding Disability in Renaissance England (2021) and Katherine Schaap Williams’s Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater (2021). These books, alongside numerous articles and other collections, illustrate the diverse expansion of disability studies in early modern literary studies. Monographs doing the same in early modern trans studies are being completed now by scholars like Chess, Gordon and Kemp. Eli Clare frames the connection and tension between trans and disabled identities: ‘The ways in which queer people and disabled people experience oppression follow, to a certain extent, parallel paths … both peoples have been considered freaks of nature.’2 Yet ‘at many points the paths diverge’ (2015: 112–13). Jasbir Puar explores at length the ‘fraught … nexus of disability and trans’ (2017: 35). Transpeople might ‘resist alliances with people with disabilities’ because of the history of disability stigmatization, but the possible challenge to trans affiliation with disability ‘is also about trans bodies being recruited … for a more generalized transformation of capacitated bodies into viable neoliberal subjects’ – that is, into productive, able bodies (Puar 2017: 35). Correspondingly, from the other side – the association of disability with trans identity – the ‘debates over inclusion or exclusion of gender identity disorder in the ADA [American Disabilities Act]’ exemplify how ‘gender normativity [is] integral to the productive potential of the disabled body … The tolerance of the “difference” of disability is negotiated through the disciplining of the body along other normalizing registers of sameness’ (Puar 2017: 38–9). Puar points to how crucial to an intersectional analysis of trans and disability is Clare, whose writing reveals the ‘epistemological predicaments of the disabled trans subject or the trans disabled subject’ (2017: 42). Clare, narrating his own complicated relationship to cure, reflects specifically on the relationship of people who are both disabled and trans to the ideology of cure: ‘Trans people who want to transition … have many different relationships to cure. Some folks name their transness a birth defect, a disability in need of repair’ (2017: 177–8). The story of his simultaneous rejection of and desire for medical intervention is one of the ‘messier stories’ about

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‘inexplicable’ desires: ‘there is no real way to reconcile my lifelong struggle to love my disabled self exactly as it is with my use of medical technology to reshape my gendered and sexed body-mind’ (2017: 177). Disability and trans scholarship and activism may find commonality in the naming of and resistance to the biopolitical policing of non-normative bodies;3 that the affiliation may also be messy and fraught is marked by spaces like the bathroom and the conceptual sites like the cure. As suggested by the focus on public bathrooms, recent legal discourse and contemporary medical technologies, some work in literary disability studies and trans studies advocates for a presentist methodology, including the promotion of scholarly approaches that connect embodied experience in the present to lived experience in the past. In a productive methodological resonance, both disability and trans scholarship have argued for modes of reading that recognize disabled and trans embodiment and experience in non-diagnostic ways, acknowledging the value of a reading strategy attuned to trans and disabled knowledges from contemporary communities. Tobin Siebers outlines a disability studies reading strategy that ‘conceives of disability as embodied knowledge’ (2016: 452). Kemp’s work on trans bodies in Shakespeare performance echoes Siebers’s emphasis on the importance of embodied knowledge: If we as scholars are going to engage in a practice that believes trans people are integral to Shakespeare, it seems important to create scholarship that is rooted in experience, not abstraction. If we are going to visit the past to serve the present, it should actually and meaningfully serve those populations whose language, identities, and communities we are borrowing. (2019: 125) While a long history of scholarship on Shakespeare’s plays might suggest turning to cross-dressing as an analogy – perhaps in the way that theatrical prosthetics have so easily been understood to mark disability – Kemp proposes instead that we read for experiences that affect transpeople disproportionately, including ‘discussions of body dysphoria … harassment by law enforcement figures … homelessness … sexual violence’ (2019: 124). Prioritizing disability knowledge, for Siebers, similarly means that ‘the identification of people with disabilities no longer derives solely from the physical or mental properties of their bodies … people are not recognized as disabled apart from their self-knowledge. The disabled know themselves and others as disabled based on the possession and use of embodied knowledge’ (2016: 452–3). Elizabeth Freeman, writing of queer presentism and historicism, evokes a connection that might apply to both trans and disability studies: ‘Contact with historical materials can be precipitated by particular bodily dispositions, and … these connections may elicit bodily responses … that are themselves a form of understanding’ (2010: 95–6). Freeman captures the keen importance of embodied knowledge in writing about texts removed from us historically: it is both a strategy that recognizes the power of lived experience and an acknowledgment that texts from the past can challenge our assumptions about what disability and trans identities can mean in the present. Let us return to Cripple and Moll, and in the spirit both of this kind of reading and of exploring the possibilities of early modern disability/trans affiliation, seek Moll

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and Cripple knowing each other. When we find Cripple and Moll in community with each other, what do they tell us about capacity, access and exchange? Both centre the bustling action in their city-comedy London. Moll (also known as Jack) is an urban denizen and consumer who wears both men’s and women’s clothes, who ‘loves to lie o’both sides o’th’ bed myself’ (2.2.37–8) and who has been ‘described in scholarship as a roaring girl, a transvestite, a lesbian, and, more recently, as both (proto) butch, and transgender’ (Chess 2016: 16). Cripple is a vendor in London’s Royal Exchange who is sought out for his related skills in verbal wit and matchmaking, who uses crutches and has an unidentified limb difference in his legs. Moll and Cripple’s roles match: both are sociable and extroverted, connected to nearly every other character and therefore social group. They are thus well positioned to facilitate their plays’ marriages, though they reject participation in the institution themselves. ‘’Twixt lover’s hearts’, Sebastian avers of Moll, ‘she’s a fit instrument’ (2.2.203), but Moll has ‘no humor to marry … Marriage is but a chopping and changing, where a maiden loses one head and has a worse in’th’place’ (2.2.37, 44–6). Nonetheless, Moll eagerly facilitates the marriage of Mary and Sebastian with which The Roaring Girl ends (the success of the project involves Moll role-playing as Sebastian’s chosen partner). Cripple likewise declares, ​​‘Fancy shall never marry me to woe. / Take this of me: a young man’s never marred, / Till he by marriage from all joy be barred’ (2.2.250–2). Yet Frank seeks out Cripple to help him in his scheme to marry Phyllis, a project Cripple tackles with alacrity (it involves Frank disguising himself as Cripple). Furthermore, Cripple facilitates the marriage of the play’s other eligible young woman to the ‘proper’ gallant (this management of gallant mis/behaviour is something Moll does, too). They assume congruent supervisory roles in their Londons, swirling through economic worlds that are in the end mainly romantic and sexual ones, yet also remaining apart from and above them, dramaturgically directing the action even as they strike a satirical pose towards it. Both Cripple and Moll are capable and have capacity, contesting our assumptions that disabled or trans identities are defined by innate lack or restriction.4 Indeed, their capacity for social manoeuvring is animated by their disabled and trans identities, an effect we see through their skill at the manipulation and transfiguration of doubleness. Both characters in their non-normative embodiment are linked to multiplicity. Cripple is insulted as ‘thou that has more legs than nature gave thee’; his prosthetic endowment is also a source of capability: ‘Now stir thee, Cripple’, he enjoins himself upon hearing another character in distress, ‘and of thy four legs, / Make use of one to do a virgin good’ (1.1.85–6). Moll is named and described in so many ways that their identity becomes, in Marjorie Rubright’s word, ‘kaleidoscopic’: ‘a thing one knows not how to name’; ‘two shadows to one shape’; ‘woman more than man, / Man more than woman’; ‘a monster with two trinkets’; mad Moll, merry Moll, honest Moll, Jack (1.2.129–133, 2.2.81, 1.1.100, 2.1183, 5.2.220).5 Both plays end with plays on the trans and disability multiplicity that have enlivened them throughout. Moll’s facilitation of Sebastian and Mary’s betrothal, the conclusion towards which the play is driving, banks on Moll’s appearance ‘masked’ as Sebastian’s chosen spouse, a figure that brings forth multiple beings: a

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double for Mary, the ‘real’ bride; an alternate version of the self as a partner for a man, whether parodic or not; a spectre of that which they’ve rejected. The Fair Maid of the Exchange similarly ends with a troubled, spectral double that summons the concluding ‘real’ marriage. Frank, in disguise as Cripple, attempts in the final scene to secure his marriage to Phyllis, when Cripple himself enters. The doubling of a double character – not just four legs instead of two, but eight legs instead of four – crosses the line into the uncanny and Phyllis reacts in horror: ‘Hence foul deformity! / Nor thou, nor he, shall my companion be, / If cripples dead the living seem to haunt’ (5.1.288–90). Phyllis will in fact end up betrothed to Frank; the play relies on Cripple to conjure the multiplicity needed to bring the plot to conclusion. The skill of theatrical impersonation, the multiplicity required to arrange other characters in their places for comic conclusion, banks on the kinds of multiplicity that move through Moll’s and Cripple’s bodies. Rubright’s work on Moll’s ‘transgender capacity’ endows the philological and ontological richness of Moll’s many names with locomotive energy. Rubright renders the character’s name as ‘Moll | Jack’: the line (|) is ‘a membrane through which the play’s ideas of masculinity and femininity pass back and forth … Moll or Jack, as well as Moll then Jack … Moll as Jack’ (2019: 51). It is also ‘a fold that creases differences into being across the self-same subject’: ‘Moll is Jack and Jack is Moll’. They ‘materialize gender as processual and ongoing change’; they are ‘moving mattering’ (Rubright 2019: 51–2).6 Cripple, too, is ‘moving mattering’. Paralleling Rubright’s naming, we could supply his name as ‘Cripple | Crutch’, the latter a name he’s also called. Cripple’s first words in the play apostrophize his crutches, inaugurating the dynamic relationship between Crutch and Cripple: Now you supporters of decrepit youth, That mount this substance ’twixt fair heaven and earth, Be strong to bear that huge deformity. And be my hands as nimble to direct them, As your desires to waft me hence to London. (1.1.74–8) Cripple addresses his prosthetics as separate and autonomous entities: ‘you supporters’ as opposed to ‘my hands’. Yet the tender intimacy of his address to his crutches and the distance Cripple places between himself and his body (‘this substance’ and especially ‘that huge deformity’) combine to suggest the inclusion of the crutches in Cripple’s person. This suggestion is underscored by Cripple’s notion that even as his hands will ‘direct them’, the crutches’ ‘desire’ motivates his movement through the world, across the stage. The ongoing, processual relationship of Cripple and his prosthetics – Cripple or Crutch, Cripple is Crutch – is what animates Cripple and moves him through London. The transdisabled ‘moving mattering’ of Moll | Jack | Cripple | Crutch secures their dramaturgical and social capacity. While in their ongoing locomotive ontology they may lack a place in the patterns they design, they are also untethered. As the arrangements of other characters snap into place at the ends of these plays, these characters keep moving, reaching forward to a trans and disability future that is still coming into being.7

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NOTES 1 Chess’s own Male-to-Female Crossdressing in Early Modern English Literature (2016) predates the latter special issue; still the ‘only monograph to date that engages with trans studies in a sustained way and brings the insights of the field to bear on early modern English literature and culture’ (Chess, Gordon and Fisher 2019: 20), the book argues for the relational status of queer gender and for the benefits that accrue to male-to-female crossdressers and their communities. While a number of books in literary disability studies and trans studies appeared prior to the publication of the two particular special issues, they are (other than Chess’s) focused on time periods outside the Renaissance – notably, the medieval. 2 ‘Freak’ is an important term for Clare. See ‘freaks and queers’ in Clare (2015: 81–118). 3 For an early exploration of connections between disability and trans studies, see Mog (2008). 4 Multiple senses of ‘capacity’ are at play here: on ‘transgender capacity’ (a kind of ontological potentiality), see Rubright (2019), esp. 47–8; on ‘capacity’ in the biopolitical sense, see Puar (2017), passim. 5 For an excellent Roaring Girl wordscape including all of Moll’s ‘names’, see Rubright (2019: 46). 6 Rubright cites the phrase ‘moving mattering’ from Hayward and Weinstein (2015: 197). 7 My phrasing here draws on Chess’s reflection, ‘It’s true that, when we read literary figures from the past as analogous to our own lived queer experiences, we set ourselves up for failure and disruption … What if we let those figures reach forward to us, even as we feel backward toward them?’ (2016: 175). Chess herself is drawing on language from Love (2009).

REFERENCES Adair, C. (2015), ‘Bathrooms and Beyond: Expanding a Pedagogy of Access in Trans/ Disability Studies’, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2 (3): 464–8. Bearden, E. (2019), Monstrous Kinds: Body, Space, and Narrative in Renaissance Representations of Disability, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Chess, S. (2016), Male to Female Crossdressing in Early Modern English Literature: Gender, Performance, and Queer Relations, New York: Routledge. Chess, S., A. Kafer, J. Quizar and M. U. Richardson (2004), ‘Calling All Restroom Revolutionaries!’, in M. B. Sycamore (ed.), That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, 216–29, Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press. Chess, S., C. Gordon and W. Fisher (2019), ‘Introduction: Early Modern Trans Studies’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 19 (4): 1–25. Clare, E. (2015), Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, Durham: Duke University Press.

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Clare, E. (2017), Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure, Durham: Duke University Press. The Fair Maid of the Exchange ([1607] 2020), ed. G. Love, in J. Lopez (gen. ed.), The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama, 816–81, New York: Routledge. Hobgood, A. P. (2021), Beholding Disability in Renaissance England, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Hobgood, A. P. and D. H. Wood (2009), ‘Introduction: “Disabled Shakespeares”’, Disability Studies Quarterly, 29 (4). Hobgood, A. P. and D. H. Wood (2013), ‘Introduction: Ethical Staring: Disabling the English Renaissance’, in Hobgood and Wood (eds), Recovering Disability in Early Modern England, 1–22, Columbus: Ohio University Press. Freeman, E. (2010), Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Durham: Duke University Press. Hayward, E. and J. Weinstein (2015), ‘Introduction: Transanimalities in the Age of Trans*Life’, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2 (2): 195–208. Kemp, S. K. (2019), ‘“In That Dimension Grossly Clad”: Transgender Rhetoric, Representation, and Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Studies, 47: 120–6. Linton, S. (1998), Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity, New York: New York University Press. Love, G. (2018), Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability, London: Arden Shakespeare. Love, H. (2009), Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Middleton, T. and T. Dekker ([1611] 2002), ‘The Roaring Girl’, in D. Bevington (gen. ed.), Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, 1377–449, New York: W. W. Norton. Mog, A. (2008), ‘Threads of Commonality in Transgender and Disability Studies’, Disability Studies Quarterly, 28 (4). Puar, J. K. (2017), ‘Bodies with New Organs: Becoming Trans, Becoming Disabled’, in The Right to Maim: Debility | Capacity | Disability, 33–61, Durham: Duke University Press. Row-Heyveld, L. (2018), Dissembling Disability in Early Modern English Drama, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rubright, M. (2019), ‘Transgender Capacity in Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s The Roaring Girl (1611)’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 19 (4): 45–74. Siebers, T. (2016), ‘Shakespeare Differently Disabled’, in V. Traub (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race, 435–53, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stryker, S. (2006), ‘(De)Subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies’, in Stryker and S. Whittle (eds), The Transgender Studies Reader, 1–17, New York: Routledge. Williams, K. S. (2020), ‘Disability Studies’, in E. Gajowski (ed.), The Arden Research Handbook of Contemporary Shakespeare Criticism, 265–78, London: Arden Shakespeare. Williams, K. S. (2021), Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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CHAPTER 5.2

Diversifying early modern drama 2: Gaining perspective: Race, diversity and early modern studies FARAH KARIM-COOPER

Undergraduates entering a first-year Shakespeare or early modern drama course might learn about the political, social, theatrical and cultural contexts of Elizabethan and Jacobean London. For instructors, the material available to draw upon is vast, from rare books that illustrate the prescriptive and epistemological discourses of the period to the range of literary texts that were in dialogue with or helped to shape its writing and dramaturgical practices. A variety of critical methodologies is also taught in such survey courses, from Feminism, New Historicism, Marxism, performance history, to post-colonial thought, but how often does a consideration of race or early modern black presence feature as a key thematic and theoretical question? Since 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic began and shortly after the murder of George Floyd enabled Black Lives Matter to become a more global rallying cry, there has been an increased interest in embedding British history, literature and culture in the contexts of race, empire, colonialism and slavery. In the field of early modern studies in particular, lecturers are exploring ways to include race as well as a multiplicity of critical perspectives that offer a more meaningful and dynamic encounter between twenty-first-century students and early modern texts. However, there are several issues that currently face academics teaching Shakespeare and early modern drama that are shaping the direction of scholarship and pedagogy more generally. A post-pandemic world will be very different from the one we have grown accustomed to, perhaps unrecognizable altogether, and so many of these issues arise from the events surrounding and the effects of the pandemic; the profound effect of impending climate catastrophe, social isolation, online learning and teaching and racial reckoning on the mental health of students necessitates a deeper understanding of the potentially harmful impact of early modern narratives on the learner; the increased awareness of racial inequity may affect the courses students select and the demands they make regarding diversity of faculty and campus equality; finally,

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the long history of decolonizing efforts and the recent urgency to de-authorize the canon will also mean that Shakespeare and early modern drama will need to be taught, researched and performed innovatively, in ways that account for all kinds of bodies and perspectives. In this chapter, I want to explore some of the urgent questions facing the field, consider some possible strategies for repositioning the literature and drama of the period in the classroom, and point to the demand for more equitable practices within the academy more broadly. When they published their collection of essays, Teaching Social Justice through Shakespeare, in 2019, Wendy Beth Hyman and Hillary Eklund could not have predicted how quickly the landscape would change only a year later. Nevertheless, the collection demonstrates an awareness of the unsustainability of the status quo in the teaching of Shakespeare as it registers an important shift in the attitudes as well as the demographic of students in university Shakespeare and early modern drama courses (although focused in the United States, this study has much value with regard to the British context). They observe that the ‘moment seems right for early modern studies to undertake a new kind of engaged truth-seeking and truth-making’ (Hyman and Eklund 2019: 7). Truth-seeking seems poignantly urgent on this side of the pond given the British government’s design on putting a stop to what they refer to as a ‘noisy minority of activists constantly trying to do Britain down’ (Heffer 2021). Singling out universities and heritage organizations in 2021, the UK government declared it would protect British artefacts (in light of the toppling of the Edmund Colston statue in Bristol in June of 2020 (Grey 2020)) and preserve ‘free speech’ by appointing a ‘champion’ for universities thus empowering the Office for Students to sanction universities for failing to maintain freedom of speech on their campuses. But there is no evidence of free speech being in any crisis or danger since debate is still actively encouraged (Scott-Bauman 2021). Cynically, part of the government’s concern grows out of the increasing desire in academia and in the heritage sector to decolonize the past: to expose the centuries of whitewashing from British historiography and bring to light deeper histories of colonization and the Atlantic slave trade. One of the greatest challenges in teaching, researching and performing race and the early modern canon, then, is the cultural and political opposition to examining the past with the rigour and authenticity necessary for a true and ethical account of the place of people of colour in that past. Therefore, as initiatives to widen participation in universities and to open the pipeline for students of colour into postgraduate studies are underway in the UK, our approaches to researching and teaching early modern drama and Shakespeare need re-tooling so that the material from this period, which largely represents Western Anglo-American reception, is not persistently presented through the lens of cultural whiteness.

INTRODUCTION TO CRITICAL WHITENESS STUDIES Aren’t all the courses about white people anyway? – Anonymous student (Sueyoshi 2013: 373) Critical whiteness studies is a growing field of enquiry in literary contexts, but it has been an active methodology for decades within the disciplines of Education and

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Social Sciences, such as in the work of Sara Ahmed (2007, 2004), David Gilborn (2005), Shona Hunter (2021) and Steven Garner (2007) to name only a few. In Shakespeare and early modern studies, scholars such as Ian Smith1 and Arthur J. Little (forthcoming) are applying critical frameworks of whiteness to textual criticism and disciplinary analysis, while Ambereen Dadabhoy (2020; see also ‘Understanding Whiteness’ 2020) has written about the pervasiveness of whiteness in teaching and in the critical history of the field. When teaching race within any context it is vital to include discussions of whiteness for two main reasons: (a) to discover how the history and the study of literary texts and culture have been dominated by white perspectives and that therefore this history is selective and potentially biased towards white experience and positionality; (b) identification of whiteness as a racial marker itself is crucial to equipping white students with a vocabulary for discussing how language and culture ‘others’ people of colour, and will inform interpretations and analyses of anti-black and religious-based racism in texts and in culture. Additionally, it de-objectifies black and brown people in any discussion of race when whiteness is finally raced. As Amy Sueyoshi observes, ‘the main purpose of whiteness studies is to make the social construct of inequality though “whiteness” visible’ (Sueyoshi 2013: 378). In their assertion of the ‘need for Critical Whiteness Studies in Education’ as a form of resistance, Brittany Aronson and Kyle Ashlee explain why deconstructing whiteness as a racial category is crucial to any discussion of race in an educational setting: While it is crucial to center the experiences of racially-minoritized students, exclusively doing so enables White educators and White students to leave their privilege on the shelf. Indeed, when educators confront White students with the realities of racism from the perspective of people of Color without addressing the systemic constructions of Whiteness, marginalized voices are dismissed and learning is delayed. (2018: 51) When teaching critical race theory alongside early modern drama, conducting some analysis or discussion about whiteness would go some way towards addressing the peripherality of the students of colour in the room, who may also be experiencing a form of racial melancholy provoked by an encounter with textual examples of racism and the elevation of whiteness evident in Western European literature. Racial melancholy is a phenomenon underpinning the experience of one’s racial life; described as a kind of grief that is a result of overt and systemic forms of racism, it is intertwined with racial identity (Eng and Han 2019). The persistent elevation of whiteness in early modern texts as well as in cultural media and in the classroom conveys a message that whiteness is the norm and that, in its ideal form, it constitutes perfection; because it cannot be attained by people of colour, this perceived inability to achieve ‘perfection’ can lead to racial melancholy. I learned recently that people from the part of the world where I was born (Indian subcontinent) have been ‘travelling to or settling in Britain since the early 1600s’ (Fisher 2004: 1). In his book, Fisher outlines the traffic and exchanges in people and merchandise between England and India as a mounting ‘counterflow’

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of Indians entering Britain, living there and producing knowledge in ways that compelled British responses (2004: 1). The narratives I heard growing up and being raised by a half-Indian half-English father were that South Asians never felt welcome in Britain and I had assumed it was because we had only been there since the early twentieth century. That there were Indians in England in the early modern period was, for me personally, an extraordinary and liberating discovery to make. Although I fell in love with the works of Shakespeare, I had never found a way to fully identify with his world. Studying Elizabethan theatre and culture felt alienating and fascinating all at the same time. Of course, every historian suffers a degree of alienation from the moments in time they are attempting to reconstruct, but the added layer of ethnic alienation and of reading racist and xenophobic language from that era creates a response to the period that makes a scholar of colour feel out of place, like an interloper into a field of study seemingly irrelevant to them. This phenomenon, first identified by black feminist Patricia Hill Collins in 1998 and known as ‘outsider-within’, speaks to ‘the liminal border space of marginalisation she experienced as a woman of colour working inside white academy’ (Mirza 2018: 11). For a scholar of colour, the experience of seeming to belong because they possess ‘both the credentials for admittance and the rights of formal membership’ (2018:11) is at odds with the lived experience of racial trauma. The trauma is cumulative over time for scholars of colour and those of nonChristian backgrounds, who are on a daily diet of pre-modern texts that demonize and dehumanize people on religious and racial grounds. Moreover, these scholars then have to work in a field where systemic racism reminds them of their bodily and religious difference on a daily basis. Therefore, to create an inclusive space for discussions of whiteness in the critical field and racial heterogeneity in the primary texts we study would make a powerful difference for minoritized scholars and students alike.

EQUAL PLAYING FIELD The field of early modern drama studies is not an equal one in lots of ways: there are brutal sexism, gender discrimination and parity issues as well as a severe structural problem evident in the diminishing opportunities for early career scholars and the unequal treatment of contingent faculty. Racial disparities are also deeply systemic in academic institutions, and these disparities are related to those on a larger, macro level when it comes to society more generally. The Macpherson Inquiry (which followed the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence by police in 1993) defines institutional racism as a ‘collective failure to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origins’ (Steven Lawrence Inquiry 1999). Since this report was published, there has been wide understanding of how institutional racism operates in higher education. Mirza observes that while ‘the “success story” of expansion in higher education has led to

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a more diverse student body, it ironically has not produced a more inclusive higher education sector’ (2018: 8). The lack of inclusivity extends not just to student admissions, attainment and experience but also to the pipeline into postgraduate studies, teaching opportunities, publishing, tenure and the REF (Research Excellence Framework in the UK to assess research output), all compounded by the persistent promotion of white faculty to the professoriate. As of March 2021, there are no Black professors of Shakespeare or early modern studies employed fulltime in a UK higher education institution, and there are only two people of colour at professor level who specialize in this area (Adams 2020). Academic posts are few and far between throughout the UK, and in order to be eligible early career scholars are expected to have had mini-careers including teaching experience, publishing, some conference experience and perhaps even a bit of coordination of events or impactful outreach. It is wildly inappropriate and oppressive to expect any postgraduate working on a doctoral thesis to accumulate the equivalent profile of someone who already has two or three years’ experience in the field. Such that it is, many are at a disadvantage, not least because of the gatekeeping practices that have plagued academia for a long time. In 2020, the Executive Board of RaceB4Race (a collective of BIPOC scholars seeking racial justice in pre-modern literary studies) issued a call for the dismantling of publishing gatekeeping that has been a staple of the field: All academic journals and presses need to think about what structures are limiting access and hindering the full participation of scholars of color. After all, how academic journals structure their practices reflects their values. (Coles, Hall and Thompson 2020) The letter goes on to question publishers regarding the make-up of their editorial boards, their reviewing practices, and how they define and articulate their evaluative criteria. How Shakespeare and early modern drama are taught at school and at university (though often quite divergently) also needs a reconsideration because of the radically changing demands, interests and cultural reflections on identity of the current and next few generations of learners. Using widening participation initiatives to encourage a diverse range of students to study English or drama at university addresses one junction in the pipeline, but how do early modernists encourage students from non-white backgrounds to consider postgraduate degrees in pre-modern studies? This is an important question to ask, of course, before it is even considered how university posts and promotions are acquired. It is time to move beyond the white academy, and while there are larger social issues and institutional racism even beyond higher education, there is an urgent necessity to re-evaluate the way we conduct admissions, teaching, publishing, recruitment and promotion. Mentorship, networking and academic inclusivity are moves that are already underway in the field.2

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TEACHING AND RESEARCHING EARLY MODERN DRAMA WITH RACE There are a variety of ways to consider the canon of early modern drama in relation to questions of race, racialization or race-thinking. I will discuss a few strategies for the remainder of the chapter in order to illustrate the potentiality for opening up old plays to new meanings in either teaching or research practice. A reliable and exciting vehicle for the analysis of pre-modern literature is of course an historicist approach that takes into account the ideologies and practices gleaned from an examination of books and manuscripts of the period. Doing so now necessitates demonstrating an awareness that black lives mattered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The dominance of white perspectives in the academy has cast a shadow over the very fact of black and brown people’s presence in England. The archival work of Peter Fryer (1984), Imtiaz Habib (2008) and Onyeka (2013) shows overwhelming evidence of black Africans living in England often brought into the country illicitly; many worked in service, some as tradesmen, many marrying cross-racially. But an important question to ask now that we are aware of this documentary material is: How can this body of archival evidence serve an interpretative enquiry into literary and dramatic meaning? One method might include an application of this archival evidence to different aspects of theatre history, such as the relationship between the audience demographic in early modern playhouses and the material practices of costume, makeup and other forms of racial impersonation. Such an analysis would need to question the racial homogeneity of playhouse audiences and consider, though speculatively, the potentiality of reception in such a context. In a recent essay, I consider Richard Burbage’s performance of Othello; if the black presence extended into the yards and galleries of amphitheatres, we would need to think about the multiplicity of responses to Burbage’s racial impersonation, for example (Karim-Cooper 2022). Studies that consider race and racial difference in early modern theatre history can fruitfully extend to all aspects of performance, including physicality, skill and music. Noémie Ndiaye’s work on race, choreography and movement in performance is an exciting example of the developments in this area (2022; see also 2021). The enthusiasm for a phenomenological enquiry into dramatic texts and early modern theatrical culture would benefit from a critical framework that accounts for non-white bodies. The pioneering work of Carol Mejia LaPerle, who has written extensively about race and affect, illustrates the myriad ways of re-appraising early modern texts (2022, 2019a, 2019b). This kind of enquiry is crucial towards the aim of creating a diversity of perspectives and studies on the body in early modern drama, which until now have largely been conducted through the prism of whiteness. Thinking about early modern dramatic texts in relation to the history of language might lead to a more productive engagement with race through a close reading of the texts themselves. John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi is largely considered through critical frameworks like feminism, phenomenology and historicism, but examining the play’s preoccupation with patterns of dark/light or black/white reveals an underlay of racial rhetoric that had been in the English imaginary since the Middle Ages (Heng 2019). This kind of analysis seems challenging at first because on the surface, Malfi is not a play explicitly about race. But its thematic interest in religious angst

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and representation of female sexuality and death are often couched in terms that demonstrate in a range of early modern texts, as Kim Hall identifies, ‘a broad discursive network in which the polarity of dark and light articulates ongoing cultural concerns over gender roles and shifting trade structures’ (1995: 2). Hall goes on to describe the ‘binarism of black and white’ as ‘the originary language of racial difference in English culture’ (1995: 2). When looking closely at the language in Webster’s play, we see patterns that show evidence of the kind of racial ideation Hall refers to. In Act 1, when Antonio is describing the character of the Cardinal, he alludes to long-established negative associations with blackness to suggest the villainy of his inward nature: ‘But observe his character: he is a melancholy churchman; the spring in his face is nothing but the engendering of toads’ (Webster 2009: 1.1.60–61). Using humoral theory in his character analysis, Antonio identifies the Cardinal with melancholy, which was thought to be caused by an excess of black bile. Margaux Deroux observes links in the European imagination between black bile and Africans. She suggests ‘early conceptions of color and physiology assign a stigmatized, subjugated role for blackness’; additionally, citing Clarence J. Glacken, Deroux notes that ‘the inhabitants of warm climes (such as Africa) were perceived of as having “the black bile or melancholy dominant among them”’ (2010: 89). The same passage has Antonio alluding to toad spawn. Toads are referred to often as venomous, filthy, foul or black. In Titus Andronicus, the Nurse who announces the child of Aaron and Tamora calls it a ‘black and sorrowful issue’ that is ‘as loathsome as a toad’ (4.2.68–9). These associations with toads are ubiquitous in early modern drama and poetry, linked frequently to diabolic imagery; it is no coincidence that there were associations from the early middle ages between the devil and blackness. Shakespeare’s Richard III makes this triangular link perhaps most explicitly. The humoral and animal imagery explicitly associated with blackness in the early modern mindset here racializes the Cardinal so that early on in the play he is marked out as a villain. The play has many more such examples, which could lead to broader questions about the role that colour symbolism plays in the presentation of character and the articulation of racial difference in the Jacobean period. I have only given a brief example in this chapter of applying a framework that considers race, critical whiteness and historical enquiry in relation to an early modern play. I want to conclude by calling for the field of early modern studies to consider what can be gained from this type of analysis, not just because of the ideas that might be unlocked in the text but also because of the doors that such approaches can open for students, who otherwise might feel alienated by or locked out of the advanced study of early modern drama.

NOTES 1 Smith has lectured on his current project which tackles Shakespeare’s texts and white forms of interpretation. 2 The Early Modern Scholars of Colour Network was set up in the UK in 2020 to attempt to address some of the inequities that tend to hold postgraduates of colour back. https://twitter.com/EMSColourUK

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REFERENCES Adams, R. (2020), ‘Fewer than 1% of UK University Professors Are Black, Figures Show’, The Guardian, 27 February. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/ education/2020/feb/27/fewer-than-1-of-uk-university-professors-are-black-figures-show Ahmed, S. (2004), ‘Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism’, Borderlands, 3 (2): 117–39. Ahmed, S. (2007), ‘A Phenomenology of Whiteness’, Feminist Theory, 8 (2): 236–56. Aronson, B. A. and K. Ashlee (2018), ‘Holding onto Dread and Hope: The Need for Critical Whiteness Studies in Education as Resistance in the Trump Era’, Journal of Critical Scholarship on Higher Education and Student Affairs, 3 (3): 50–61. Coles, K. A., K. F. Hall and A. Thompson (2020), ‘BlacKKKShakespearean: A Call to Action for Medieval and Early Modern Studies’, Profession, Fall. Available online: https://profession.mla.org/blackkkshakespearean-a-call-to-action-for-medieval-andearly-modern-studies. Dadabhoy, A. (2020), ‘The Unbearable Whiteness of Being (in) Shakespeare’, Postmedieval, 11: 228–35. Deroux, M. (2010), ‘The Blackness Within: Early Modern Color-Concept, Physiology and Aaron the Moor in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus’, Mediterranean Studies, 19: 86–101. Eng, D. and S. Han (2019), Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans, Durham: Duke University Press. Fisher, M. H. (2004), Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain 1600–1857: Counterflows to Colonialism, Ranikhet: Permanent Black. Fryer, P. (1984), Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain, London: Pluto Press. Garner, S. (2007), Whiteness: An Introduction, London: Routledge. Gilborn, D. (2005), ‘Education Policy as an Act of White Supremacy: Whiteness, Critical Race Theory and Education Reform’, Journal of Education Policy, 20 (4): 485–505. Grey, J. (2020), ‘Bristol George Floyd Protest: Colston Statue Toppled’, BBC News, 7 June. Available online: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-52955868. Habib, I. (2008), Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677: Imprints of the Invisible, Burlington: Ashgate. Hall, K. F. (1995), Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Heffer, S. (2021), ‘The “Heritage Summit” Will Be British Culture’s Last Stand against Woke Zealotry’, Daily Telegraph, 22 February. Available online: https://www. telegraph.co.uk/art/architecture/heritage-summit-will-british-cultures-last-stand-againstwoke/ Heng, G. (2019), The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hunter, S. and C. van der Westhuizen, eds (2021), Routledge Handbook of Critical Studies in Whiteness Studies, London: Routledge. Hyman, W. B. and H. Eklund, eds (2019), Teaching Social Justice through Shakespeare, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Karim-Cooper, F. (2022), ‘Emotions, Gesture and Race in the Early Modern Playhouse’, in S. Smith and E. Whipday (eds), Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England, 57–76, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Little, A., ed. (forthcoming), White People in Shakespeare, London: Arden Bloomsbury. Mejia LaPerle, C. (2019a), ‘“If I Might Have My Will”: Aaron’s Affect and Race in Titus Andronicus’, in F. Karim-Cooper (ed.), Titus Andronicus: The State of Play, 135–56, London: Bloomsbury. Mejia LaPerle, C. (2019b), ‘Race, Affect and the Olfactory’, The Sundial, September. Available online: https://medium.com/the-sundial-acmrs. Mejia LaPerle, C., ed. (2022), Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature, Tempe, AZ: ACMRS Press. Mirza, H. S. (2018), ‘Racism in Higher Education: What, Then, Can Be Done?’ in J. Arday and H. S. Mirza (eds), Dismantling Race in Higher Education: Racism, Whiteness and Decolonising the Academy, 3–23, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ndiaye, N. (2021), ‘“Come Aloft, Jack-Little-Ape”: Race and Dance in The Spanish Gypsie’, English Literary Renaissance, 51 (1): 121–51. Ndiaye, N. (2022), Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Onyeka (2013), Blackamoores: Africans in Tudor England, Their Presence, Status and Origins, London: Narrative Eye. Scott-Bauman, A. (2021), ‘A New “Free Speech Champion” May End Up Doing the Opposite’, The Guardian, 17 February. Available online: https://www.theguardian. com/commentisfree/2021/feb/17/free-speech-champion-universities-campus Shakespeare, W. (2018), Titus Andronicus, ed. J. Bate, rev. edn, Arden Shakespeare Third Series, London: Arden Shakespeare. The Steven Lawrence Inquiry (1999), [Government Report]. Available online: https:// assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/ file/277111/4262.pdf Sueyoshi, A. (2013), ‘Making Whites from the Dark Side: Teaching Whiteness Studies at San Francisco State University’, The History Teacher, 46 (3): 373–96. ‘Understanding Whiteness and Racism’ (2020), [Podcast], Shakespeare’s Globe, August. Available online: https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/discover/blogs-andfeatures/2020/08/12/suchstuff-s6-e1-understanding-whiteness-and-racism/ Webster, J. (2009), The Duchess of Malfi, ed. L. Marcus, Arden Early Modern Drama, London: Arden Shakespeare.

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Performing Shakespeare’s contemporaries HARRY R. M c CARTHY

Die-hard fans of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi will have had quite a job keeping up with productions of the play in the UK and North America since the turn of the century. In order to catch all thirty-one professional productions I have been able to trace, a Malfi ‘completist’ would have needed to travel to London, Stratfordupon-Avon, Brighton, Leeds, Oxford, Northampton, Nottingham, Glasgow, Washington, DC, Virginia, British Columbia, Minnesota, Georgia and Texas in order to take in the work of leading classical companies such as the UK’s National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), ‘Original Practices’ venues – Shakespeare’s Globe, the American Shakespeare Center (ASC) in Staunton and the Hidden Room in Texas – fringe companies ranging from London’s Eyestrings Theatre through the Ensemble Theatre in Vancouver and troupes specializing in early modern drama such as Lazarus Theatre, the Villain’s Theatre in Halifax, Nova Scotia and Virginia’s Brave Spirits. The Duchess of Malfi, in other words, has a twenty-first-century performance life that could easily rival that of several Shakespearean plays. On a par with Christopher Marlowe’s perennially popular Doctor Faustus, Webster’s tragedy has reached the pinnacle of ‘performing early modern drama today’ – small wonder, then, that it was the play with which Pascale Aebischer and Kathryn Prince chose to open their landmark collection bearing that very title in 2012. But if The Duchess of Malfi ‘is now understood as a canonical text, a known quantity’ (2012: 1), what of another of Webster’s works – say, The Devil’s Law Case? That play’s champions have had the rather easier task of attending, by my count, just two professional productions: a 2002 staged reading directed by Jenny Eastop as part of the ‘Read Not Dead’ series at Shakespeare’s Globe and a run at London’s White Bear, directed by David Cottis, that same year. These two examples present in microcosm the landscape of ‘Shakespeare’s contemporaries’ in twenty-first-century performance that is the focus of this chapter. As signalled by the contributors to Aebischer and Prince’s Performing Early Modern

I am grateful to Lucy Munro and Eoin Price for their invaluable feedback on this essay, to James Wallace for providing details of Read Not Dead readings, and to George Jones for several inspiring conversations.

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Drama Today, the performance of non-Shakespearean early modern drama is in fine health  – at major state-funded venues; in regional, touring and site-specific productions; on amateur and university stages; and on film and television. This is particularly true of those plays, like The Duchess of Malfi, which form what Aebischer and Prince term ‘the twenty-first century’s early modern canon’: a group of a dozen or so plays by Webster, John Ford, Ben Jonson, Marlowe and Thomas Middleton which dominate theatrical programming and more or less have a monopoly over the smaller offering of early modern drama on film. While these plays have received theatrical treatment (and even adaptation) that is so extensive and varied as to have solidified their place in the mainstream on both sides of the Atlantic, a great many more  – including those written by the same authors as these big hitters  – have a negligible enough performance history, often limited to one-off staged readings at specialist venues, to maintain their status as outsiders and historical oddities. The first section of this chapter attends to this binary, demonstrating the role scholarship and pedagogy play in sustaining the contemporary performance tradition of particular works while maintaining the historicity of others. I then depart from the general performance landscape and home in on two dominant and seemingly opposing models of twenty-first-century engagement with Shakespeare’s contemporaries in performance  – historical reconstruction and research-based exercises, and contemporary, politically engaged production  – highlighting the ways in which critically marginal companies and practices continue to attest to the theatrical viability and potential for contemporary relevance of non-canonical early modern plays. My coda looks briefly to the future of early modern drama in performance and considers how the accelerated use of digital performance technologies in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic might transform theatrical and scholarly approaches to Shakespeare’s contemporaries in the years to come. First, however, it is worth noting that this introduction has already fallen prey to one of the governing paradigms of producing and discussing early modern drama in performance: the invocation of Shakespeare. In using his plays as a yardstick against which to measure the popularity and theatrical viability of The Duchess of Malfi, I have positioned Shakespeare as an authorizing force fewer than two hundred words into a chapter which is concerned with the production of plays he had no hand in writing, a number of which there is no chance of him even having seen. The chapter’s very title semantically reinforces Shakespeare’s dominance, in which a possessive Shakespeare serves as the very pretext for these contemporaries’ existence. As Aebischer and Prince, along with Peter Kirwan (2017) and Eoin Price (2021), have argued, this co-dependence is mirrored at several of the institutions where non-Shakespearean early modern drama is most frequently produced  – in programming habits, reviewing practices and performance scholarship which endorse a hierarchical distinction between Shakespeare and his ‘contemporaries’. Rather than re-iterating the Shakespeare-centric model critiqued by these scholars, this chapter is not primarily occupied with landmark productions of canonical early modern plays, nor with the dialectical relationship such productions inevitably have to Shakespeare’s canonicity. Bearing in mind Price’s suggestion that scholarship

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has a vital role to play in shaping the performance history and reception of nonShakespearean plays (2021: 165–6), in what follows I aim to make visible a wider range of performance traditions and practices which productively push at the edges of the contemporary repertory.

PERFORMING SHAKESPEARE’S CONTEMPORARIES: A TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY ‘REPTHOLOGY’ In her thoroughgoing survey of fifty years of UK performances of early modern drama, Lucy Munro presents a repertory defined by a tripartite structure: First, we find the select group of frequently performed plays, each of which is prominent in school and university curricula, and many of which have been adapted in other media. Second, we find a group of plays revived on a relatively regular basis, most of which are secondary plays by dramatists featuring in the first group, such as Bartholomew Fair or Dido, Queen of Carthage. Third, we have the ‘lost classics’: infrequently performed plays which are revived precisely because they are obscure. (2012: 33) In the decade that has elapsed since Munro’s essay was published, it would appear that little has changed, despite significant developments such as the opening of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (SWP) at Shakespeare’s Globe and the increasing availability of high-quality editions of under-performed plays. Though more plays have been brought into the final of Munro’s groups, there has not been noticeable movement between these three categories. Of the 450-plus twenty-first-century productions of 200 discrete early modern plays in the UK and North America I have surveyed in preparing this chapter, twenty have received five or more productions in the past twenty years, with only eight hitting double figures.1 In order of recurrence, they are Doctor Faustus, The Duchess of Malfi, Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling, Jonson’s Volpone, Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Jonson’s The Alchemist, Marlowe’s Edward II and Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy. The vast majority of the plays I have surveyed  – 140 or around 70 per cent  – have received only one production, 122 (86 per cent) of which have been staged readings in the Read Not Dead series at Shakespeare’s Globe. The few ‘one-offs’ to have been produced outside of this series have been at the hands of major Shakespeareproducing companies such as the Globe (Milton’s Comus), the RSC (Middleton, Rowley and Philip Massinger’s The Old Law) and the ASC (George Chapman’s The Blind Beggar of Alexandria and Middleton’s The Witch), or fringe companies specializing in the classical repertoire such as The Owle Schreame, Lazarus Theatre and Brave Spirits. As I discuss in the next section, the performance of these plays at a handful of often academically minded venues occasionally holds them at a historical remove from the theatrical present. Meanwhile, the unchanging – or even shrinking – core of ‘big-hitters’ continues to be reworked and re-presented across the theatrical spectrum.

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As Munro notes, the relative popularity or obscurity of an early modern play is largely determined by pedagogy, a double-bind ‘in which much-studied plays receive theatrical revivals, and frequently revived plays are those selected for study’ (Munro 2012: 20; see also Lopez 2012a: 36). Broadly speaking, the twenty-first-century repertory of early modern drama mirrors the gradual canonization of certain plays in the anthologizing trends outlined by Jeremy Lopez: of the eight most-performed plays, all bar Revenger’s and ’Tis Pity have been printed in at least six of the eleven early modern drama anthologies produced between 1911 and 2005 (2013: 33–5), though these two plays have become increasingly present in more recent collections, suggesting their gradual assimilation into the canon. Concurrently, of the seventeen plays that have been printed in the majority of those anthologies, only John Lyly’s Endymion and Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay have not received more than one production in the last twenty years. If ‘an anthology … is a representation of the field of early modern dramatic literature in its temporal and aesthetic dimensions’ (Lopez 2013: 7), the twenty-first-century landscape of early modern drama in performance offers a representation of early modern drama as anthologized – a ‘repthology’. What Lopez identifies as the ‘close relation between the pedagogical dissemination and the scholarly valuation of early modern dramatic texts’ (2013: 4) is, ouroboros-like, equally true of their theatrical valuation, as well as the subsequent scholarly valuation of that theatrical value. The Oxford Thomas Middleton (general-edited by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino) in 2007 marked a rare scholarly intervention in the landscape of early modern drama in performance. As Aebischer and Prince, along with Farah KarimCooper, suggest, the widespread publicity surrounding the edition’s release, in which the playwright was frequently figured as an appealingly radical, transgressive alternative to Shakespeare, played a crucial role in the rehabilitation of Middleton’s reputation and subsequent high-profile revivals of several of his plays (Aebischer and Prince 2012: 8–9; Karim-Cooper 2012: 59–60). Yet the increasing availability of accessible, high-quality editions of underperformed early modern plays such as Middleton’s does not always lead to this kind of symbiotic relationship between scholarly labour and newfound theatrical popularity, particularly where it is less possible to make such an aggressive case for an early modern playwright’s edginess and antagonistic relationship to the national poet. Since the publication of the magisterial Cambridge Ben Jonson (general-edited by David Bevington, Martin Butler and Ian Donaldson) in 2012, very few of his plays have been professionally performed, with the old favourites The Alchemist and Volpone continuing to eclipse practically all of the others. Jonson’s artistic successor, Richard Brome, has fared even worse: aside from one staged reading of The Court Beggar at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2012, none of his plays has been professionally produced since the release of the innovative online edition of his collected works in 2010 (Richard Brome Online), despite the fact that it is free to access, provides details of productions from the early modern period to the present and embeds a significant number of video clips attesting to the theatrical potential of the plays. As Elizabeth Schafer suggests, editing Shakespeare’s contemporaries has often suffered from the lack of performance history available (2012) – while this is beginning to change in editions

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such as the Arden Early Modern Drama and Manchester University Press Revels series as well as Brome Online, a still-pervasive chasm between scholarship and performance has limited their chances at multiple lives in the theatre. It is too early to tell whether Lopez’s own new Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama (2020), featuring high-quality editions of plays which have received no performances in the past twenty years such as William Heminge’s The Fatal Contract and James Shirley’s The Bird in A Cage, will see greater theatrical attention paid to these drastically neglected works. While presenting ‘an unprecedented variety of plays’ to ‘scholars, students, and performers alike’, however, this innovative collection nevertheless participates in reinforcing existing hierarchies (Routledge 2020). The anthology features editions of both Doctor Faustus and The Duchess of Malfi (which between them account for 13 per cent of all twenty-first-century productions of early modern drama), further solidifying their canonical status. At the same time, it also perpetuates existing strategies of occlusion: glaringly, there are no plays written by women in this collection, which promises to illuminate the ‘diversity and strangeness of different early modern approaches to the artistic and commercial enterprise of play-making’ (Routledge 2020). If, as seems clear from Lopez’s own work on canonicity, anthologies play a key role in determining the contours of early modern drama in performance, this exclusion will do little to improve the fate of early modern women’s drama, of which there have only been three professional productions in the past twenty years.2 The role of scholarship in the performance of early modern drama must therefore extend considerably further beyond textual practice – an issue I address in the following section.

BEYOND THE BIG HITTERS: RECONSTRUCTION, REVIVAL AND PRESENT(-)ING THE PAST One of the principal ways scholarship and performance have productively interacted to expand the range of early modern drama in production is through the engagement with historical performance practice and revival through staged reading. As Aebischer reminds us, ‘[t]he study of modern theatrical performance of early modern drama … began with theatre history and early modern performance’ (Aebischer 2010: 141); in this tradition, early modern drama is not simply an object to be performed but is itself the means of investigating performance. Recent work by Paul Menzer attests to the long history of utilizing theatre-historical evidence – of costume, stage space, music and casting practices, to name but a few  – to engage theatrically with the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries (2017: 67–79). The deployment of this set of approaches, broadly defined as Original Practices (OP), in both performance and academic research has recently been charted by Sarah Dustagheer (2021), and there is no need to repeat it here: what I want to stress is the extent to which OP and non-Shakespearean early modern drama have traditionally been intertwined and the extent to which scholarship and performance have been and can continue to be mutually reinforcing. In the early days of Shakespeare’s Globe, as Farah KarimCooper describes, OP experimentation  – through historical costume and all-male casts – initially took as its focus the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, which in

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turn provided the impetus for the theatre’s more widely remembered and researched Shakespearean OP productions: ‘Early Globe practitioners were able to see, through staging the contemporaries, what they might do with Shakespeare in that space’ (Karim-Cooper 2012: 57–8). At the Globe, it was precisely the historical distance of the plays of Brome, Dekker and the like which made them valuable; concurrently, as the OP priorities of the Globe receded, so too did the performance of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, the productions of plays within the ‘repthology’ at the SWP since 2014 notwithstanding. With their scrappy performance histories and seeming imperviousness to adaptation, the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries are particularly vulnerable to an emphasis on ‘authentic’ materials which threatens to relegate them to the position of historical curiosity. Such a stressing of the ‘pastness’ of plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries is evident in their performance at the American Shakespeare Center, where, almost without exception, they are left out of the main, directed season’s repertory and incorporated instead into the shorter, director-less Actors’ Renaissance Season. Described by Menzer as ‘the ASC’s most hardcore recursion to early English theatrical practice’ (2017: 138), the Renaissance Season dispenses with directors and full-scale rehearsal, drawing on the theatre-historical work of Tiffany Stern in its use of cue-scripts and limited rehearsal time.3 As Jaquelyn Bessell has documented, ‘[w]ithout sufficient time left for nuanced character development’, actors participating in the Renaissance Season ‘tend to develop a recyclable series of broad-stroke characterisations, as part of a collective technical shorthand’ (2012: 87). Though, for Menzer, the exercise of staging a play as obscure as The Blind Beggar of Alexandria is itself invaluable, and while there is no doubt that these productions can be energetic and revelatory, this ‘broad-stroke’ approach nevertheless imposes certain interpretive limitations. Actors have expressed anxieties that some critics ‘will find Actors’ Renaissance Season productions “overly comical, even grotesque”’ in their haphazard nature, with others commenting that ‘in the speed of the Renaissance season, the scene is not always served. And if the scene is not served, the play, ultimately, is not served’ (Bessell 2012: 101). In its adoption of a historically unfamiliar method of performance, then, the Actors’ Renaissance Season at the ASC arguably trades not on making the drama of Shakespeare’s contemporaries more dramatically legible today, but less so, placing not only the playtexts but the performance methods they apparently invite or necessitate at a double remove from the theatrical present.4 We might conclude that what matters in the Renaissance Season is not the interpretation of a particular play but the imposition of an unfamiliar playing style and the location of Shakespeare’s contemporaries in a different, temporally foreign mode of performance. An alternative approach to staging truly rarely performed plays, stripping away historical materials and practices to focus more readily on the affordances and opportunities of the text, is through the staged reading. By far the most extensive enterprise in this regard is the Read Not Dead initiative co-ordinated by Patrick Spottiswoode and run by the Education department at Shakespeare’s Globe. Since 1995, Read Not Dead has staged full readings of over 250 non-Shakespearean early modern plays with a cast of professional actors, who receive the script at very short

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notice and have only one collective rehearsal on the day of the performance. Though these readings are open to the public, where they are enthusiastically attended, they to some extent de-emphasize the ‘finished’ product, prioritizing performance’s exploratory and interpretive potential rather than subjecting underperformed plays to unfamiliar processes and materials such as cue-scripts. For Genevieve Love, staged readings ‘serve an analytical function that most performances do not: they show us text becoming, and becoming a part of, performance; performance both freeing itself from and tethering itself to the text’ (Love 2004: 13). What this means in practice, for Read Not Dead, is a repeated opportunity to mine the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries for theatrical opportunity and embodied interpretation – resisting the flattening of tone discernible at the ASC and often, as Lucy Munro notes in her review article, to great dramatic effect (2004; see also Wallace 2008). As these two examples demonstrate, performance of early modern drama in the twenty-first century has moved away from ‘authentic’ materials and towards embodied processes. For Adam Cunis, an actor who has taken part in multiple Read Not Dead events, part of the pleasure lies in co-creation of meaning among the performers and the audience: ‘you’ve had the script since like 10.00 am. And then the audience are laughing at jokes that you haven’t understood’ (qtd in Williams and Ash 2021: 268). Given the archaeological impulse that initially drove OP at the Globe, we might describe this approach as a turn from excavation towards what Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks term ‘interpretive archaeology’. For Pearson and Shanks, ‘interpretive archaeology’, like the performance of early modern drama today, constitutes ‘a contemporary material practice which works on and with the traces of the past and within which the archaeologist is implicated as an active agent of interpretation. What archaeologists do is work with material traces, with evidence, in order to create something – a meaning, a narrative, an image – which stands for the past in the present’ (2001: 11). Working with the ‘material traces’ of the past that constitute the early modern playtext, the Read Not Dead series thus facilitates a close examination of early modern drama’s theatrical viability through ‘contemporary material practice’. An even closer exploration of how performance can generate new meaning and interpretations of neglected early modern texts is facilitated by another branch of Globe Education’s activities: the Research in Action workshops conducted in the SWP each summer. Described by its co-ordinator, Will Tosh, as ‘a more historically-focussed investigation of the playhouse’s capacities than is possible under the conditions of a commercial theatre production’ (2018: xxvi), Research in Action’s value for the performance of Shakespeare’s contemporaries partially lies in its initiation of a remarkably minute, collaborative and corporeal close reading of particular scenes and cruxes in plays which typically do not receive theatrical attention5 – a reading that might (though it has not yet) be a jumping-off point for fuller exploration of these plays in performance. What connects Research in Action to Read Not Dead is not the imposition of historical performance practices, but the use of non-Shakespearean early modern drama as itself a mode of exploration – into staging, tone, generic effect and so on – which helps rehabilitate the performance potential of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. However, where, initially, the concerns

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of Research in Action tended more towards the pragmatic than the thematic, exploring the opportunities and limitations of the playhouse itself as much as the plays, increasingly, these workshops have utilized under-performed plays to speak to urgent contemporary concerns. Recent workshops have focused on the performance of disability (co-ordinated by Allison Hobgood), gendered violence (co-ordinated by Lucy Munro and Clare McManus) and the effects of racially sensitive casting on staged eroticism (co-ordinated by Matthew Dimmock and Dennis A. Britton). Their value therefore, is ultimately twofold: they illuminate issues of staging and theatrical interpretation in underperformed plays that are typically overlooked in reading, while also making use of obscure early modern plays to interrogate the attitudes and prevailing discourses of today. The business of historically informed performance which utilizes exploratory rehearsal processes to make underperformed early modern drama theatrically meaningful in the present is not restricted to these venues or to the professional sphere. Despite Jeremy Lopez’s quantifying study of amateur and student performances of early modern drama in 2012, there have been very few attempts to explore this less commercial side of the performance landscape, the increasing inclusion of amateur productions in performance histories provided by play editions notwithstanding (Lopez 2012a, 2012b). As Lopez attests, amateur and student performers ‘in spite of their limitations and their susceptibility to material exigency, can and do create – rather than simply act as a conduit for – theatrical meaning in their productions’ (2012a: 44). This is certainly true of one of the most sustained amateur projects in early modern performance, Edward’s Boys, a company of schoolboy actors based at King Edward VI School (‘Shakespeare’s School’) in Stratford-upon-Avon, who since 2008 have staged sixteen plays from the boy company repertory – which has been particularly neglected in twenty-first-century performance (Munro 2012: 25–6)  – under the direction of the school’s deputy headmaster, Perry Mills. Though the company was born out of a research project led by Carol Chillington Rutter into Shakespearean cross-dressing, its actors, even less so than their counterparts at the ASC or the Globe, would likely not identify as researchers. They nevertheless play a crucial role in the physical interpretation of historical materials discussed by Pearson and Shanks: as I have argued elsewhere, Edward’s Boys’ unwitting engagement with the processes of interpretive archaeology positions them as embodied researchers of underperformed plays (McCarthy 2020: 25–6). At the same time, their productions are vivid and vigorous in performance style, fusing realist acting, live music and physical theatre, while often transposing the world of the early modern play to a (near-) contemporary setting, therefore satisfying theatrically minded impulses as well as scholarly and editorial ones. Their work serves as an important reminder that performance practice which is initially contoured by research or rooted in historical practices need not be incompatible with resonant contemporary theatre. Though the company has recently received substantial scholarly treatment (McCarthy 2020), the same cannot be said for other amateur performances, nor indeed for projects like Read Not Dead, Research in Action or other historically sensitive companies who specialize in early modern plays:6 the amateur productions staged by the Shakespeare Institute Players and Boston University’s Willing

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Suspension would certainly merit the same kind of in-depth treatment Edward’s Boys are beginning to receive, along with Lazarus Theatre and Brave Spirits,7 to name just two professional fringe companies. It might be hoped that scholarship will continue to dismantle the divides between research and performance, as well as historical and contemporary theatrical practice – something these practitioners seem explicitly to invite. In the words of Dan Bray and Colleen MacIsaac, artistic director and producer of the Villain’s Theatre, We would want [a historian from the future] to see us creating timely work, using texts from the past to comment on relevant, current issues rather than simply being a re-creation of historical pieces. We would hope to be represented as making artistically and socially interesting work that was very much of its time, using the past to look to the future. (qtd in Williams and Ash 2021: 255) More scholarly work on these companies, and on the overlapping disciplines of theatre history and contemporary performance beyond OP, would no doubt enable scholars and practitioners to think more widely about how the performance materials of the past can be repurposed to make new meaning in the present.

PAST-ING THE PRESENT: THE DE-POLITICIZED ‘JACOBEAN’ AND RE-POLITICIZED ‘ELIZABETHAN’ The use of early modern drama to speak to the contemporary moment has been the focus of a highly significant branch of performance scholarship since the 1980s and 1990s, particularly when it comes to the critical (rather than strictly chronological) category of the ‘Jacobean’. In Performing Nostalgia, Susan Bennett influentially defines the term ‘Jacobean’ as ‘a denotation of (moral) decay, excess and violence – deficiencies we also find in our contemporary moment and for which this past can apparently give expression and meaning’ (1996: 82). For Bennett, it is the inherent ‘(moral) decay, excess and violence’ of certain plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries that makes them ripe for radical theatrical and filmic adaptation in which they are made to speak in and for the present – an idea that has been productively explored in relation to female-centric stage performance by Roberta Barker (2007) and Kim Solga (2009) and queer cinema, television and digital performance by Aebischer (2013). As Aebischer and Prince began to observe in 2012, however, the gradual absorption into the mainstream of the ‘Jacobean’ core that had proven so attractive to radical and politically invested theatre- and filmmakers was threatening to diminish their counter-cultural potential (2012: 2–3). Edward II is as good an example as any of this shift. Though not, chronologically, Jacobean, Marlowe’s chronical history was, as Bennett charts, thoroughly ‘Jacobeanized’ through Derek Jarman’s radically queer 1991 film adaptation of the play. In the twenty-first century, however, a play which lay, thanks to Jarman, at the heart of transgressive and emphatically political performance of early modern drama seems to have become ever more traditional and de-politicized, despite the nearuniversal decision taken by theatre-makers to centralize the homosexual relationship

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of the King and his favourite, Gaveston. Jarman’s film powerfully spoke back to and against the homophobic legislation that typified Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in the UK through its sympathetic portrayal of Edward and Gaveston, its uncompromising depiction of police violence against LGBTQ+ individuals and its triumphant nod towards a queer future in its ending. In a move that is perhaps unsurprising given the increasing (though not universal) tolerance of homosexuality at an individual and legal level, more recent productions have tended to de-emphasize the political import of Marlowe’s play. Where Jarman’s film presented an outward challenge to the heteronormative status quo  – depicting Edward and Gaveston’s straight oppressors as the true sexual deviants  – more recent productions have tended to play up the hypersexual nature of Edward and Gaveston’s relationship, reducing the King’s homosexuality to an aesthetic that invites voyeuristic or even conservative modes of viewing. In Peter Darney’s staging of the play for Em-Lou Productions (a company whose new writing work often features frank portrayals of hedonistic gay sex), Matt Barber’s Edward ‘embrace[d] his lover’ – Joseph Bader’s ‘dashingly tall, dark and handsome Gaveston’ – ‘with all the predatory sexuality of a malevolent praying mantis’, an expression of visceral homosexuality which was mirrored in a staging of the King’s death that was equally ‘steeped in sexual nuance’ (Quarmby 2011). That the presentation of a homosexual desire laced with violent undertones is now seen as a keynote to Edward II was further suggested by Lazarus Theatre’s 2017 production, in which the initial, surprising chastity of Edward and Gaveston’s (Timothy Blore and Oseloka Obi) relationship eventually gave way, in the play’s final scene, to a ‘horribly surreal’ sequence in which Edward was stripped naked and penetrated in half-light by an equally unclothed Lightborne – the same actor who had played his lover (Kirwan 2018). These productions’ uneasy equivalence of homosexual coupling with sexual violence was pushed further still in Joe Hill-Gibbins’s 2013 National Theatre production of the play. Despite Hill-Gibbins’s insistence in the publicity that surrounded the production that he was not particularly interested in speaking directly to the debates around the legalization of same-sex marriage that were preoccupying press and politics in the UK (Aebischer 2020: 91), the production’s use of offstage space and remediated video to stage increasingly graphic, debauched, leather-clad encounters between Edward and his favourites relegated homosexuality to a vulnerable and voyeuristic position. For Aebischer, these choices invited the production’s audience to ‘project latent anxieties about homosexuality, fabricate obscenity out of scrappy evidence and participate, affectively, in the punishment of the very obscenity which they themselves had constructed’ (2020: 100)  – perhaps even with the unintended effect of replicating the homophobic anxieties so powerfully challenged by Jarman’s film. The extent to which the play seems to have exhausted its radically queer potential and receded into the small-c conservative mainstream was indicated by Nick Bagnall’s medieval-dress production at the SWP in 2019, where an Edward and Gaveston who ‘were simply in love’ ultimately became less important than the historical tensions between Edward and the barons that are arguably the true focus of Marlowe’s playtext (Kirwan 2019a). In this production, Edward II was certainly

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not itself the catalyst for exploration of homosexuality in our contemporary moment – that role fell in the SWP’s 2019 season to the twinned production of After Edward, a newly commissioned play written by Edward II’s lead, Tom Stuart. Where Edward II had been firmly rooted in the past, this production, which featured the cast of Marlowe’s play in the roles of gay icons such as Quentin Crisp, Harvey Milk and Gertrude Stein, provided, for Kirwan, a ‘sensation of collective healing and freedom’ for the queer communities represented for and in the audience (2019b). Positioning Bagnall’s decidedly historical Edward II against contemporary writing which explored the great sweep of gay history in the UK and North America from Edward II’s death to the present thus resulted in a dialectical relationship in which the early modern play was preserved as a thing of history, requiring a response from the present rather than being made to act itself as a response to and in the present. If practitioners and scholars are to continue to find the materials for political meaning-making in Shakespeare’s contemporaries, then, they may need to look beyond the ‘Jacobean’ – even, perhaps, to the more wholesome ‘Elizabethan’. In the past few years, a group of scholars and artists have begun to do exactly that through engagement with John Lyly’s 1585 Gallathea,8 whose restaging accelerated in the wake of two Read Not Dead readings directed by James Wallace in 2007 and 2013, and two 2014 productions by Edward’s Boys (at the SWP) and the Villain’s Theatre. But it is Gallathea’s place among queer theatrical communities that has enhanced its place in the contemporary repertory and asserted its potential to articulate the concerns of the present in its depiction of gender non-conforming characters and teasingly open-ended conclusion which imagines a multiplicity of (trans)gendered possibilities for its central lovers, the disguised ‘girls’ Gallathea and Phillida (see Chess 2015). At the heart of this work is a long-standing collaboration by the transgender theatre-maker Emma Frankland and the scholar Andy Kesson, whose work has consistently striven to rehabilitate Lyly’s place in scholarship and performance. Since 2016, Frankland and Kesson have explored Gallathea through a series of ‘research and development’ workshops on the play, centred on ‘the play’s representations of non-normative sexuality and its concluding investment in transgender identity’ (BeforeShakespeare 2016). Building towards a full-scale production (still, at the time of writing, unrealized) ‘that wants to challenge the current repertory of early modern plays and challenge the way such plays get cast’, the workshops are invested in equitable casting practices and the location of marginalized identities in the early modern text. Frankland has written passionately about Gallathea as ‘a text that actually invites my queerness and transness  – a text that, frankly, needs those things’, describing how a number of the workshops’ participants – particularly those identifying as queer, trans, deaf and racially diverse – ‘have found themselves reflected in the play in a way that is largely absent from mainstream classical theater’ (Frankland and Kesson 2019: 290). In these workshops, the inclusion of trans and gender non-conforming artists enabled a deeper exploration of the shifting gender presentations offered by Lyly’s play. In this, they mirror Sawyer K. Kemp’s recent call for ‘a methodology that puts contemporary trans social issues at the center of early modern trans studies, a methodology that unapologetically and necessarily embraces the contemporary, the personal, the affective, and the positional’ (2019: 267).

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The workshops thus serve – as the full production undoubtedly will – as a model of productive scholarly and artistic collaboration which utilizes the performance of Shakespeare’s contemporaries to recover queer histories and identities. Equitable practice and the celebration of the kinds of queer and trans identities that inhere in Lyly’s play were also governing principles of the three Zoom productions of Gallathea that took place in March and April 2021 against the backdrop of the still-unfolding Covid-19 pandemic (I return to the affordances of Zoom performance in my coda). The paired performance of Lyly’s play (in a production directed by Emma Rosa Went) with a new adaptation, Galatea, or Whatever You Be by M. J. Kaufman (directed by Will Davis) – orchestrated by Red Bull Theater, Women’s Project Theater and Drama League  – and the production of Gallathea by Rob Myles’s The Show Must Go Online (TSMGO) initiative, each featured LGBTQIA+-majority casts, making space for trans, non-binary and TwoSpirit performers in a repertory which typically excludes them. The result in each production was an uncompromising celebration of the inherent queerness of Lyly’s play discussed by Frankland and Kesson. Kaufman’s adaptation gave confidently queer sexual identities to Galatea and Phillida from the outset, permitting them to express the difficulties they encountered in ‘passing’ as their assigned genders and speak against the entrapping restrictions of gender binaries. Harnessing its diverse range of performers, the play also gave space to the open exploration of the Lyly’s band of chaste nymphs as a group of ‘lesbian separatists’ and to addressing Lyly’s subtle hint of homoerotic attraction between Gallathea’s patriarchal figures. The queer and gender-diverse performers in Rachel Chung’s production for TSMGO, meanwhile, incorporated the designs of the Pride flag into their costumes and backdrops, invoking a queer aesthetic ranging from asexual punk to drag and creating – for one another as well as the enthusiastic audience commenting live in the streaming platform’s chat function – an extraordinarily diverse community that nevertheless remained rooted in the early modern play. It is no accident that Gallathea has come to be ‘the’ early modern play of 2021. In each of these productions, the queer trauma emphatically staged in productions of Edward II from Jarman to the present gave way instead to a powerful assertion of queer joy and gender euphoria – leading, in Kaufman’s Galatea, to an eventual rejection of a heteronormative reading of the play’s conclusion and culminating, in Chung’s, in a riotous all-cast dance party. At a time when, on both sides of the Atlantic, the lives of trans and non-gender-conforming people are routinely questioned, violently compromised and actively legislated against, the use of Lyly’s play as queer celebration could not feel more urgent. In the Q&A session that immediately followed the TSMGO performance, the company identified the resonance of Lyly’s play for queer and gender-diverse communities and shared the joys they felt in the rare experience of working with a queer-majority cast on a play by which they felt recognized and represented, despite its origin in a place and time from which they had typically felt excluded. Frankland’s plans for a largescale, open-air production of Gallathea in the near future look set to replicate these affirmations. The ambitious – and overdue – staging of Lyly’s play that is currently in the works comes at a time, she writes, ‘when queer, fringe theater also tends towards

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very small companies …, towards the autobiographical and to emphasize the trauma of queer existence’. For Frankland, Gallathea ‘has the potential to give us a largescale, positive history for otherwise marginalized identities’ (Frankland and Kesson 2019: 298). Or, as Went might put it  – as she did in the online discussion that followed the two Red Bull productions (Red Bull Theater 2021) – ‘this is everybody’s party. The past is yours. Come home’.

CODA: THE DUCHESS GOES DIGITAL At 8 p.m. on 17 March 2021, at the instruction of the Zoom holding screen, I lit a candle in my office and turned off the lights. What followed was not a boldly immersive after-hours departmental meeting, but the Oxford-based Creation Theatre’s production, via Zoom, of The Duchess of Malfi, directed by Natasha Rickman and early modern scholar Laura Wright. Enabling the imaginary Malfi ‘completist’ with which this chapter began to engage with a high-quality performance of an early modern play from the comfort of their own home, Creation’s digital production pushed the limits of the medium to their extremes, incorporating prefilmed sequences, clever superimposition of spatially segregated performers within the same frame and increasingly sinister use of extreme close-up and dramatic lighting  – all of which created a decidedly claustrophobic and psychologically compelling take on Webster’s play despite the physical separation of the performers. While, in her introduction to TSMGO’s Gallathea, the scholar Simone Chess singled out Lyly’s play as ideally suited to pandemic-enforced online performance due to its extended use of monologue and its curious lack of emphasis on physical touch, Creation’s Malfi demonstrated that Webster’s play, too, is ripe for transferal to digital platforms. Might more plays across the sweep of non-Shakespearean drama stand to benefit from similar treatment? As Aebischer and Rachael Nicholas have documented (2020), virtually from the start of the Covid-19 pandemic Creation have led the way in adapting contemporary theatre practice to online media, managing to sustain themselves financially and continue to bring high-quality performance to locked-down audiences. Though technically more sophisticated than the digital Gallatheas, their Duchess of Malfi is united with those productions through a shared productive use of the digital medium to attest to the affective power of their characters. With its close-up, straight-tocamera mode of performance – an echo of the confessional nature of live streams enabled by social media channels such as TikTok and Instagram Live – the digital sphere can, I suggest, help to recuperate the interiority theatre-makers have typically had to work hard to recover in non-Shakespearean plays (see Barker 2012). More than this, digital performance offers democratic – though admittedly not universal – access to underperformed plays in productions which, as Aebischer and Nicholas show, can be mounted relatively cheaply, partially mitigating against the financial risk of staging niche plays which has typically made companies averse to producing them. The increase of non-Shakespearean productions that this emerging mode of performance could potentially facilitate will, of course, be reliant on widespread acknowledgement of their value as theatre – including their deserving of financial

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backing. As the production of post-pandemic theatre in general, at least in the UK, becomes ever more reliant on goodwill and ever less buttressed by financial reward, it is not always easy to be optimistic in this regard. Yet as the productions I have discussed demonstrate, the rewards of this mode of production are worth fighting for. Digital performance of early modern drama does not come at the expense of affect or the creation of community among its (in the case of Gallathea, traditionally marginalized) participants – indeed, it finds new ways to create and sustain those very values. In years to come, it may well prove more possible than ever for theatremakers to harness the digital affordances necessitated by the global pandemic to produce an ever-wider range of non-Shakespearean early modern drama. Communities of various sorts  – scholarly, theatrical, queer and combinations of the three  – lie at the heart of much of what I have discussed here. Running throughout the repthology-adjacent performances I have charted in this chapter is the fruitful collaboration between scholars and practitioners, attesting to the mutually shaping role each field plays in the other’s practice. But even where the kinds of direct collaboration I have touched on here are not possible in terms of finance, resources and time, scholars can do more to expose and illuminate performances of Shakespeare’s contemporaries off the beaten track. What I have outlined here – scholarly collaboration which extends beyond mainstream performance spaces, an engagement with neglected plays which speak to urgent political concerns, and the use of emerging media to connect audiences through the performance of Shakespeare’s contemporaries  – are three fruitful areas for further artistic engagement and research. While it cannot always directly influence the repertory, it is the responsibility of scholarship to ensure that the expansion of Shakespeare’s contemporaries in performance continues to be acknowledged, recorded  – and celebrated.

NOTES 1 Production records up to 2010 are based on the wide-ranging census provided by Karin Brown (2012), which I have supplemented with a considerable number of 2000–10 staged readings which have been easier to trace than they were for Brown thanks to the new availability Shakespeare’s Globe’s Read Not Dead archive. Extensive searches of online archives, theatre websites and reviews (particularly in Shakespeare Bulletin and Peter Kirwan’s Bardathon blog) yielded records of a further 246 productions staged between the cut-off date of Brown’s census and the end of 2020. These records are available at https://bloomsbury.pub/arden-shakespeare-modern-drama. 2 Gavin Harrington-Odedra directed a production of Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam for Lazarus Theatre in 2013, while a staged reading of Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory was included in the 2014 Read Not Dead season at Shakespeare’s Globe. This reading subsequently led to a professional production of Wroth’s play directed by Martin Hodgson for Urania Theatre Company as part of Alison Findlay’s ‘Shakespeare and His Sisters’ project in 2018.

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3 Accounts of the season are provided in Bessell (2012); Lenhardt (2012); and Menzer (2017: 138–66). 4 It is true that the Renaissance Season also includes plays by Shakespeare in its programming, but, unlike their ‘contemporaneous’ counterparts, his works’ theatrical treatment is not limited to this mode of performance. 5 Tosh offers a full account of the workshops in his book on the SWP (2018). 6 Individual Research in Action workshops are, however, beginning to feed into academic research on particular plays and performance traditions: see, for instance, Hopkins (2016); Rycroft (2021). 7 A casualty of the Covid-19 pandemic, Brave Spirits officially disbanded in 2020, but the online availability of their recorded performances ought not to prohibit future work on the company. 8 I use the spelling ‘Gallathea’ to refer to Lyly’s original play, and ‘Galatea’ to refer to the contemporary adaptation by M. J. Kaufman.

REFERENCES Aebischer, P. (2010), Jacobean Drama, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Aebischer, P. (2013), Screening Early Modern Drama: Beyond Shakespeare, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Aebischer, P. (2020), Shakespeare, Spectatorship and the Technologies of Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Aebischer, P. and K. Prince (2012), ‘Introduction’, in Aebischer and Prince (eds), Performing Early Modern Drama Today, 1–16, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Aebischer, P. and R. Nicholas (2020), ‘Digital Theatre Transformation: A Case Study and Digital Toolkit’, Creation Theatre, October. Available online: https://www. creationtheatre.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Final-full-report-for-webreduced-compressed.pdf (accessed 20 April 2021). Barker, R. (2007), Early Modern Tragedy, Gender and Performance, 1984–2000: The Destined Livery, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Barker, R. (2012), ‘“A Freshly Creepy Reality”: Jacobean Tragedy and Realist Acting on the Contemporary Stage’, in P. Aebischer and K. Prince (eds), Performing Early Modern Drama Today, 121–41, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. BeforeShakespeare (2016), ‘Galatea Workshops’, Before Shakespeare, 13 July. Available online: https://beforeshakespeare.com/2016/07/13/galatea-workshops/ (accessed 20 April 2021). Bennett, S. (1996), Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past, Abingdon: Routledge. Bessell, J. (2012), ‘The Actors’ Renaissance Season at the Blackfriars Playhouse’, in P. Aebischer and K. Prince (eds), Performing Early Modern Drama Today, 85–103, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, K. (2012), ‘Professional Productions of Early Modern Drama in the UK and USA, 1960–2010’, in P. Aebischer and K. Prince (eds), Performing Early Modern Drama Today, 178–217, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Chess, S. (2015), ‘“Or Whatever You Be”: Crossdressing, Sex, and Gender Labour in John Lyly’s Gallathea’, Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme, 38 (4): 145–66. Dustagheer, S. (2021), ‘Original Practices: Old Ways and New Directions’, in P. Kirwan and K. Prince (eds), The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Contemporary Performance, 65–81, London: Bloomsbury. Frankland, E. and A. Kesson (2019), ‘“Perhaps John Lyly Was a Trans Woman?”: An Interview about Performing Galatea’s Queer, Transgender Stories’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 19 (4): 284–98. Hopkins, L. (2016), ‘Moving Marlowe: The Jew of Malta on the Caroline Stage’, Marlowe Studies, 6: 1–16. Karim-Cooper, F. (2012), ‘The Performance of Early Modern Drama at Shakespeare’s Globe’, in P. Aebischer and K. Prince (eds), Performing Early Modern Drama Today, 53–69, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kemp, S. K. (2019), ‘Transgender Shakespeare Performance: A Holistic Dramaturgy’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 19 (4): 265–83. Kesson, A. (2018), ‘Galatea, BritGrad and Diverse Alarums’, Before Shakespeare, 4 June. Available online: https://beforeshakespeare.com/2018/06/04/galatea-britgrad-anddiverse-alarums/ (accessed 20 April 2021). Kirwan, P. (2017), ‘Not-Shakespeare and the Shakespearean Ghost’, in J. C. Bulman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance, 87–101, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kirwan, P. (2018), ‘Edward II (Lazarus) @ Greenwich Theatre’, The Bardathon, 28 January. Available online: https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/bardathon/2018/01/28/ edward-ii-lazarus-greenwich-theatre/ (accessed 20 April 2021). Kirwan, P. (2019a), ‘Edward II (Shakespeare’s Globe) @ The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse’, The Bardathon, 2 March. Available online: https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/ bardathon/2019/03/02/edward-ii-shakespeares-globe-the-sam-wanamaker-playhouse/ (accessed 20 April 2021). Kirwan, P. (2019b), ‘After Edward (Shakespeare’s Globe) @ The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse’, The Bardathon, 31 March. Available online: https://blogs.nottingham. ac.uk/bardathon/2019/03/31/after-edward-shakespeares-globe-the-sam-wanamakerplayhouse/ (accessed 20 April 2021). Lenhardt, A. K (2012), ‘The American Shakespeare Center’s “Actors’ Renaissance Season”: Appropriating Early Modern Performance Documents and Practices’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 30 (4): 449–67. Lopez, J. (2012a), ‘The Seeds of Time: Student Theatre and the Drama of Shakespeare’s Contemporaries’, in P. Aebischer and K. Prince (eds), Performing Early Modern Drama Today, 35–52, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lopez, J. (2012b), ‘Performances of Early Modern Plays by Amateur and Student Groups since 1887’, in P. Aebischer and K. Prince (eds), Performing Early Modern Drama Today, 225–7, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lopez, J. (2013), Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Lopez, J., ed. (2020), The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama, Abingdon: Routledge. Love, G. (2004), ‘Book, Body, Voice: The Staged Reading and Non-Shakespearean Early Modern Drama’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 22 (1): 5–14. McCarthy, H. R. (2020), Performing Early Modern Drama beyond Shakespeare: Edward’s Boys, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Menzer, P. (2017), Shakespeare in the Theatre: The American Shakespeare Center, London: Bloomsbury. Munro, L. (2004), ‘Read Not Dead: A Review Article’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 22 (1): 23–40. Munro, L. (2012), ‘The Early Modern Repertory and the Performance of Shakespeare’s Contemporaries Today’, in Pascale Aebischer and Kathryn Prince (eds), Performing Early Modern Drama Today, 17–34, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pearson, M. and M. Shanks (2001), Theatre/Archaeology, Abingdon: Routledge. Price, E. (2021), ‘Canon: Framing Not-Shakespearean Performance’, in P. Kirwan and K. Prince (eds), The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Contemporary Performance, 151–70, London: Bloomsbury. Quarmby, K. (2011), ‘Edward II’, British Theatre Guide, n.d. Available online: https:// www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/ed2rose-rev (accessed 20 April 2021). Red Bull Theater (2021), ‘Bull Session: GALLATHEA/GALATEA’, YouTube, 25 March. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOCu8tSzq7k (accessed 20 April 2021). Richard Brome Online (2010), Available online: https://www.dhi.ac.uk/brome/home.jsp (accessed 20 April 2021). Routledge (2020), ‘The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama’, 2020. Available online: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Anthology-of-Early-ModernDrama/Lopez/p/book/9781138953802 (accessed 20 April 2021). Rycroft, E. (2021), ‘“Whither Will You Walke, My Lord?”: Promenading, PAR, and Place-Realist Theatre’, London Journal, 46 (2): 128–45. Schafer, E. (2012), ‘Troublesome Histories: Performance and Early Modern Drama’, in T. Hoenselaars (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists, 244–68, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Solga, K. (2009), Violence Against Women in Early Modern Performance: Invisible Acts, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Tosh, W. (2018), Playing Indoors: Staging Early Modern Drama in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London: Bloomsbury. Wallace, J. (2008), ‘“That Scull Had a Tongue in It, and Could Sing Once”: Staging Shakespeare’s Contemporaries’, in C. Carson and F. Karim-Cooper (eds), Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, 147–54, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, N. J. and C. K. Ash (2021), ‘New Directions in Shakespeare and Performance’, in P. Kirwan and K. Prince (eds), The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Contemporary Performance, 245–77, London: Bloomsbury.

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PART FOUR

Chronology and resources

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CHAPTER 6

Rethinking the early years of the London playhouses: An essay in chronology ANDY KESSON

The history of early modern theatre has tended to be told in terms of dates. The opening of the Theatre in 1576, the formation of the Queen’s Men in 1583 and that of the Chamberlain’s Men in 1594 are all examples of key events whose accompanying dates have come to dominate and organize the way theatre history is researched and understood.1 This is unfortunate because, as Janette Dillon has noted, early English theatre history is characterized ‘by vagueness and uncertainty over dating’ (2006: xi). In other words, the evidential basis of early theatre history works against scholarship’s attachment to dates and desire to organize material around them. Scholarly attention has also tended to focus on particular kinds of playhouse and theatre company. This essay in chronology asks what happens if datescepticism is introduced to theatre history, aims to set the more familiar Theatre alongside less familiar Elizabethan London playhouses, and proposes the role of John Bale, a playwright usually thought of as distant in time and space from the later playhouses, in shaping the first generation of playwrights to be associated with the playhouses. It is not difficult to demonstrate the formative importance of the Theatre to modern scholarship. The Theatre has come to be thought of as The First London Theatre since C. W. Wallace published a book of that name in 1913. Herbert Berry’s 1979 edited collection on the playhouse was titled The First Public Playhouse, and Gabriel Egan has more recently celebrated the venue for being ‘the first of a kind of venue  – the open-air amphitheatres’ (2009: 172). What actually makes the Theatre distinctive in terms of dating is that it is the first playhouse whose inception is documented so precisely, and it was not until the Rose opened in 1587 that a playhouse was similarly recorded.2 But several other playhouses had opened in London in or before the 1570s, not least Shoreditch’s other playhouse, the Curtain, which is first recorded as already open in 1577 (Wickham, Berry and Ingram 2000: 408). This means that the Theatre was not necessarily even the first playhouse in Shoreditch, let alone London, and as we will see, three other playhouses had

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definitely opened before the Theatre and a further six playhouses may have opened before the Theatre.3 The Theatre is the only one of these spaces whose opening date is known, but that gives it primacy in the quality, not the timing, of its dating. The evidence for the Theatre’s primacy has therefore never been as clear as scholars have tended to think, but it was explicitly disproved in 1983 by Janet S. Loengard, who discovered evidence of an earlier playhouse being built in 1567 at Mile End.4 It isn’t clear from these documents whether the Red Lion successfully opened and, if so, for how long, and for this reason scholars have often ignored the Red Lion or seen it as a short-lived, transitory experiment. In fact it isn’t even clear whether the Red Lion building works constituted a new building or the renovation of a pre-existing performance space. Though the Red Lion documentation has been consistently read as recording only a momentary and doomed enterprise, it is perfectly possible to read the evidence in the other direction, that it offers a brief snapshot of a much longer enterprise, and recent excavations at the Red Lion site have indeed suggested instead a pronounced long-term and sustained use of the playing space.5 In a book on the culture, theatre and politics of early modern London, David Smith, Richard Strier and David Bevington begin in 1576 with the opening of the Theatre because it ‘seemed like a convenient period’ (1995: 2), and the Red Lion has tended to be either ignored or assumed to be transitory precisely because it inconveniences standard narratives about which playhouses matter when. Although the existence of the Red Lion troubles narratives about the Theatre’s firstness, 1576 and the Theatre often continue to be central to the stories scholars tell about early playhouses. But as we have seen, the much wider difficulty, embedded in the evidence all along, is that most playhouses do not have their opening dates recorded. Documentary evidence tends instead to record a moment when individual playhouses became notable in some way, so that the Red Lion is mentioned in 1567 as a venue being built or redesigned, while a whole string of playing spaces are mentioned as venues already open and usually already notorious and well known. In this way the Bell Savage and St Paul’s are mentioned in 1575 (Wickham, Berry and Ingram 2000: 297, 309), the Newington Butts playhouse, the Bell and the Curtain in 1577 (242–6, 297, 408), the Bull in 1578 and the Cross Keys in 1579 (298). These dates do not record a venue opening, but the date in which the venue was already open and notable enough to mention, and indeed Laurie Johnson (2017) has shown that the Newington Butts playhouse, first recorded by Wickham, Berry and Ingram (2000) in 1577, was in planning and may well have been open one or two years before this date. In other words, it is not possible to provide a chronology of the early London playhouses based on when they opened. Indeed, this tendency to open without making a surviving imprint in the documentary record could be said to be an important part of how these spaces worked. Although the plays they hosted depended to some measure on the written word, playhouses are not themselves inherently textual and textualized spaces, which is why theatre history now has so much to learn from the archaeological record (on which see Johnson’s chapter in the current volume). The most important playhouse here when it comes to thinking about the current state of play of theatre history is the Curtain. Open by 1577 and uniformly assumed

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to be a later building than the Theatre, it may well instead have been built before the Theatre, and, as we shall see, much of the evidence starts to make more sense once this possibility is allowed. Thus, a chronology of early modern drama needs to acknowledge the frequent datelessness with which much theatre history happens: the London playhouses came into being in comparative silence, at least as witnessed by documentary evidence, and only later became part of a wider cultural conversation about playing venues. That later process should not be equated with the origins of the playhouses themselves. Indeed scholars sometimes mistake documentary noise for evidence of historical importance: the Theatre’s very well-documented financial and legal troubles have made it seem extremely important in the historiography, in contrast to a lack of comparable evidence for trouble at the Curtain, for example. But evidence of trouble is not evidence of importance, and if anything, the Theatre’s recurrent appearance in the historical record points to its administrative and financial troubles, not its success. Why has the Theatre come to dominate twentieth- and twenty-first-century historiography? Among other things, this demonstrates the power of nomenclature: the Theatre is theatrical in its name, and this has placed it front and centre in the way people have understood the early modern London theatrical scene. Its name was, after all, a deliberate publicity decision, and it had immediate effect. John Stockwood said on 24 August 1578, in a sermon preached at Paul’s Cross, ‘I know not how I might … more discommend the gorgeous Playing place erected in the fields, than to term it, as they please to have it called, a Theatre … a show place of all beastly and filthy matters’ (Stockwood 1578: 134). Stockwood is not aiming for compliments here, but he does pay the building the compliment of acknowledging that its name (from the Greek θέᾱτρον, ‘a place for viewing’: OED ‘theatre/theatre, n.’) has stuck: it is a provocation and an intervention which the subsequent embrace of the word ‘theatre’ by the English language has hidden from us. In this way, its name has done its job: it is a marketing term designed to make this particular building seem special and distinct. Such a naming strategy makes sense in a city with an already burgeoning playhouse scene so that the Theatre responds to its already-open rivals but distinguishes itself from them with its name. The alternative narrative, in which the Theatre gets there first, has been enormously popular, but it makes little sense of the playhouse’s name. All other early playhouses seem to be named after their location, and the Theatre’s name helped to differentiate it from this existing context. If the Theatre had got there first, and its name made such a splash, why did the playhouses that theatre historians think of as following it not follow its naming practices? This is a move repeated two decades later by many of the same personnel repurposing the timber from the Theatre site to build the Globe: the new playhouse’s metaphorical title was, like that of its predecessor, distinctive in a theatrical culture which otherwise named playing venues after their location (the Curtain after the walled pasture on which it was built, for example). It is also important for subsequent historiography that the Theatre was a regular playing space for the various theatre companies that eventually merged into the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and it has sometimes been treated by scholars as their home. This means that its connections

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with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the Burbages and Shakespeare add a kind of canonical weight to the importance it has come to occupy in theatre history. Scholarship is used to thinking of the literary canon, which privileges certain writers and kinds of writers over others, but buildings and histories can be the objects of canonization too, and the special fusion of Shakespeare with the theatrically named Theatre may have had a particular mnemonic, thaumaturgical effect on how the playhouses of this period have been remembered and organized. Scholars have also come to see the Theatre through the viewpoint and memory of the Burbage family itself. In 1635 James’s brother Cuthbert looked back on the early years of playhousebuilding sixty years earlier and called his father ‘the first builder of Playhowses’, a claim that has been taken to describe the Theatre (National Archives MS LC 5/133, p. 50; Wickham, Berry and Ingram 2000: 226). By this time the Burbages had spent many years arguing and sometimes literally fighting the other people who had helped to finance, build and run the Theatre, on the site of the playhouse, in the streets, in each other’s homes and in court (see for example Wickham, Berry and Ingram 2000: 358–63), and Burbage’s later claims here need to be seen in light of these disputes. The Theatre, then, has been powerfully placed at what has come to be seen as the start of a period of playhouse-building, its name, its Shakespearean associations and the aggressive, sometimes violent claims of the Burbages working to maintain its primacy and centrality to conventional scholarly chronologies. The traditional scholarly emphasis on 1576 and on specific playhouse spaces like the Theatre has had a number of effects, cutting off the amphitheatre playhouse from other contemporary playing spaces and their earlier antecedents (see Dillon 2006 and Ingram 1992). Round (or more exactly, polygonal) playhouses, now usually seen as the default for early modern playing venues, were in fact always in the minority. Until 1587, the Theatre was the only such playing space; it was joined in that year by the Rose, with the Swan, Globe and Hope opening over the next few decades. As Callan Davies puts it (forthcoming), this means that London had only two amphitheatres before 1596, which means that Richard Tarlton, Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, Thomas Kyd, along with the Shakespeare who had ‘written most of his histories, Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, had operated in a city ‘dominated by rectangular, room-, or hall-like venues’, none of which can be securely dated but which seem to have opened during the 1560s and 1570s. It is precisely these kinds of venues which have dropped out of view because of the canonization of and fixation on the Theatre opening in 1576. Long before these decades, John Rastell was running a performance venue at Finsbury in the 1520s, built by Henry Walton, who was involved in several other 1520s playing venues.6 David Kathman (2009) has shown that London’s inns were regularly staging professional plays from at least the 1540s, while Mary Erler (2014), Meg Twycross (1988) and Janette Dillon (2006) have all shown that London venues were hosting commercial theatre in the first decades of the sixteenth century. (For more on the city inns, see Tracey Hill’s chapter in the current volume.) Theatre history chronology, then, is liable to all kinds of distortions. So how might we instead think about how the London playhouses came to happen in time? The playhouses listed above testify to something special and unusual happening

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in London; though specific opening dates cannot be affixed to these spaces, what is clear is that by the 1570s, and possibly before, new experiments in regular performing spaces were being undertaken in London. Scholarship is still working to understand how that process happened in historical, civic, cultural, architectural and entrepreneurial terms and how it might be set against a wider national and European picture. In support of this attempt to rethink the potential chronology of such events, this chapter moves now to John Bale, a playwright strongly associated with the theatre and Reformation politics of the 1530s, and to the culture of play revival and reprinting of the middle part of the sixteenth century.

* The playwriting and theatre-making communities of the London 1570s playhouses often seem starkly different and removed from earlier traditions, but much of that difference is the result of different levels and qualities of evidence and the way that evidence is framed, rather than a lack of continuity in playing traditions. Such different levels and qualities of evidence can be seen in the very different rates at which performances, playing venues or playing companies are recorded in documentation or plays are published in print (and, less commonly, manuscript) editions. It is therefore worth spending some time in the middle of the sixteenth century, looking for examples of such continuity. Zachary Lesser shows that ‘[a]lmost from the introduction of the printing press into England, stationers printed drama alongside their religious treatises, sermons, legal manuals, medical texts, poetry, and other kinds of books’ (Lesser 2011: 520). Nevertheless, there was a marked drop-off in the number of plays being printed in England towards the middle of the sixteenth century. Only two plays are known to have been printed in England in the 1540s and two again in the 1550s. Plays do not seem to be printed in England with any frequency until the end of the 1550s, when this markedly changed.7 Richard Tottel printed Jasper Heywood’s translation of Seneca’s Troas in two 1559 editions and Thomas Powell printed it in a third edition the following year. The year 1560 also saw John King print Nice Wanton (1547–53) and Impatient Poverty (1554–8), the latter play printed in a second edition the following year by William Copland, who also published two editions of Jack Juggler (1553–8) between c. 1562 and 1568. In the 1560s at least one play is published each year, and sometimes as many as six. This is quite a change from the previous two decades which saw only two plays every ten years, and this upsurge in printed editions is accompanied by the first examples of plays being reprinted, new editions that suggest some kind of revived consumer appetite for printed plays from the late 1550s. In the same period, evidence for English play revival suddenly accumulates, sometimes in England and sometimes elsewhere in Europe, suggesting an increase in the number of such revivals. Traditional forms of theatre such as the Corpus Christi plays had been built for revival, their purpose being to be performed at a certain time each year. In the middle of the sixteenth century, however, plays which had been written and produced for a specific occasion some years before suddenly

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start to be revived. Thus, John Bale’s Chief Promises, John Baptist’s Preaching and The Temptation, all of them written for performance in 1538, were revived on 20 August 1553 by young men performing at the market cross in Kilkenny High Street, County Kilkenny, Ireland (Fletcher 2001: 169). Nicholas Grimald’s Christus  redivivius, staged at Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1540–1, was revived at St Anne’s Gymnasium, Augsburg, 1556.8 Nicholas Udall’s Hezekiah (1534–53), possibly performed originally by Eton’s Boys at Thomas Cromwell’s house on 2 February 1538, was revived in 1564 as part of the entertainment laid on for Elizabeth I when she visited Cambridge University (Nelson 1989: 85, 230). And finally, as we shall see, Bale’s King Johan (1538–9) seems to have been planned for revival in Canterbury in 1560. The geographical sweep of these revivals makes it especially hard to generalize in any way, but what is clear is that the middle of the sixteenth century saw a return to English plays staged a couple of decades before, resulting in new publications and revivals. Each of these plays is theological in subject and polemical in its relation to reformation, and these revivals seem to be seeking to revive that polemic in their very different historical and cultural contexts. Evidence for such revival seems to disappear soon after 1560, around the same time that reprint rates for plays seem to rise. Across the fields of performance and print, evidence for theatrical activity seems to point in contradictory directions, but what does seem clear is that both audiences and readers were expected to take interest in the theatrical products of their youth or of a previous generation. Midsixteenth-century theatrical culture included a strong interest in plays written over the previous decades. John Bale is important to this tradition because documentary evidence shows him working directly within it. His play King Johan had first been performed in Canterbury in September 1538, where it had then sparked actionable statements concerning the respective powers of Henry VIII and the Pope and the merits of Reformation. In legal proceedings over ‘certen wourdes’ which Henry Totehill spoke in the house of Thomas Browne, one deponent said that he had heard that Totehill had said ‘yat the olde lawe was as good as the newe’; another tolde that he hadde ben at my lorde of Canterburys, and there hadd hard one of the best matiers that euer he sawe towching king Iohn and than says yat he had harde diuers tymes preistes and clerkes say, that King Iohn did loke like one that hadd rune frome brynnyng of a house, butt this deponent knewe now, that yt was nothing treu, for as farr as he perceyued, king Iohn was as noble a prince as euer was in England, And therby we myght perceyve that he was ye begynner of the puttyng down of the bisshop of Rome, and thereof we myght be all gladd. (Gibson 2002: 151–2) Drama here was a catalyst for the kinds of public discussion strongly discouraged or even criminalized in Tudor England, confronting practitioners, audiences and their neighbours with chronological change: because the play showed a highly ideological image of a past monarch ‘as noble a prince as euer was in England’, some in the audience felt ‘we myght be all gladd’.

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The year 1538 might not be as historically and culturally distant from the Elizabethan playhouses as it might first appear: we have already seen how difficult it is to date them. It is not clear when the Red Lion first opened or whether there were Elizabethan playhouses before it, and there is evidence of regular performances in London venues that look and operated like playhouses from as early as the 1520s (Kathman 2009). Recent scholarship by Roslyn Knutson, David McInnis, Matthew Steggle and Misha Teramura (2009-; see also McInnis 2021, McInnis and Steggle eds 2014), and Martin Wiggins (2012–) has called attention to the state of knowledge on ‘lost’ plays, some of which can be well documented, some of which are irretrievably lost, and the same may well be true of playhouses. But whether we think of Bale’s 1530s plays as being separated by a generation from the period of the Elizabethan playhouses, or whether we think of them as part of a continuum, later performance records show this prominent English playwright bringing plays now associated with the earliest years of the Henrician reformation to Elizabethan Canterbury with controversial effect. From 1559 until his death in 1563, Bale was prebendary of Canterbury Cathedral. Biographies and literary histories of Bale’s career often present these final years as unimportant: Thora Balslev Blatt (1968) has nothing to say about them, Peter Happé calls them years of ‘Retirement’ (1996: 22), and Leslie P. Fairfield reviews but does not emphasize these years (1976: 144–50). This is seriously misleading. There are multiple forms of evidence that Bale intended, and was expected, to return to writing his incendiary history of England; his international reputation was, if anything, growing in these years; and his unpublished late works make clear that he was drafting interventions in local debate and protest. The unpublished dedicatory epistle to his reply to James Cancellar’s The Pathe of Obedience, for example, attacks recent celebrations of Midsummer which had targeted local aldermen and Protestant dignitaries and summarizes several sermons delivered against such Catholic protests (Gibson 2002: 1.187–9). This is someone with a public audience actively involved in local, national and international religious and political controversy, living at the heart of Canterbury life, and indeed working to bring that life to national or international attention. This is also a former playwright who not only planned to stage his divisive 1530s plays in Elizabethan Canterbury but was actively rewriting them. In 1560, legal examinations once again record local debate about religious, national identity sparked by Bale’s theatrical work. One play required the making of a friar’s costume: ‘Mr Bale settith furth [a play]9 wherin ther is a fryer’ (Gibson 2002: 1.184). It isn’t possible to know if this play – perhaps a revival of King Johan – was staged or not, but the controversy surrounding its pre-production period was public, divisive and abusive, and preparations for the production, along with their reception, may help to explain why Bale’s plays were reprinted in the early Elizabethan period. Again and again, testimonies move from the issues of the proprietary nature of making or mocking friar attire to centre on Bale-as-author and Bale-as-playwright-becausehe-cannot-get-into-the-pulpit, a concept important enough to reappear in three testimonies in different wording. In other words, these records turn on the role of

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theatre as public address, religious intervention and means of authorial expression. The words of alderman John Ugden or Oakden, whom Bale apparently sued for libel (Gibson 3.945), are reported by three different witnesses: pilkinton answered Mr Bale settith furth a play wherein ther is a fryer, cui Okeden respondendo dixit [to whom Okeden said in response], I nowe, he doth well for that … he cannot preach anny more he settith furth and inventith plaies to speke against fryers and monckes and other religious people that haue ben in the tymes past. (Gibson 2002: 1.184) nowe mr bale can Preach no more he settith furth plaies. (Gibson 2002: 1.185) mr Bale doth well practise himself to sett furth playes against religious men and not com in to the pulpit to make sermons. (Gibson 2002: 1.186) Hugh Pilkington’s examination is especially revealing of how local controversy centred on Bale himself: his local standing, his Reformation and even his preReformation biography, the potentially poisonous content of his plays and, crucially for thinking about professional theatre, their capacity to make money. Pilkington records Ugden telling the servant whom Pilkington has instructed to make a friar’s outfit, ‘if thowe make a fryers cote thowe shalte be my contry man no more’. Ugden goes on to ask Pilkington, ‘Is it mr bales doyng’, and, in response to his answer ‘yea: it shall be played at mr mays house’, ‘will they take anny mony’. He then says: mr Bale doth well to occupie him self with such trompery And speaking against fryers, yet the knave him self was a fryer And knewe ther knavery well ynoughe To whom Pylkyngton answered and said I knowe not him to be such aman Cui [to whom] okeden [said] yes by godes blode he is as the rest are knaves. (Gibson 2002: 1.186) There is obvious continuity between the 1560 controversy and that of 1538. In both disputes, religion and nationhood intertwine: King Johan made its audience think about Anglo-Papal relations, while the making of a friar’s costume calls someone’s English (or Kentish) identity into question. Above all the two incidents suggest the centrality of performance and Bale to local public life and debate. But there are also important differences to this new controversy: first, Bale’s centrality to local gossip, the framing of his work via his biography, both as a former friar and as a playwright who would prefer to be in the pulpit, as if his past and present identity affect or inflect his right to speak and the way he was watched and heard. Second, these new productions of Bale plays may have been staged or planned with the local grammar school boys. Certainly by 1562 the school was being granted repeated funds for ‘settyng furthe of Interludes’ (Gibson 2002: 1.190) and for ‘settynge out of … plays yn Christmas’ (1.191), and a year later the painter John Johnson was paid for his work ‘yn tyme of the [school] playe’ (1.193). In these

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years provisions appear to have been put in place for a well-funded and continuous tradition, and the boys are recorded performing again in public in 1591 and soon after the Restoration. This raises the distinct possibility that Bale was mounting plays with the schoolboys Stephen Gosson and John Lyly in the company or the audience, and embedding in the school’s memory his highly controversial playwriting career, which means that Christopher Marlowe, ten years younger than Gosson and Lyly, may well have heard of these performances too. In other words, three writers who would go on to be associated with the London playhouses of the 1570s and 1580s had much opportunity to see Bale, the preacher-playwright, the mocker of Catholicism, the notorious writer whose career is known and discussed by the local community, in action. We can’t know for sure that Bale was working with the school, but whether performed by schoolboys or not, we can see that this was a public scandal involving theatre, Reformation politics and a major author rehearsing close to the local grammar school at a time when Lyly and Gosson were schoolboys. As boys, these future playwrights had ample opportunity for hearing about  – and may have witnessed, and may have performed in – the first English plays to have been canonized in print under their author’s name. Astonishingly, three of the first six writers associated with the London playhouses came from Canterbury and likely attended the same school. Little has been made of this connection hitherto, partly because Lyly and Gosson have been of much less interest to scholarship than Marlowe and partly because scholarship rarely connects the boy companies that Lyly wrote for with the adult companies Marlowe mostly worked with, or the 1570s theatre scene for which Gosson wrote with the playhouses Marlowe worked in ten years later. Nor have these writers been linked much with Bale before. But it is not difficult to see links between Bale and Lyly and Marlowe in particular. Lyly, like Bale, wrote for choirboys and incorporated their music into his work and their bodies into his dramaturgy; Lyly, like Bale, was fascinated with the sacred Reformation body of the monarch; and Lyly wrote with a view to publication as well as performance. Peter Happé (1996: 108) suggests that Bale wanted his audiences and readers to think of his work as a cycle or manifesto, and similarly Lyly used the repeated figure of Cupid to suggest that new plays might be continuations of older ones. Encountering Cupid in Galatea, Lyly’s Venus immediately reminds him of the conclusion to the previous Lyly play, Sappho and Phao: ‘alwaies taken’, she complains, ‘first by Sapho, nowe by Diana’ (1592: sig. G3v). This line makes explicit something implicit in Lyly’s habit of recycling stories, anecdotes and characters across his texts  – his first play, Campaspe, for example, stages a conflict between monarch and artist that had been repeatedly invoked in both Euphues books; in his habit of encouraging dialogue between successive stories, Lyly was repeating if not directly following Bale’s example. It is less easy to link Gosson’s plays with Bale’s, since the former do not survive, though we might reflect on whether their failure to survive and their author’s later attacks on theatre themselves express attitudes to the risk of performance also available in Bale’s theatrical and non-theatrical work. But Marlowe’s work has a

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famously confrontational approach to religion, which includes assaulting a priest (Edward II), burning a religious document (Tamburlaine) and making a deal with the devil (Doctor Faustus). Marlowe was born soon after Bale attempted to revive his iconoclastic 1530s plays in Canterbury, and while we can never know what kind of lasting cultural imprint Bale left on the city Marlowe grew up and the school he attended, Bale’s legacy was much closer to Marlowe in time and geography than usually supposed. It is, in any case, possible to link John Bale to the first generation of Elizabethan writers to be associated with the London playhouses, and to see that, while it is possible that Gosson and Lyly never had direct exposure to Bale or his works, he was the focus for gossip and literary fame in the town of their youth and offered a set of precedents that Lyly’s work, at least, goes on to embrace. The playwriting and theatre-making communities of the playhouses often seem starkly different and removed from earlier traditions, but in the 1560s revivals of John Bale’s plays it may be possible to witness an early Reformation theatrical practitioner training and inspiring future ones. Perhaps most importantly of all, these 1560s revivals and printed and reprinted plays offer important contexts for the Red Lion building works recorded in 1567 and the many new playhouses recorded in the 1570s and possibly open before this decade. So often perceived as a late Elizabethan, late Tudor and late-sixteenth-century phenomenon, the London playhouses are mid-Elizabethan responses to the ongoing theatrical experiments of the sixteenth century.

NOTES 1 Except where otherwise stated, this chapter follows the dates offered and evidenced in Wickham, Berry and Ingram (2000), although it questions the idea that the date of the first surviving document to mention a historical phenomenon is also necessarily the date that the phenomenon comes into existence. 2 For a 1600 summary of the (lost) 1576 lease between James Burbage and Giles Allen, see Wickham, Berry and Ingram (2000: 333–6). For the contract between Philip Henslowe and John Cholmley, which places the building of the Rose in 1587, see 423–5. 3 For more on this chronology, see Kesson (2017). 4 TNA K.B. 27/1229, m.30; Guildhall Library MS 4329/1, 128v. These documents are discussed and transcribed in Wickham, Berry and Ingram (2000: 290–4). 5 I’m grateful to the archaeologist Steve Wright for talking me through his work on the site. 6 For more on Walton’s importance to several 1520s playing venues, see Davies (forthcoming). 7 Alexander Samson (2016) has shown the vibrancy of literary and theatrical culture of the 1550s, and these subsequent print editions may be belated responses to that earlier vibrancy, showing the time lag between performance and print that would also define playhouse playing culture.

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8 Elliott et al. (2004: 1.85–6, 807) and Wiggins (2012–: 1.101), citing Archiv für das Studium der Neueren sprachen und Litteraturen 105 (1900: 1–9). 9 This phrase is inserted above the line.

REFERENCES Berry, H. ed. (1979), The First Public Playhouse: The Theatre in Shoreditch, 1576–1598, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Blatt, T. B. (1968), The Plays of John Bale: A Study of Ideas, Technique and Style, Copenhagen: G. E. C. Gads. Davies, C. (forthcoming), What Is a Playhouse? England at Play, 1520–1620, Routledge. Dillon, J. (2006), The Cambridge Introduction to Early English Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Egan, G. (2009), ‘The Theatre in Shoreditch, 1576–1599’, in R. Dutton (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, 168–85, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Elliott, J. R., A. H. Nelson, A. F. Johnston and D. Wyatt, eds (2004), Records of Early English Drama: Oxford, 2 vols, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Erler, M. (2014), ‘London Commercial Theatre 1500–1576’, in J. Jenkins and J. Sanders (eds), Editing, Performance, Texts: New Practices in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama, 93–106, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Fairfield, L. P. (1976), John Bale: Mythmaker for the English Renaissance, West Lafayette: Purdue University Press. Fletcher, A. (2001), Drama and the Performing Arts in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gibson, J., ed. (2002), Records of Early English Drama: Kent: Diocese of Canterbury, 3 vols, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Happé, P. (1996), John Bale, New York: Twayne. Ingram, W. (1992), The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of the Adult Professional Theater in Elizabethan England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, L. (2017), Shakespeare’s Lost Playhouse: Eleven Days at Newington Butts, New York: Routledge. Johnston, A. F. and M. Rogerson, eds (1979), Records of Early English Drama: York, 2 vols, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Kathman, D. (2009), ‘The Rise of Commercial Playing in 1540s London’, Early Theatre, 12 (1): 15–38. Kesson, A. (2017), ‘Playhouses, Plays, and Theater History: Rethinking the 1580s’, Shakespeare Studies, 45: 19–40. Knutson, R. L., D. McInnis, M. Steggle and M. Teramura, eds (2009–), Lost Plays Database. Available online: https://lostplays.folger.edu Lesser, Z. (2011), ‘Playbooks’, in J. Raymond (ed.), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, vol. 1: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660, 521–35, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Loengard, J. (1983), ‘An Elizabethan Lawsuit: John Brayne, His Carpenter, and the Building of the Red Lion Theatre’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 34 (3): 298–310.

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Lyly, John (1592), Gallathea, London. McInnis, D. (2021), Shakespeare and Lost Plays: Reimagining Drama in Early Modern England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McInnis, D. and M. Steggle, ed. (2014), Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Nelson, A. H., ed. (1989), Records of Early English Drama: Cambridge, 3 vols, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Samson, A. (2016), ‘Culture under Philip and Mary I’, in Sarah Duncan and Valerie Schutte (eds), The Birth of a Queen: Essay on the Quincentenary of Mary I, 155–78, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Smith, D. L., R. Strier and D. Bevington (1995), ‘Introduction’, in D. L. Smith, R. Strier and D. Bevington (eds), The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London, 1576–1649, 1–16, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stockwood, J. (1578), A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse on Barthelmew Day, London. Twycross, M. (1988), ‘Felstead of London: Silk-Dyer and Theatrical Entrepreneur’, Medieval English Theatre, 10 (1): 4–25. Wallace, C. W. (1913), The First London Theatre, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Studies. Wickham, G., H. Berry and W. Ingram, eds (2000), English Professional Theatre, 1530–1660, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wiggins, M. (2012–), British Drama: 1533–1642: A Catalogue, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 7

Resources CATHERINE EVANS AND AMY LIDSTER

Rather than attempt a comprehensive listing of digital resources, our aim in this chapter is to be selective and discuss some core resources that we believe are of particular use to researchers interested in Shakespeare and early modern drama. We concentrate, for the most part, on open-access, online databases, ranging from those that strive for comprehensive coverage of a broad subject (such as the English Short Title Catalogue for printed texts) to others that have a narrower focus (such as Early Modern London Theatres for theatrical documents with transcription afterlives). Our resources are divided into three main categories: ‘Plays and Early Texts’ (for platforms that provide access to texts through facsimiles, transcriptions, critical editions or evidence of materials); ‘Theatre and Cultural Spaces’ (for databases that are geographically structured, concentrating on cultural activities in London and across Britain); and ‘Publication of Plays’ (for those with an emphasis on plays as printed books). Digital resources can be continuously updated, and most of the ones we consider here are maintained to reflect new findings. Some are still in progress or expanding to accommodate new strands, such as the focus project on bookshops in St Paul’s Churchyard as part of the Map of Early Modern London. The majority have detailed ‘how to’ guides, so rather than replicating this advice, we aim to contextualize the resources for readers and highlight some profitable avenues of enquiry. It is tempting to approach digital tools as neutral; however, like any scholarly work, they are the products of editorial decisions and priorities. As Laura Estill and Andie Silva propose, digital projects should be considered ‘as arguments: they argue for the importance of the material they present, and they shape the ways users conceptualize and research texts and archives’ (2018: 131). These ‘arguments’ are shaped through interface design, searchability, accessibility and funding priorities. Users should be alert to how digital tools direct the questions they can ask and the information they find.

PLAYS AND EARLY TEXTS Early English Books Online (EEBO) EEBO is one of the most widely known databases for researchers working on the early modern period. It strives towards comprehensive coverage, providing full digital facsimiles and bibliographic details

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for over 146,000 titles printed between c. 1473 and 1700 in the British Isles and British North America, plus works in English printed elsewhere. While EEBO is an invaluable resource for accessing early texts, perhaps the most crucial thing to understand is its limitations (Gadd 2009). It does not provide complete coverage of texts printed in the British Isles and colonies during its set date range, nor does it give a clear picture of the texts available to readers. Imported foreign-language books, which formed an important part of the period’s print culture, fall outside its scope (although it does include works in other languages that were printed within its geographical limits). EEBO’s emphasis on ‘English’ books is therefore somewhat slippery, incorporating – sometimes inconsistently – both geographical and language criteria. It draws its selection from Pollard and Redgrave’s Short-Title Catalogue (1976–91), Wing’s Short-Title Catalogue (1972–98), the British Library’s Thomason Tracts (1640–61) and the Early English Books Tract Supplement. EEBO does not, however, include a copy of all titles in these catalogues and typically provides only one copy of an edition (usually from major collections), which, by virtue of this selection, makes it appear representative when copies often vary significantly. The achievement and value of EEBO nevertheless cannot be overstated, including its ability to democratize, albeit through a subscription, access to early books. A  number of open-access resources offer higher-quality facsimiles than EEBO, such as the British Library’s Shakespeare in Quarto , the Bodleian First Folio facsimile and the Folger’s LUNA , but each of these covers a more limited corpus. For those interested in early modern drama, these texts and their sources are well represented on EEBO and can be searched by title, author (including modern attribution and spelling), date, publisher, bibliographic number, keyword and document features (to give a few examples). When conducting a keyword search of full texts, users need to be aware that only those texts that have been transcribed through EEBO-TCP will be searched (see below). On the ProQuest platform, EEBO can be searched alone, or in tandem with a wide range of other databases, including another early modern one: Early European Books . This database draws on the holdings of national libraries in Denmark, Italy, France and the Netherlands, as well as the Wellcome Library in London, and its scope extends to all works printed in Europe before 1701 and works in European languages printed elsewhere. It is structured as a series of ‘collections’, each of which digitizes a group of major printed works from a partner library. While Early European Books aims to be increasingly comprehensive, the database’s underlying design privileges specific library holdings grouped into thematic categories (e.g. ‘Statecraft and Law in Early Modern France’ from the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) in Collection 17). New ‘collections’ are added every year and are integrated with Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC) subject classifications and bibliographic numbering (discussed later). Unlike EEBO, Early European Books provides searchable images of printed material in full colour, with bindings, endpapers, inserts and blanks captured, allowing more extensive bibliographic research to be carried out through digital resources.

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EEBO Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP) As of 2022, over 60,000 of the works on EEBO have been transcribed and fully encoded through EEBO-TCP. The transcriptions appear on both EEBO and through EEBO-TCP’s own open-access platform . This resource is useful for reading early printed books in semidiplomatic transcription, but it is also a powerful tool for conducting sophisticated searches of words and phrases. EEBO-TCP uses string-matching and looks for the exact term users supply. Its ‘Word Index’ helps to identify spelling variants: one quirk of the resource is that it was created in two phases, and each corpus of transcriptions has its own Word Index, so users need to search for variants through both indices (although the Basic Search option for keywords looks through the entire corpus). EEBO-TCP can be used, for example, to explore patterns in spelling by a particular author. A Basic Search for ‘emured’ reveals that this unusual spelling for ‘immured’ appears in only three records: Edward III (1596), Love’s Labour’s Lost (1623 Folio) and the much-later Ladies Dictionary (1694). It could represent, in the first two records, a distinctive Shakespearean spelling and be used to support claims that these plays were printed (at least in part) from authors’ papers and confirm Shakespeare’s hand in the ‘anonymous’ Edward III. However, as printed texts can also reflect the spelling habits of their compositors, these searches cannot stand alone as evidence of authorial agency and need to be supplemented with further evidence. It should be stressed that EEBO-TCP is not only of interest for attribution studies but is invaluable for a wide range of digital humanities projects, such as mapping language use and linguistic change (seen through the Linguistic DNA project ). The search categories on EEBO-TCP are common to other databases, and it is useful to define them here. The Basic Search offers a keyword search (of a word or phrase) within transcriptions from the entire corpus and can be sorted by date, author, title and frequency. To look for variants (a Wildcard Search), add an asterisk (*). If a researcher were interested in music, for example, searching for ‘bell*’ would bring up ‘bells’, ‘bellring’, ‘bellringer’, ‘bellhouse’, as well as less relevant variants, such as ‘belly’, ‘bellicose’ and ‘belligerent’. The Boolean Search allows users to search for up to three terms, as well as specify terms to exclude. When searching for ‘bell’ and ‘music’, a user could specify ‘NOT funeral’, in the hopes that this would exclude works discussing the controversy over funeral bells. The Proximity Search looks for terms that appear (or do not appear) within a proximity of 40, 80 or 120 words.

English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) and Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC) The ESTC and the USTC are separate resources, but we consider them together because they both offer digital ‘catalogues’ of printed texts that can be used to explore the period’s print culture. Unlike EEBO and EEBO-TCP, these databases do not contain facsimiles or transcriptions but feature bibliographic details and links to library holdings and/or digital facsimiles

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on EEBO and other sites, such as HathiTrust and Internet Archive. The ESTC lists more than 480,000 items, primarily in English, that were published between 1473 and 1800 in the British Isles or colonies. The USTC casts a much wider geographical and linguistic net, containing more than 780,000 editions that were printed before 1650 across Europe and the British Isles in a range of languages. The ESTC, in particular, creates an impression of comprehensive coverage, but, as with EEBO, the entries do not document everything that did – or does – exist. The ESTC derives its entries from the STC (Pollard and Redgrave 1976–91), Wing (1972–98) and its own forerunner project, the ‘Eighteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue’. The USTC draws on catalogues representing different countries and regions and has to deal with a considerable number of deficient or non-existent national bibliographies. Both platforms are being developed to incorporate new titles; indeed, the USTC does not yet list all items from the ESTC. Searches on both databases are connected to old-spelling word forms, meaning that supplying a standardized title often does not yield all  – or sometimes any  – records (even when using, on the ESTC, the ‘Uniform Title’ option or not searching for exact phrases). In order to gather a clear impression of relevant records, it is necessary to conduct multiple searches with spelling variants. The USTC’s interface offers more details about search results than the ESTC, by including, for example, a useful timeline graph of search hits. It also provides further information about physical copies, including library shelf marks. Both platforms have their advantages: the ESTC is unmatched in its expansiveness for ‘English’ printed texts (which incorporates, as on EEBO, linguistic and/or geographical criteria), while the USTC helps to foreground the transnational and transcultural exchanges that were so central during the period but are often elided on other digital platforms.

Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450–1700 (CELM) CELM offers a digital catalogue of ‘literary’ manuscripts, a term that is broadly defined and incorporates poems, plays, notebooks, letters and annotated books. It describes over 38,000 manuscript materials, taken from public and private collections, and represents well over two hundred authors. CELM is an extension of Peter Beal’s Index of English Literary Manuscripts 1450–1700 (1980– 93), which drew its narrower selection of authors from the Concise Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (Watson ed. 1965), the latter including only one female author – Aphra Behn. Under Beal’s direction, CELM has greatly expanded this representation, featuring more than seventy-five women writers and offering insight into the number and variety of their works, a crucial development as many of these texts were not printed and therefore are undocumented by the ESTC or EEBO. For those working on women’s writing, CELM can be used in tandem with the Perdita Project, which exists in two strands: an open-access catalogue of five hundred manuscripts written or compiled by women (1500–1700) and a subscription database , which provides digital facsimiles of 230 manuscripts.

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For each featured author, CELM provides an introduction to their work and any major collections, as well as a manuscript listing that contains details of each item’s manuscript witnesses, printed editions and information on scribes and previous owners. The full catalogue can be searched in a number of ways, including by first line and copy heading, which enables users to locate unnamed texts. CELM is essential for examining the copying and circulation of manuscripts: it can be used, for example, to consider the reception and remediation of dramatic works. While there are no dramatic manuscripts in John Webster’s hand, CELM points the user towards miscellanies that contain extracts from his plays, as well as highly annotated print copies. For exploring the circulation of dramatic extracts in manuscript, another complementary (and more focused) resource is the open-access Database of Dramatic Extracts or DEx .

Lost Plays Database (LPD) The LPD , edited by Roslyn Knutson, David McInnis, Matthew Steggle and Misha Teramura, is a wiki-style platform for finding and sharing information about ‘lost’ plays that were first performed in England between roughly 1570 and 1642 (set to be extended to 1679). The term ‘lost’ applies to plays that are identifiably lost – that is, some reference to them, usually in the form of a title, survives in at least one historical document. They are not, therefore, as Steggle points out, ‘truly lost, not in the sense that applies to most of the output of early modern theatre’ (Steggle 2014b: 81). Each entry for a lost play begins with transcriptions and sometimes facsimiles of the document(s) that refer to the play, most commonly Henslowe’s Diary, the Stationers’ Register and legal records. The rest of the entry offers, where available, discussion about the play’s narrative and dramatic sources, genre, plot, theatrical provenance, authorship and other scholarly commentary. Many entries are in progress or do not yet contain data (indicated by red title links), and researchers can apply to the editors for contributing privileges. The LPD is an indispensable resource for understanding theatrical activity in England and the fact that most plays that were performed have since been lost. The small proportion of drama that was printed or preserved in manuscript is the exception rather than the norm, and the LPD helps researchers to position their knowledge of extant plays within a more diverse theatrical landscape. It insists upon early modern theatre being evaluated not solely on the basis of extant texts, but on extant and identifiably lost ones. It also casts light on converging and diverging patterns in performance and publication. For example, a considerable number of English history plays were printed during the late 1590s: the LPD confirms this interest in English history through entries for lost plays such as ‘The Life and Death of Henry I’; but it also shows that other theatrical patterns – such as a spate of biblical plays (‘Nebuchadnezzar’, ‘Jephthah’, ‘Pontius Pilate’) performed at a similar time – were not represented in print. Print and stage patterns could differ considerably, and the LPD helps researchers recover crucial evidence of these trends.

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Linked Early Modern Drama Online (LEMDO) High-quality, open-access, scholarly editions of early modern plays and other texts can be found through Digital Renaissance Editions (DRE) , co-ordinating editor Brett Greatley-Hirsch; Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE) , co-ordinating editor Janelle Jenstad; and Queen’s Men Editions (QME) , general editor Helen Ostovich – all of which will be remediated onto LEMDO . These sites provide peer-reviewed, old- and modern-spelling editions, as well as critical introductions, reference and performance materials, and some facsimiles. Unlike databases such as EEBO-TCP, which offer transcriptions of early texts without editorial mediation, these platforms provide that critical direction by clarifying the relationship between early witnesses and offering commentary. Taking advantage of a digital medium, users can switch easily between a play’s early editions. James Mardock’s edition of Henry V on ISE, for example, contains old-spelling and modernized versions of both Q1 (1600) and the Folio (1623). The modernized versions on ISE clearly display the layers of textual variants that have accrued throughout a play’s history of editing (through ‘Show variants’ > ‘Display variants inline’). All three sites also feature further resources according to their distinctive focus: ISE provides information about Shakespeare’s life and times; QME considers primary evidence and secondary work on the Queen’s Men as a playing troupe; and DRE offers resources about the early modern period more broadly. QME is particularly invested in Performance as Research and aims to provide performance editions for all plays from the Queen’s Men (drawing on Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean’s The Queen’s Men and Their Plays (1998)), accompanied by recordings and performance stills of full-length productions.

THEATRE AND CULTURAL SPACES The Map of Early Modern London (MoEML) The MoEML , director Janelle Jenstad, helps researchers to explore the relationship between texts and the spaces in which they were created, performed, printed and circulated. The project consists of several strands, which are still being developed, including a map of London; an encyclopaedia of people, places and terms; and a library of early modern texts that have a close connection to places and movement within the city, such as Lord Mayor’s shows, royal entries and proclamations. The map itself is a digital version of the 1633 edition of Civitas Londinium, originally printed in 1561 from woodblocks and often referred to as the ‘Agas’ map, owing to an (incorrect) attribution to surveyor Ralph Agas (c. 1540–1621). Not only does the MoEML provide a digitized historical map, it offers an interactive interface that allows users to search for specific locations and see them highlighted on the map. A drop-down list of search features includes playhouses,

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city gates, churches, streets, bridges and markets – to name just a few categories – which, when selected, appear highlighted on the map, alongside links to historical documents that refer to them. The MoEML allows users to explore the areas in which dramatists lived and worked, the places where plays, processions and pageants were performed, and the connections between textual and physical spaces in the city. It helps researchers and students to imagine how people, texts and other materials moved around London’s streets and were shaped by their surroundings. Users can, for example, plot the city gates on the map and read extracts from documents, including plays, that make reference to them (such as the discussions of Ludgate in 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, Sir Thomas More, The Shoemaker’s Holiday and Westward Ho!). Because the MoEML is based on a historical map, one of its limitations is that representations of place and space cannot be updated and some features cannot be plotted precisely (owing to inaccuracies in the underlying map). A key highlight of the MoEML’s library is the old-spelling and modern editions (still in progress) of all Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline mayoral shows – texts which have an intrinsic connection to London itself.

Records of Early English Drama (REED) REED, a project that includes printed resources and online platforms, offers an important challenge to the primacy of London theatre by shifting the focus outside the capital to uncover regional touring patterns and performance activities across England, Wales and Scotland and moves the frame of enquiry beyond printed texts and authorial canons. It has transformed research in disciplines beyond early modern drama, such as music and social history, and enabled the birth of new fields, such as patronage studies (Westfall 2016). As the name suggests, REED collects and transcribes records (spanning the Middle Ages to 1642) that provide evidence of performance events and traditions, including secular music. As at 2021, there are twenty-eight printed volumes (nineteen of which are available on Internet Archive) that focus on either a major city or county. These volumes form the basis of REED Online . Records and editorial matter have been marked up using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) schema, tagging records with terms of interest. Users can search these tags by location, calendar day (including religious festival), person, playing troupe, performance title or type, and material object (such as prop, costume or instrument). While there is a text search option that makes use of Boolean and Wildcard operators, it does not allow for spelling variants, and using the filters is often the most effective way to locate records. Researchers should also remember that the tagging process is not ‘neutral’: the editors of REED have selected terms which they believe will be significant for projected users, so, for example, not all occupations have been tagged. For those interested in contextualising theatrical events by geographical area, the map display is particularly useful for locating, at a glance, performance centres and evidence. As helpfully discussed in the site’s ‘Anatomy of a Record’, these materials are often incomplete, repetitious and elliptic, and it is always important to bear in mind the original ‘author’ of a record and their purposes in making it.

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REED Patrons and Performances REED Patrons and Performances , codirectors Sally-Beth MacLean and Alan Somerset, is a focused project that draws on the REED collections to explore professional performers on tour in the provinces before 1642. It can be searched by patron, venue, troupe or event. This platform enriches the data from the REED volumes with new research, such as architectural information on performance spaces and geographies, including an interactive map of England and Wales that shows the routes troupes travelled on pre-1700 road networks. It is particularly valuable for researchers interested in theatrical patronage. Entries on individual patrons provide biographical details and a listing of their patronized troupes, performance venues they owned and events at which they were named as patron. This feature enables researchers to examine networks of influence and cultural exchange that reach far beyond the small group of well-known patrons connected to playing in London. Entries for venues provide short histories and a list of performance events, which can be browsed through the interactive map. All performance events give details of their source in a specific REED volume and can be cross-referenced for further information.

Early Modern London Theatres (EMLoT) In contrast to the wider geographical scope of the REED collections, EMLoT , director Sally-Beth MacLean, concentrates on primary documents connected to theatres in London and the afterlife of these documents, including where and how they have been transcribed and re-presented. EMLoT does not aim to be comprehensive: it features ‘Primary Sources’ that were written down prior to 1642 and then recopied (as ‘Secondary Sources’) by others after 1642. Because of this narrowed focus, EMLoT fulfils two core functions: it facilitates research on early modern theatres (by providing a searchable and highly organized database of historical records), and it also casts a spotlight on the processes of ‘filtration’ and transmission that these documents have undergone subsequently. It contains records relating to the theatres north and south of the Thames, as well as bear-baiting arenas and playing venues within the boundaries of the city of London. EMLoT will be interoperable with the London, Middlesex and Surrey collections of REED, once they are online. EMLoT is a useful starting place for research on London theatres. Its design, which emphasizes the links between documents and a range of performance venues, people and companies, alerts researchers to their complex interconnections. Users can browse by event, venue, person and primary or secondary source. Although document entries retain their original spelling, the search functions have been set up using standardized spellings, so it is easy for users to run comprehensive searches. EMLoT does not feature facsimiles or transcriptions of the documents themselves but does indicate where the primary source is located and where transcriptions or facsimiles can be found, including information about their reliability. In many cases, they can be found online through, for example, REED (specifically the Rose Theatre prototype); Internet Archive ; Shakespeare Documented

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(which features primary materials from Shakespeare’s life and times); and the Henslowe-Alleyn Digitization Project (which includes photographic facsimiles and transcriptions of Henslowe’s and Alleyn’s papers, as well as essays about them).

PUBLICATION OF PLAYS Database of Early English Playbooks (DEEP) DEEP , created by Alan Farmer and Zachary Lesser, provides clear, in-depth evidence about how plays were marketed as books. It contains entries for most extant play editions (single text and collections) published in England from the advent of printing until 1660 and draws on the data in monumental volumes like Greg’s Bibliography of English Printed Drama (1939–59) and Harbage’s Annals (1989). Entries contain full title-page transcriptions, separated out into different categories to show the play’s title and plot description; any attributions to dramatists, companies and theatres; the stationer’s imprint (which DEEP uses to distinguish the roles of printer, publisher and bookseller); as well as details about an edition’s paratexts and Stationers’ Register entries. DEEP’s first performance dates and modern attributions to dramatists and companies draw primarily on Harbage’s Annals, supplemented with new research. It is always worth cross-referencing this data with other resources such as Martin Wiggins’s Catalogue (2012–) and recent repertory studies, including Lawrence Manley and Sally-Beth MacLean’s Lord Strange’s Men and Their Plays (2014). The search feature that enables researchers to compile plays according to a modern understanding of their ‘genre’ is based exclusively on Harbage’s classifications in the Annals. One of the aspects that makes DEEP invaluable is the flexibility and power of its search features. Users can find and amass a list of play entries by date, author (using modern or playbook attribution), company (using modern or playbook attribution), performance venue and stationer – to name just some of the main options. Highly individualized searches can also be conducted. It is possible to search all of the title-page text (in modern or old spelling) for specific words or phrases. Lists can be compiled of plays that contain a certain kind of paratext (such as dedications, errata, or character and actor lists), and results can be expanded and searched within. For example, a researcher interested in early playbook dedications to William and Philip Herbert, dedicatees of Shakespeare’s First Folio, could look for ‘Herbert’ within a ‘dedication’ search to find that Matthew Gwinne’s Latin university play Vertumnus sive Annus Recurrens (1607) features the first dedication to Philip, while Ben Jonson’s Catiline (1611) contains the first to William.

Paratexts in English Printed Drama to 1642 and Early Modern Dramatic Paratexts These connected resources – Thomas Berger and Sonia Massai’s two-volume printed collection, Paratexts in English Printed Drama (2014) and Massai and Heidi Craig’s open-access database, Early Modern Dramatic Paratexts   – provide valuable evidence about how plays were marketed as books and the extra-dramatic materials they contained. Both resources draw on the titles and bibliographic data in Greg’s Bibliography and Farmer and Lesser’s DEEP with the aim of providing old-spelling critical editions of all paratexts printed in English playbooks (commercial and non-commercial) up to either 1642 (for Berger and Massai’s printed resource) or 1660 (for Massai and Craig’s database). ‘Paratext’ is taken to refer to title pages, dedications, addresses to the reader, commendatory verses, actor and character lists, prologues, epilogues, errata and colophons. These materials are fully transcribed, annotated and cross-referenced. In the printed volumes, they are arranged chronologically by first edition and separated into singletext editions and collections. Multiple indices allow users to search the transcriptions by place (including theatrical venue) and person (including stationer, playwright, actor, company, patron and dedicatee). At the end of volume two, a master list of all collections and single-text editions indicates, at a glance, which types of paratexts feature in every edition. This list can be used to explore patterns of inclusion as well as innovations for certain kinds of material, such as the first address to a reader in a commercial playbook: Richard Jones’s address in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (1590). The digital database enhances the searchability of the paratext transcriptions. Users can conduct keyword searches within all paratexts and filter paratexts by ‘type’ – such as actor lists, character lists and addresses to the reader. These two resources are indispensable tools for understanding how writers and stationers positioned plays in the book market, what motivated the publication of plays, and how ideas about authorship, ownership and the ‘value’ of plays developed.

Stationers Register Online (SRO) The SRO , editorial team Giles Bergel, Ian Gadd, James Cummings and Pip Willcox, is a database of title entries that were recorded in the Registers of the Stationers’ Company of London between 1557 and 1640 as a precursor to publication. Entry in the Register was not a prerequisite for publication until 1637: texts needed to be licensed by the Company, but that was a separate process to entrance, which required an additional fee and provided further protection of a stationer’s right to copy (i.e. to publish the text exclusively). The SRO is a newly edited, searchable database that is based on the Company records and Edward Arber’s five-volume edition of the Register (1875–94) (available through Internet Archive). The SRO is of particular use for researchers interested in the publication of early modern drama. An entry for a play title provides important information about who owned the rights to the text, which Company official licensed the title and, where applicable, which state representative (usually a clergyman) authorized it. Each entry also provides information about how plays were read or interpreted through the specific phrasing of the title, which often differed from printed editions. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine is described in the Register, somewhat surprisingly, as ‘twooe commicall discourses’ (SRO3094). In this case, the entry could indicate that the play did contain – in performance – the scenes of jesting that publisher Richard Jones

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criticizes and claims he has excised in his printed edition of 1590. One limitation with the SRO is the fact that individuals’ names are searchable through their original spellings only, meaning that searching for Shakespeare publisher Andrew Wise using ‘Wise’ does not yield results that involve variant spellings such as ‘Wyse’. The SRO suggests that future versions of the site may include standardized names.

FURTHER RESOURCES AND CONCLUSION We have aimed in this chapter to offer some advice on a handful of core resources that concentrate on early modern texts, places and cultural spaces. There are, of course, many excellent resources that we have not been able to include, such as the newly launched Read Not Dead Archive hosted by Shakespeare’s Globe, the Folger’s Digital Anthology of Early Modern Drama (EMED) , the University of Cambridge’s course, English Handwriting Online 1500–1700 and Gale’s British Literary Manuscripts Online  – to name just a few. Expansive lists of resources can be found on a number of sites, including Folgerpedia and Claire M. L. Bourne’s Of Pilcrows . Here, however, we have selected resources that we believe have wide appeal for researchers interested in early modern drama and that strive towards comprehensiveness in some degree, ranging from the ambitious scope of EEBO, to those that catalogue manuscripts, lost plays or performance evidence. Some of the titles we include are notably London- and Anglo-centric, and while their emphasis (and ours in this handbook) is on writing in the English language, we hope that resources continue to develop in ways that emphasize the multiculturalism and multilingualism of London, its theatres and book trade, as well as the theatrical life and diverse cultures and languages witnessed across England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland and further afield.

REFERENCES Arber, E., ed. (1875–94), A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–1640 A. D., 5 vols, London and Birmingham: privately printed. Beal, P., ed. (1980–93), Index of English Literary Manuscripts, 2 vols, London: Mansell. Berger, T. L. and S. Massai, eds (2014), Paratexts in English Printed Drama to 1642, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Estill, L. and A. Silva (2018), ‘Storing and Accessing Knowledge: Digital Tools for the Study of Early Modern Drama’, in J. Jenstad, M. Kaethler and J. Roberts-Smith (eds), Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools, 131–43, Abingdon: Routledge. Gadd, I. (2009), ‘The Use and Misuse of Early English Books Online’, Literature Compass, 6 (3): 680–92. Greg, W. W. (1939–59), A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration, 4 vols, London: Bibliographical Society.

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Harbage, A., S. Schoenbaum and S. S. Wagonheim (1989), Annals of English Drama, 975–1700, 3rd edn, London: Routledge. McMillin, S. and S. MacLean (1998), The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Manley, L. and S. MacLean (2014), Lord Strange’s Men and Their Plays, New Haven: Yale University Press. Pollard, A. W. and G. R. Redgrave, eds (1976–91), A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475–1640, 2nd edn, rev. W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson and K. F. Pantzer, London: Bibliographical Society. Steggle, M. (2014), ‘Lost, or Rather Surviving as a Very Short Document’, in D. McInnis and M. Steggle (eds), Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England, 72–83, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Watson, G., ed. (1965), The Concise Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, 600–1950, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Westfall, M. (2016), ‘What Hath REED Wrought? REED and Patronage’, in A. Douglas and S. MacLean (eds), REED in Review, 85–100, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Wiggins, M. (2012–), British Drama: A Catalogue, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wing, D. G. (1972–98), A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America, and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700, 2nd edn, rev. J. J. Morrison, C. W. Nelson and M. Seccombe, New York: Modern Language Association of America.

CHAPTER 8

Further reading MICHELLE M. DOWD AND TOM RUTTER

This chapter has been collated by the editors from contributions submitted by the authors of the relevant chapters. We have sought to avoid listing the same resource in multiple sections and have therefore used the phrase ‘see also’ to direct readers to other sections that may be relevant.

DID EARLY MODERN DRAMA ACTUALLY HAPPEN? See also ‘Rethinking the chronology of the early London playhouses’. Cooper, H. (2010), Shakespeare and the Medieval World, London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare.

Transvaluates the categories of the ‘medieval’ and the ‘early modern’ by challenging readers to consider that much of what we consider to be quintessential Shakespeare, and therefore modern, was bequeathed to him and to us by the culture and drama of the late Middle Ages. Cox, J. D. and D. S. Kastan, eds (1997), A New History of Early English Drama, New York: Columbia University Press.

An essay collection published in the wake of theory’s heyday which both re-examines and restores historicism by foregrounding the collaborative economies of early English drama: the social and material circumstances in which plays were written, performed, printed and consumed. Cummings, B. and J. Simpson, eds (2010), Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

A wide-ranging collection of essays which the editors strategically arrange on either side of long-standing period and disciplinary boundaries with particular attention to the Reformation, or rather Reformations (in literature, religion, history, law, labour, politics, science, epistemology, etc.), that occurred between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries.

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de Grazia, M. (2007), ‘The Modern Divide: From Either Side’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 37 (3): 453–67.

An essential essay on the topic of periodization. It offers an intellectual history that takes particular aim at modernity’s incessant desire for novelty and the ongoing presumption that our ‘modern’ present has a special affinity with the ‘early modern’ past, resulting in the continual abridgment of what lies between. de Grazia, M. (2021), Four Shakespearean Period Pieces, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

A penetrating history of the discipline which traces the concepts for organizing past time – anachronism, chronology, period and secular modernity – which have (mis-) guided Shakespeare studies and broader humanist and intellectual discourses for centuries. Harris, J. G. (2009), Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Explores early modern theories of matter with a particularly keen desire to resist synchronic approaches to material culture as well as misperceptions of objects as temporally fixed and inert. Sees matter as always ‘untimely’ in the sense that it is never fully assimilated into the present historical moment but in fact continually ‘tells time’: through its accretion, erosion, recycling, transparency or disruption, matter creates and alters the present, past and future. McMullan, G. and D. Matthews, eds (2007), Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rather than treat the Middle Ages as the dull and homogenous past from and against which the Renaissance would spring forth, the contributors to this volume consider the ways in which late medieval culture would itself shape later engagements with its literary outpourings. What emerge are not only historical continuities but also fundamental shifts and, inevitably, periodization as both epochs construct and reconstruct one another and themselves. Nagel, A. and C. S. Wood (2010), Anachronic Renaissance, New York: Zone Books.

Introducing the word ‘anachronic’ as an alternative to the pejorative term ‘anachronistic’, this art historical study challenges Erwin Panofsky’s long-standing epochal history of Renaissance art by considering non-linear historiographies, above all modes of substitution or instantiation whereby artefacts and monuments join together the present moment with a point in the ancient past.

DRAMA AND SOCIETY IN SHAKESPEARE’S ENGLAND See also ‘Early modern race-work’. Cohen, W. (1985), Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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Cohen examines the major genres in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries wrote as they expressed aspects of class struggle informing the transition to capitalism. This is one of the first books to take a transnational perspective on early modern drama through consistent comparisons between English and Spanish theatre. Habib, I. (2008), Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677: Imprints of the Invisible, Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

Through extensive archival exploration, Habib unearths records and probable records of Black people in the British Isles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He examines the social roles they performed and changes in those roles over time. Hall, K. F. (1995), Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

This is a path-breaking look at the various ways in which racial difference was represented in early modern English texts and visual culture including sonnets, paintings, plays, masques, and other genres. Howard, J. and P. Rackin (1997), Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories, London: Routledge.

Howard and Rackin argue that while women are not present in large numbers in Shakespeare’s English histories, they are nonetheless central to the major issues treated in those plays including monarchical succession, rebellion and resistance, social and biological reproduction, and legitimacy. Knights, L. C. (1937), Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson: The Effects of Society and Economics on Elizabethan-Jacobean Drama, London: Chatto and Windus.

Knights examined the impact of economic growth and change on early modern urban life and on city comedy as a mediated barometer of that change. Nardizzi, V. and T. J. Werth, eds (2014), Premodern Ecologies in the Modern Literary Imagination, Toronto: Toronto University Press.

This excellent collection of essays examines the ecological links between pre-modern literature and the places where it was and is produced and read, consistently linking pre-modern and present moments of ecological disequilibrium and impending catastrophe. O’Dair, S. and T. Francisco, eds (2019), Shakespeare and the 99%: Literary Studies, the Profession, the Production of Inequity, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

The contributors to this collection argue that the academic study of Shakespeare (and much other literature) has contributed to the persistence of structures of inequality in modernity. Shannon, L. (2013), The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Shannon brilliantly delineates a pre-Cartesian world view in which humans were not set above other species but were seen as having capacities and prerogatives that situated them alongside, rather than below, their human counterparts. Traub, V. (2002), The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Traub unpacks the many discourses through which same-sex female love, desire, and eroticism were figured in the early modern period. The book engages a wide range of literary genres and visual materials with notable theoretical sophistication. Wrightson, K. ([1982] 2002), English Society, 1580–1680, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Wrightson offers a comprehensive look at the structures of social life, especially in rural England, in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with careful attention to class and regional differences and to the role of women as well as men.

ANCIENT AND EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN CONTEXTS Berger, T. L., W. C. Bradfield and S. L. Sondergard, eds (1998), An Index of Characters in Early Modern English Drama: Printed Plays, 1500–1660 (Revised edition), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Study stage characters in English Renaissance drama, and you will need this smart reference book. Characters are listed by name, occupation, city or nation of origin. Brandt, G. H., ed. (1993), German and Dutch Theatre, 1600–1848, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

A valuable documentary history. This comprehensive collection offers many early modern source materials. The most relevant passages from these materials are provided in English translation. Each passage is carefully referenced and introduced. Cohn, A. (1865), Shakespeare in Germany in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: An Account of English Actors in Germany and the Netherlands and of the Plays Performed by Them during the Same Period, London: Asher.

After more than 150 years, this is still an indispensable guide to the drama and its Anglo-German(ic) relations. It contains a long and detailed history, together with transcripts of multiple original documents but also provides a parallel text edition (German-English) of the earliest Shakespeare plays on the European continent. Eckhardt, E. (1910–11), Die Dialekt- und Ausländertypen des älteren Englischen Dramas. Materialien zur Kunde des älteren Dramas, nos. 27 and 32, Louvain: A. Uystpruyst.

Remarkable two-part reference work introducing stage characters and the type of language that they speak. Learned, meticulous, complete. Indispensable, but available only in German.

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Hillman, R. (2002), Shakespeare, Marlowe and the Politics of France, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave.

An exemplary study of Shakespeare and Marlowe from a continental European perspective. Introduces a large number of stunning intertextual connections between French and English literary culture. Miola, R. S. (1992), Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Seneca, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miola, R. S. (1994), Shakespeare and Classical Comedy: The Influence of Plautus and Terence, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

At the intersection of classical studies, Shakespeare studies, and intertextual theory, Miola masterfully makes us aware of many broad processes as well as the linguistic subtleties involved in the creative process that led to Shakespeare’s comedies. Miola’s remarkable Greek, Latin and English skills further make Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy (1992) as well as Shakespeare and Classical Comedy (1994) indispensable. Sugden, E. H. (1925), A Topographical Dictionary to the Works of Shakespeare and His Fellow Dramatists, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

An indispensable work of reference for anyone working on English Renaissance drama in its international contexts. Sugden brings together and analyses (nearly) every reference to topography (cities, countries and inhabitants) in the extant plays.

PLAYING COMPANIES AND REPERTORIES See also ‘Playhouses and performance’ and ‘Drama beyond the playhouses’. Carlson, M. (2003), The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

This influential book provides a framework for considering the ways in which repetitions at various levels of theatre-making not only activate but take advantage of memory recall. The recycling of texts, actors’ bodies, props and even spatial conditions, recognizable as from a past experience and now repeated in a somewhat different context, characterizes the phenomenon he calls ‘ghosting’, fundamental to any repertory theatre. MacLean, S. and S. McMillin (1998), The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Foundational in both providing a troupe history for the Queen’s Men and establishing a model for the many biographies to follow, McMillin and MacLean argue the company was a mechanism for disseminating Tudor propaganda in a mode of plainness that promoted civic pride and Protestant ideology. Framing their regional touring as anything but a sign of financial failure, this book shows how cultivated a medley style stressing a vision of social reciprocity widely palatable. This book remains a crucial study of a theatre company too often in the shadows of Shakespeare’s King’s Men.

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Munro, L. (2003), ‘Early Modern Drama and the Repertory Approach’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 42: 1–33.

Munro argues the repertory approach provides a methodological answer to the problem of the author. Given that theatre works to dissipate the individual voice, with numerous exemplars she contends it is more appropriate to look at dramatic writing in terms of the collaborative networks for which plays were written and in which they were performed. Examining plays within their performative networks reveals ‘the full choir’ of inflecting factors for which the author can only prove a poor representative. Rutter, T. (2008), ‘Repertory Studies: A Survey’, Shakespeare, 4 (3): 352–66.

This historiographic assessment of recent moves in repertory studies captures central questions driving the field: the influence of Henslowe’s papers and whether those illustrate broader business practices; to what extent there were playgoers of differing status or classed groups, if any; and whether playwrights tailored their work to a company’s personnel or venues, or responded to trends in the marketplace. Rising interest in repertory studies seems partly a response to methodological problems of new historicist criticism. Stern, T. (2000), Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

A complement to her later work on actors’ parts and the paratextual documents that constitute the play event, Stern focuses on the cobbled nature of the rehearsal process with three key points. First, rehearsal was based on individual parts and inherited through and from coaching senior players. This affords her next two claims: that texts were often cut, inserted or otherwise changed along the lines of parts, and that boy-actors inherited a collection of these parts, vis-à-vis gestures and passionating techniques, from their instructing actor. Taylor, D. (2003), The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Durham: Duke University Press.

Taylor draws out the constitutive features of archive and repertoire that work to form communal memory by drawing on cases from both performance and hemispheric studies in the struggle for control of cultural materials and images in the postcolonial period, especially in Mexico. While crucial in dealing with the colonial project, her definitions have widespread value because the performance archive is understood as the collection of material traces of a culture, such as texts, while repertoire is the enacting of embodied memory. Tribble, E. (2011), Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bringing together the fields of cognitive science and theatre history, Tribble demonstrates the ways in which actors leveraged their material contexts, from props to playhouses, in order to offload the cognitive labour of memorization, enabling actors to perform up to six different plays a week and rendering efficient apprentice training as part of professional performances. Tribble establishes a crucial trajectory for the study of embodiment and enskillment in the early modern playhouse.

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Wickham, G., H. Berry and W. Ingram, eds (2000), English Professional Theatre, 1530–1660, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

This invaluable collection offers edited transcriptions of the fundamental primary sources available in the study of early English playing companies and commerce. Divided into three sections (documents of control, players and playing, playhouses), the detailed annotations, contextualizing headnotes and relevant images make this an essential, all-inclusive reference.

PLAYHOUSES AND PERFORMANCES See also ‘Playing companies and repertories’ and ‘Drama beyond the playhouses’. Bowsher, J. (2012), Shakespeare’s London Theatreland: Archaeology, History, and Drama, London: Museum of London Archaeology.

As Senior Archaeologist who directed excavations of playhouse sites prior to 2012, Bowsher is uniquely qualified to provide this extensive overview of the latest information available by that time about the London playhouse locations, shapes and sizes. A wealth of illustrative material is provided, along with historical descriptions of playhouse audiences, players and playwrights. Dustagheer, S. (2017), Shakespeare’s Two Playhouses: Repertory and Theatre Space at the Globe and the Blackfriars, 1599–1613, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Drawing on detailed historical investigation and modern experiments in recreating original stage practices in reconstructed playhouses at Shakespeare’s Globe and the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, Dustagheer examines how Shakespeare and other playwrights wrote specifically for the company’s two principal venues. The book outlines a number of innovations written into the repertory of Shakespeare’s company to make optimal use of the different structural features of these new playhouses at the Globe on Bankside and the Blackfriars within the city. Fitzpatrick, T. (2011), Playwright, Space, and Place in Early Modern Performance: Shakespeare and Company, Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate.

A rigorous but suitably polemical contribution to the debate about the number of doors that provided egress to the stage by analysing hundreds of early plays. Demonstrates the use of a two-door logic modelled on the idea of moving further in or further out from the imagined site represented by stage space in each scene and includes detailed tables of entrances and exits in scenes from selected plays. Griffith, E. (2013), A Jacobean Company and Its Playhouse: The Queen’s Servants at the Red Bull Theatre (c. 1605–1619), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

An excellent example of a company biography that follows the model established by Munro (q.v.), by developing what might also be considered a playhouse biography. The back story to the Red Bull in Clerkenwell is told at length, offering a rich portrait of the social, economic and political contexts in which the playhouse operated. The result is more than just context for the story of the playing company of Queen Anna

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but a deep account of the way the plays and players under her patronage positioned themselves in their environments. Ingram, W. (1992), The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of the Adult Professional Theater in Elizabethan London, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

A paradigm changer, Ingram’s book set out to revise the standard narratives of the rise of the Elizabethan theatre focusing on origin narratives of 1576 (the construction of the Theatre as the first purpose-built playhouse). Using a mass of original archival research, Ingram delves into the lives of key players to portray their families, social networks and most importantly their business partners. When we understand more about these stories, the business decisions that resulted in the rise of the playhouse industry begin to make better economic sense. A massively influential and important book which casts a sceptical eye on aspects of theatre history too often taken for granted. Munro, L. (2005), Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Building on the growing scholarly trend towards producing company biographies, Munro’s study of the Children of the Queen’s Revels also offers a significant amount of original scholarship on the history and operations of the Blackfriars and Whitefriars playhouses. Also represents one of the best applications of approaches to the study of the lives of the players and their networks of families, business associates and social connections initially outlined by Ingram (q.v.). An ideal model for how to write company biography not as a single identity but as a formation of multiple lives working together but not always in unison.

DRAMA BEYOND THE PLAYHOUSES See also ‘Playing companies and repertories’ and ‘Playhouses and performance’. Dutton, R., ed. (2011), The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

A treasure trove of important interventions ranging across the field of early modern drama studies. This book is a significant precursor to the current one and includes chapters by major scholars on dramatic venues, companies, authorship and theatrical styles, taking in the various social, economic and cultural contexts of the period. Collectively, these essays demonstrate the range, complexity and dynamism of early modern performance. Knutson, R. L. (2001), Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

In a revisionist account along the lines of William Ingram’s The Business of Playing, Knutson asks us to think again about the relationships between playwrights, theatre companies, actors and mercantile bodies such as the livery companies. She usefully questions the notion of a ‘rivalry’ between theatre companies in the early modern period, focusing instead on collaboration.

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Lancashire, A. (2002), English Civic Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lancashire’s pioneering book shows the vibrancy of civic performance from its earliest recorded days. She emphasizes the centrality of an urban setting to the development of a number of dramatic modes and takes the reader beyond the familiar playhouses of early modern London into livery halls and other less wellknown spaces. Price, E. (2015), ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England, London: Palgrave.

Price revisits the distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ playhouse which has been somewhat uncritically employed in theatre history for decades. In so doing, he offers a fully contextualized exploration of these terms as they were understood in the early modern period, revealing a new way of understanding how theatrical venues and companies operated. Sen, A. and J. C. Finlayson, eds (2020), Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London, Abingdon: Routledge

This volume ranges widely across civic pageantry, royal entertainments and public ceremony in early modern London, written by dramatists including Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker and Thomas Heywood. Its essays bring an up-to-date, theorized perspective on these performances, drawing parallels with the professional stage and exploring the ways in which civic pageantry can be seen to engage with an increasingly globalized mercantile world.

MATERIAL CULTURE Bennett, J. (2010), Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham: Duke University Press.

New Materialist study that has been influential for scholars of early modern drama and material culture seeking to counter anthropocentrism in their approach to the plays. Cohen, J. J. and J. Yates, eds (2016), Object Oriented Environs, Earth: Punctum.

Essay collection that brings together short essays on object-oriented approaches to Shakespeare’s plays and early modern texts and contexts. Essays cover topics including rain in Richard II, chairs and corpses in King Lear and books and bodies in The Duchess of Malfi. A good starting point for researching New Materialist approaches and key theories in this area. Hamling, T. and C. Richardson, eds (2010), Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture and Its Meanings, Farnham: Ashgate.

Essay collection that assembles a range of mainly historicist material culture studies approaches to medieval and early modern objects including pots, pins, musical instruments and portraits. Very useful for scholars of early modern drama looking to interpret objects in historical contexts as part of their research.

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Harris, J. G. and N. Korda, eds (2002), Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Important collection of essays on ‘props’ in early modern plays. The introduction in particular presents a compelling argument for materialist approaches to stage properties and reflects key debates in this field at the turn of the twenty-first century. Jones, A. R. and P. Stallybrass (2000), Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Leading, influential study of the cultural significance of early modern clothing that focuses extensively on evidence from plays and theatre companies. Karim-Cooper, F. (2006), Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Fascinating, detailed study of the significance of cosmetics in plays by Shakespeare and dramatists including Marston and Jonson. Attuned to the materiality of cosmetics, Karim-Cooper situates cosmetic practices in plays in relation to early modern beauty standards, especially the period’s celebrations of whiteness. Orlin, L. C., ed. (2000), Material London, ca. 1600, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Essay collection that is very useful for understanding the great importance of material culture for London as a city during the period in which the commercial playhouses also flourish. Smith, I. (2013), ‘Othello’s Black Handkerchief’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 64 (1): 1–25.

Key essay on one of the most famous things in Shakespearean drama. Smith’s reading of the handkerchief’s racialized significance as a black object offers an important model for how we might approach the materiality of race on the early modern stage. Williamson, E. (2009), The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama, Farnham: Ashgate.

Explores material culture onstage in the context of early modern religion; Williamson adopts a nuanced approach to these complex contexts and their significance for plays and audiences in the period. Working, L. (2020), The Making of an Imperial Polity: Civility and America in the Jacobean Metropolis, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The fourth and fifth chapters of this study examine the circulation, exploitation and role of indigenous objects in Anglo-Native American relations. Working shows how such objects are central to expressions of gentlemanly ‘civility’ in Jacobean London that participate in English expansionism. Discusses contexts important for scholarship on objects and empire in Jacobean plays.

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WOMEN AND DRAMATIC CULTURE Barker, R. (2015), ‘The “Play-Boy”, the Female Performer, and the Art of Portraying a Lady’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 33 (1): 83–97.

An analysis of the ways in which women’s court performance might feed into a boyactor’s performance of the title role of Webster’s Duchess of Malfi that challenges the separation between commercial and court theatres. Brown, P. A. (2021), The Diva’s Gift to the Shakespearean Stage: Agency, Theatricality, and the Innamorata, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

This book explores the virtuosic theatricality of Italian commedia del’arte actress and the interplay of their work with the English early modern stage, setting English theatre practice against a vital Italian context. Chess, S. (2019), ‘Queer Residue: Boy Actors’ Adult Careers in Early Modern England’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 19 (4): 242–64.

Investigating the later careers of boy-actors well known for playing female roles, Chess posits these actors’ potential ‘queer’ or ‘transness’ as they parlayed their identities into adult roles and companies. This usefully challenges any simple concept of the commercial stages as straightforwardly ‘all-male’ in the sense used by earlier theatre historians. Cockett, P. and M. Gough, eds (forthcoming), Gender on the Transnational Early Modern Stage, Then and Now: A Performance as Research Approach, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

A collection of essays and reflections emerging from the Engendering the Stage Theatre Lab at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in 2018. By centring collaboration between expert practitioners and scholars, the collection analyses the interplay of gender in early modern plays and in present-day ‘Shakespearean’ performance. Korda, N. (2011), Labors Lost: Women’s Work and the Early Modern English Stage, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

A crucial recovery of women’s theatrical labour and its effect on the plays staged in the early modern London playhouses; it reconsiders the gendering of both early modern theatre and of the discipline of theatre history. Lin, E. T. (2012), Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

A rich analysis of Shakespearean drama as ‘theatrical event’, including an exploration of the relationship of acrobatics and feats of activity to the play. McManus, C. (2015), ‘“Sing It Like Poor Barbary”: Othello and Early Modern Women’s Performance’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 33 (1): 99–120.

A study of the Willow Song scene, Othello 4.3, using methodologies from textual  editing, performance studies and transnational studies to argue that this

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scene stages an embedded moment of opposition between English boy-actor and continental actress. Mueller, S. (2008), ‘Touring, Women, and the English Professional Stage’, Early Theatre, 11 (1): 53–76.

This article explores early modern women’s performance as mobile itinerant players in England, focusing beyond London. Mueller argues that the records of such women are evidence of ‘female participation in the professional theatre before 1600’ (53). Munro, L. (2022), ‘The Changeling, the Boy Actor and Female Subjectivity’, in K. Stage and G. McMullan (eds), The Changeling: The State of Play, 179–96, London: Bloomsbury.

This essay brings together the writing of Lady Mary Wroth and Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling in order to examine gendered performance, spectatorship and the techniques through which female subjectivity was constructed on the Jacobean stage. Ndiaye, N. (2021), ‘“Come Aloft, Jack-Little-Ape”: Race and Dance in The Spanish Gypsie’, English Literary Renaissance, 51 (1): 121–51.

This article investigates movement as a neglected form of racecraft in early modern theatre and culture. Examining the racializing work of dance in Middleton, Rowley, Dekker and Ford’s The Spanish Gypsie, the essay argues for the place of embodied movement and dance as part of the early modern stage production of race and focuses on ‘animalizing dances’ as a particular technique of stage racecraft.

MATTER, NATURE, COSMOS Aït-Touati, F. (2011), Fictions of the Cosmos: Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century, trans. Susan Emanuel, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Argues for the parallel development of scientific, philosophical and literary works in the seventeenth century, viewing these fields as a ‘trading zone’ (6) where common ways of thinking and writing were exchanged. Her focus is on cosmological discourse in prose fiction and astronomical treatises of the mid-seventeenth century. Borlik, T. (2011), Ecocriticism and Early Modern English Literature: Green Pastures, New York: Routledge.

Analyses how humanism and the infusion of classical texts in early modern England predisposed English writers like Shakespeare, Donne and Dayton towards an animate view of nature that requires a reassessment of the environmental sensibilities of the early modern period and its value for ecocriticism. Crane, M. T. (2014), Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth-Century England, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Crane asks what it was like to lose the intuitive, sensible understanding of the world imparted by Aristotelian naturalism at a time when the increasing abstractions of

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the new philosophy led to a growing sense that the cosmos were unintelligible. She provides a cognitive history of this cultural shift during the late sixteenth century. Latour, Bruno (1993), We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Although modernity tends to define itself by a separation of science from the subjective realms of politics and society, Latour argues that this is an illusion and proceeds to demonstrate the entanglements of science, politics and social science today. He assumes an anti-dualist position that charts the dynamic interrelationships of society and nature, human and nonhuman, language and fact. Marchitello, H. and E. Tribble (2017), The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science, London: Macmillan.

Considers literature as a discourse for the production of knowledge during the seventeenth century, a moment before the two-culture divide when science and imaginative writing were not distinct but overlapping cultural undertakings. Contributions consider these dynamic overlaps in discussing early modern poetry, prose and drama. Mazzio, C. (2009), ‘Shakespeare and Science, c. 1600’, South Central Review, 26 (1 & 2): 1–23.

Provides a detailed account of the overlaps between art and science in early modernity when both were understood as craft-like processes. Complements the emphasis in science studies on the narrative components of experimental science by arguing for the epistemological work of early modern drama. Shapin, S. (1996), The Scientific Revolution, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rejects the notion of a cataclysmic event, such as the phrase ‘scientific revolution’ suggests, which fundamentally reordered conceptions of the natural world and argues instead for a softer break with the ancient world that moved towards a mechanizing both of nature and the means of knowing nature. He provides a broad history of this gradual shift in understanding. Snow, C. P. (1988), The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Charts the presence of a cultural divide between the arts and sciences that has come to define Western society and urges that this divide be bridged in the interests of furthering the progress of human knowledge and society. Although he speaks against an educational system that promotes excessive specialization, he also favours science above arts and letters as the path to progress. Spiller, E. (2004), Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature: The Art of Making Knowledge, 1580–1670, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Argues that just as early modern science is an art, so imaginative literature is a form of knowledge production in early modernity, a time when a ‘belief in the made

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rather than the found character of early modern knowledge’ (2) prevailed. Reading poets alongside scientists, she provides an interdisciplinary study of how both kinds of practitioners engaged in the process of making knowledge.

EARLY MODERN RACE-WORK See also ‘Drama and society in Shakespeare’s England’ and ‘Race, diversity and early modern studies’. Hall, K. F. (2019), ‘“Intelligently Organized Resistance”: Shakespeare in the Diasporic Politics of John E. Bruce’, in H. Eklund and W. B. Hyman (eds), Teaching Social Justice through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now, 85–94, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

This essay offers an example of how Shakespeare has been put into the service of social justice activism, and more specifically the furthering of a radical black politics, through the case history of John Edward Bruce (1856–1924) and the black freedom movement. It demonstrates how Bruce understood the study of Shakespeare to provide a vehicle for black aspirations and the forging interpretive communities, modelling how we might approach Shakespeare today ‘within an ethic of collective work and shared responsibility’. Heng, G. (2018), The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

This compendious, interdisciplinary study seeks to counter resistance to critical racework in the field of medieval studies by demonstrating how the ‘invention’ of race (and its ‘reinventions’) was integral to the Middle Ages. In addition to providing a useful working definition of race that emphasizes its strategic and structural aspects rather than its substantive content, the study is organized around different racial categories, including Jews, Muslims, blackness and Africa, whiteness, Native Americans, Mongols and ‘Gypsies’. MacDonald, J. G. (2002), Women and Race in Early Modern Texts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

This study examines the representation of African women in English plays spanning from the Renaissance to the Restoration, with particular interest in the material embodiment of race and sexuality as well as the representational practices that often led to African women’s abstraction and displacement. Proceeding chronologically, the discussion shifts from Cleopatra and Rome’s tangled history with Egypt to the familial bonds foregrounded in works by women writers (especially Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn) and dramatic adaptations of Oroonoko. Mejia LaPerle, C., ed. (2022), Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature, Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Press.

This collection of essays breaks new ground by considering how affect theory sheds light on the ‘relational, interpersonal and ambient operations of race-making’.

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The contents are broadly organized around three concerns: affective communities; intersections of race, sex and gender; and anti-blackness. Collectively, the essays are wide-ranging in their consideration of diverse racialized bodies and geographies, as well as texts ranging from poetry and plays to letters and medical treatises, while ardently refusing to lose sight of lived experience. Smith, C. L., N. R. Jones and M. P. Grier, eds (2018), Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology, New York: Palgrave.

In seeking to bring Black Studies and Early Modern Studies into conversation with one another, this interdisciplinary collection privileges the perspective of black Africans and contests the regional and temporal boundaries that restrict scholarly enquiry. Diverse case studies demonstrate how black Africans figured as powerful agents in contexts ranging from marronage in the sixteenth-century Spanish Caribbean to black dance historiography, to the Salem Witch Trials. A concluding roundtable discussion features John Beusterien, Nicholas Jones, Dennis Britton and Miles Grier. Smith, I. (2016), ‘We Are Othello: Speaking of Race in Early Modern Studies’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 67 (1): 104–24.

Noting that Hamlet’s injunction to ‘tell his story’ has been met by centuries of critics who embrace a sense of identification with Hamlet, Smith’s article exposes the absence of critical identification with Othello and what it reveals about our scholarly practices and profession. The essay draws connections between how blackness functions as a mark of unassailable difference, the metaphor of race as ‘war’ in Othello, the history of anti-black violence in the United States and the collective responsibilities of Shakespeareans. Varnado, C. (2019), ‘The Quality of Whiteness: The Thief of Bagdad and The Merchant of Venice’, Exemplaria, 31 (4): 245–69.

This essay models an innovative approach to whiteness studies by offering an intertextual analysis of The Merchant of Venice and the 1924 silent film The Thief of Bagdad. The essay’s intertextual approach draws upon the methodologies of queer theory to expose the invisibility of whiteness and to resist the linear causality of literary history by bringing twentieth-century cinema to bear on Shakespeare. In addition to uncovering new understandings of whiteness, the discussion addresses the politics of reading and reception.

SEXUALITIES, EMOTIONS AND EMBODIMENT Ahmed, S. (2013), The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. A foundational text in affect studies, The Cultural Politics of Emotion develops a theory of emotions rooted in the cultural politics of embodiment and the intersections of race, gender and sexuality.

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Cook, C. (1986), ‘“The Sign and Semblance of Her Honor”: Reading Gender Difference in Much Ado About Nothing’, PMLA, 101 (2): 186–202.

Cook’s essay argues that sexual conflict in Much Ado About Nothing is grounded in questions of gender difference. Cook traces the ‘signs and semblances’ of gender difference in the play through an analysis of masculine anxiety about women’s sexual fidelity, arguing that it is rooted in ‘a masculine prerogative in language’ (186). Dowd, M. M. (2011), ‘Desiring Subjects: Staging the Female Servant in Early Modern Tragedy’, in M. M. Dowd and N. Korda (eds), Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama, 131–45, New York: Routledge.

Dowd’s essay analyses the representation of women servants in early modern drama, especially tragedy, and she attends particular to the ways that these plays both occlude and enable ‘specific narratives of women’s service’ (132). Dowd’s essay provides a methodology for thinking about gender, genre and class. Escolme, B. (2014), Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage: Passion’s Slaves, London and New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare.

Emotional Excess analyses the force of emotion embedded in early modern drama, arguing that these theatrical performances contained political potential through violating social norms. Henderson, D. (2010), ‘Mind the Gaps: The Ear, the Eye, and the Senses of a Woman in Much Ado About Nothing’, in L. Gallagher and S. Raman (eds), Knowing Shakespeare: Senses, Embodiment and Cognition, 192–215, Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Using postmodern and multimedia adaptations of Shakespeare’s adaptations as a starting point, Henderson queries how a sensory approach to Much Ado About Nothing reveals the phenomenological bases of cultural norms around ‘the signifying figure of femininity’ (92). Hobgood, A. P. (2014), Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Passionate Playgoing examines the role of emotion in shaping early modern English audiences’ responses to play, analysing the reciprocal relationship between players and playgoers defined by embodied theatrical experiences. Little, A. L. (2016), ‘Re-Historicizing Race, White Melancholia, and the Shakespearean Property’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 67 (1): 84–103.

Little’s essay argues that affect drives scholarly refusals to interrogate Shakespeare’s whiteness and the deployment of whiteness in his plays, connecting their history to the field of critical whiteness studies. Orvis, D. (2018), ‘Queer Comedy’, in H. A. Hirschfeld (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy, 298–312, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Orvis argues for an expansive theory of genre rooted in queer theory. Applying the capacious political potential of comedy to unsettle social norms to Shakespeare’s

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Much Ado About Nothing, Orvis argues that even this play, which is deeply invested in heteropatriarchal conventions, requires that playgoers ‘encounter the full range of contradictions and vicissitudes inherent in comedy’ (298). Paster, G. (1993), The Body Embarrassed: Drama and Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Paster’s foundational text analyses how early modern theories of emotion, including humoral theory, shaped performances of gender in early modern drama. Suzuki, M. (2016), ‘Gender, Class, and the Ideology of Comic Form’, in D. Callaghan (ed.), A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, 2nd edn, 137–61, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.

Suzuki’s essay is foundational to understanding Margaret’s role in Much Ado, unpacking how its use of comedy dispels tensions embedded in anxieties about gender, class and social order by displacing them onto Margaret.

RELIGION AND RELIGIOUS CULTURES Adelman, J. (2008), Blood Relations: Christian and Jew in ‘The Merchant of Venice’, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. A book that connects theology and psychoanalysis in a broad investigation of what the figure of Shylock can tell us about the anxieties of early modern English Protestant culture. Britton, D. A. (2014), Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance, New York: Fordham University Press.

An important argument showing how post-Reformation baptismal theology helped create the modern concept of race. Diehl, H. (1997), Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theatre in Early Modern England, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Diehl reads the early modern stage as both the product of the Reformation and as pursuing a ‘reforming’ agenda. The book covers a wide range of issues but with a strong emphasis on iconoclasm and the critique of the imagination. Dolan, F. (1999), Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

A book that lucidly connects representations of women and of Catholics, as ‘proximate others’ complexly linked in early modern drama, pamphlet literature and polemics. Haigh, C. (2003), English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors, Oxford: Clarendon.

An important rereading of Reformation history, describing it as a piecemeal and fundamentally incomplete process, down to the end of the Tudor period.

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Heinemann, M. (1980), Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Heinemann uses a particular reading of religion and politics  – broadly, the Christopher Hill thesis – to analyse the work of one exemplary dramatist, Thomas Middleton, as a model of ‘puritan’ drama critical of the Jacobean court. Kastan, D. (2014), A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

This lucid and comprehensive account should be the starting point for anyone interested in the question of Shakespeare and religion. Lake, P. (1988), Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker, London: Allen & Unwin.

A landmark book about the internal complexities of the English Church focused on disputes over church governance: debates between proponents of episcopal and Presbyterian models for how the church should be ruled, which became critical for politics more generally. Matar, N. (1998), Islam in Britain 1558–1685, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The book that really inaugurated modern scholarly interest in English representations of, and encounters with, Muslims. Includes important chapters on renegadism (or conversion to Islam), conversion from Islam, the Qur’an, and eschatology and ‘the Saracens’. Milton, A. (1995), Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

An invaluable account of the complexity of religious differences in the early modern period, this book describes the English Church in part by describing how various members of that church viewed both Catholic and Reformed churches on the continent. The book is essential for getting a handle on subtle differences of confessional identity. Shapiro, J. (1996), Shakespeare and the Jews, New York: Columbia University Press.

A landmark book about Christian representations of and encounters with Jews in Shakespeare’s time.

EARLY MODERN DISABILITY STUDIES AND TRANS STUDIES Adair, C. (2015), ‘Bathrooms and Beyond: Expanding a Pedagogy of Access in Trans/ Disability Studies’, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2 (3): 464–8.

Connects disability, trans and critical race methodologies through a pedagogical lens to focus on access and non-normative embodiments in academic spaces.

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Chess, S. (2016), Male to Female Crossdressing in Early Modern English Literature: Gender, Performance, and Queer Relations, New York: Routledge.

Emphasizes the ‘relational and beneficial’ aspects of MTF cross-dressing in a study that opens space for a wide range of queer gender representations in the early modern period. Chess, S., C. Gordon and W. Fisher (2019), ‘Introduction: Early Modern Trans Studies’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 19 (4): 1–25.

Focuses on the range of methodological interventions (historical, performance-based, philological, more) made by the thirteen essays in this ‘first published collection’ on early modern trans studies. Clare, E. (2015), Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, Durham: Duke University Press.

Foundational scholarship from a leading voice on intersectional disabled and queer identities; combines memoir, theory and political thought. Hobgood, A. P. and D. H. Wood (2009), ‘Introduction: “Disabled Shakespeares”’, Disability Studies Quarterly, 29 (4).

Frames the first essay group in early modern disability studies with attention to ‘“disabled” as an operational identity category in the early modern period’; thereby asserts a ‘new history of the early modern self’. Hobgood, A. P. and D. H. Wood (2013), ‘Introduction: Ethical Staring: Disabling the English Renaissance’, in Hobgood and Wood (eds), Recovering Disability in Early Modern England, 1–22, Columbus: Ohio University Press.

Introduces the first book-length essay collection in early modern disability studies; shows that ‘early modern representations of disability … offer insights into the material, lived experiences of disabled individuals in the distant past’. Kemp, S. K. (2019), ‘“In That Dimension Grossly Clad”: Transgender Rhetoric, Representation, and Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Studies, 47: 120–6.

Examines the ‘connection … between Shakespeare and contemporary social justice movements’, arguing for ‘scholarship that is rooted in experience, not abstraction’. Puar, J. K. (2017), ‘Bodies with New Organs: Becoming Trans, Becoming Disabled’, in The Right to Maim: Debility | Capacity | Disability, 33–61, Durham: Duke University Press.

Explores the ontological interconnections of the ‘categories of trans and disability’ in a biopolitical context, attending to ‘neoliberal mandates regarding productive, capacitated bodies’. Rubright, M. (2019), ‘Transgender Capacity in Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s The Roaring Girl (1611)’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 19 (4): 45–74.

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Complex exploration of the opacities and interpretive possibilities of the central character’s identity; argues for the expansiveness of ‘transgender capacity’ in the play. Siebers, T. (2016), ‘Shakespeare Differently Disabled’, in V. Traub (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race, 435–53, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Asks what a ‘differently disabled disability studies’ that refuses Richard III as its standard-bearer would look like; concludes with a call for embodied knowledge.

RACE, DIVERSITY AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES See also ‘Early modern race-work’. Ahmed, S. (2007), ‘A Phenomenology of Whiteness’, Feminist Theory, 8 (2): 236–56.

This groundbreaking essay examines whiteness through the methodology of phenomenology. Ahmed considers how white bodies ‘take up space’ and how whiteness can function as a habit or even, as she describes ‘a bad habit’. As such, Ahmed aims to bring more institutional habits to the fore as a way of reforming. Dadabhoy, A. (2020), ‘The Unbearable Whiteness of Being (in) Shakespeare’, Postmedieval, 11 (2020): 228–35.

Examines the ways in which structures of racism are built into Shakespeare studies and considers how whiteness – white ways of reading and teaching Shakespeare – has left half of the canon unexamined when it comes to critical race studies and has privileged white identities in the classroom. Dyer, R. (1997), White: Essays on Race and Culture, New York and London: Routledge.

This essential book examines how the contemporary world has been organized according to whiteness. Dyer insists whiteness is an unexamined category of racial identity and explores through visual iconography  – from early Christian art to photography and film – how whiteness has seemed ‘unremarkable’ when it comes to racial representation. Garner, S. (2007), Whiteness: An Introduction, London: Routledge.

Garner’s book argues that whiteness is fluid as an identity and should be a central consideration of any understanding of racism as a system of power relations. Gilborn, D. (2005), ‘Education Policy as an Act of White Supremacy: Whiteness, Critical Race Theory and Education Reform’, Journal of Educational Policy, 20 (4): 485–505.

Gilborn’s article analyses education policy in England through the lens of critical race theory as a way of thinking through racism in education. He considers how structures of racism are relevant to considerations of institutional racism in the UK. He considers changes to the education system in the early 2000s and reveals how racial inequity is not necessarily deliberate but ‘neither is it accidental’.

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Mejia LaPerle, C. (2019), ‘“If I Might Have My Will”: Aaron’s Affect and Race in Titus Andronicus’, in F. Karim-Cooper (ed.), Titus Andronicus: The State of Play, 135–58, London: Bloomsbury.

LaPerle argues that through Aaron the Moor’s embodiment of the terrifying black man with access to power  – whose violence mimics Roman violence  – the play, Titus, criminalizes the power or agency of the racialized subject. Ruiter, D., ed. (2021), The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Social Justice, London: Bloomsbury.

Provides a wide-ranging analysis of issues related to Shakespeare and social justice, encompassing the academic as well as the theatrical perspectives.

PERFORMING SHAKESPEARE’S CONTEMPORARIES Aebischer, P. (2010), Jacobean Drama, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

The chapters in this short, student-friendly book provide an invaluable introduction to the key trends in criticism that have come to define the study of Jacobean plays and the work of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Each chapter addresses a different strand of scholarly enquiry, ranging across theatre history, textual and genre criticism, race studies, gender and sexuality studies, and performance studies, providing useful suggestions for further reading. Aebischer, P. (2013), Screening Early Modern Drama: Beyond Shakespeare, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

A landmark study of Shakespeare’s contemporaries on screen, Screening Early Modern Drama attends to the neglected corpus of film adaptations of early modern plays by filmmakers such as Alex Cox, Mike Figgis, Sarah Harding and Derek Jarman. The book places a particular emphasis on queer, avant-garde and technologically innovative productions which it sets against the mainstream, ‘heritage’ tradition of Shakespeare on screen, and additionally provides a filmography of fifty screen adaptations of early modern plays. Aebischer, P. and K. Prince, eds (2012), Performing Early Modern Drama Today, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The essays in this volume constitute the most sustained attempt to address the place of Shakespeare’s contemporaries in present-day performance. Contributors examine the place of non-Shakespearean early modern drama in the contemporary repertory, on university stages, in film and television, in amateur performance, and at landmark venues including Shakespeare’s Globe and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Appendices provide useful information on amateur and professional performances of early modern drama from the nineteenth century to 2010. Barker, R. (2007), Early Modern Tragedy, Gender and Performance, 1984–2000: The Destined Livery, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Barker’s politically engaged study examines how the gender conventions of Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean plays are remediated on twentieth-century

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stages and screens. The book’s argument centres on nine case studies, ranging across theatrical and filmed productions of Shakespearean tragedy, canonical early modern plays such as Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and Marlowe’s Edward II, and lesserperformed works including Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness and Ford’s The Broken Heart. Kirwan, P. and K. Prince, eds (2021), The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Contemporary Performance, London: Bloomsbury.

This collection brings together an international team of leading scholars to address the place of Shakespeare in contemporary performance. The essays in the first two sections of the volume attend to key issues in present-day performance research and provide case studies of key research areas. Later sections provide contemporary practitioners with the opportunity to reflect on their processes and the place of their work within the scholarly tradition, as well as identifying useful resources and materials for future research. Lopez, J. (2013), Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

This inventive book provides an overview of more than a century’s worth of early modern drama anthologies, charting the scholarly trends that have led to the ‘canon’ of early modern drama being largely defined by a core of around two dozen frequently edited plays. It provides close readings of a number of under-studied works, providing an essential introduction to a wider range of early modern plays than is typically taught and performed. Solga, K. (2009), Violence against Women in Early Modern Performance: Invisible Acts, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Solga’s important book offers highly sensitive readings of contemporary productions of early modern plays by Shakespeare, Webster, Middleton and Rowley, and Heywood, centring on the plays’ depiction  – or not  – of sexual and physical violence against female characters. Through a feminist lens, it examines the ethical implications of restaging these acts through performance today.

RETHINKING THE CHRONOLOGY OF THE EARLY LONDON PLAYHOUSES See also ‘Did early modern drama actually happen?’ Davies, C., A. Kesson and L. Munro (2021), ‘London Theatrical Culture, 1560–90’, in Editor in Chief Paula Rabinowitz, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Provides an account of the new theatrical spaces opening in London from the 1560s, revising the evidence for the places, people and plays involved. Dillon, J. (2006), The Cambridge Introduction to Early English Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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A detailed survey of the topic that quotes extensively from primary sources and calls into question the periods and people typically associated with the phrase ‘commercial theatre’. Dillon demonstrates the persistence of medieval performance conventions into the early modern period, as well as the permeability of the boundaries between London’s theatrical culture and provincial, non-commercial and non-dramatic forms of performance. Johnson, L. (2017), Shakespeare’s Lost Playhouse: Eleven Days at Newington Butts, London: Routledge.

The most recent book-length study devoted to a single playhouse, and the first one devoted to this important space. Johnson’s methodology is capacious, drawing on archival studies, archaeology, environmental studies, geography and social, political and cultural studies in addition to literary studies and theatre history to explore the development of London’s theatres and playing companies. Kathman, D. (2009), ‘The Rise of Commercial Playing in 1540s London’, Early Theatre, 12 (1): 15–38.

An exploration of the owners and leaseholders of London theatrical venues, expanding our understanding of who was involved in commercial playing. Kathman argues that the commercial playing scene emerged in London in the 1540s – just over thirty years prior to the establishment of the Theatre in Shoreditch.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES * The starred volumes can be viewed as online facsimiles on Internet Archive. *Bentley, G. E. (1941–1968), The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Modelled on Chambers (see below), these volumes provide a narrative history of the London dramatic companies from Shakespeare’s death in 1616 to the closing of the theatres in 1642, with transcriptions of some key documents. The first two volumes are structured by companies and players; vols 3–5 by plays and playwrights; and vols 6–7 by individual theatres. *Chambers, E. K. ([1923] 2009), The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

These volumes give an account of the private, public and court stages from 1558 to 1616. The first volume focuses on the development of court drama; vol. 2 details the companies, actors and playhouses of London; vol. 3 focuses upon staging, playwrights and printing of drama; and vol. 4 explores anonymous works, with extensive indices to the text as a whole. This work shaped theatre history but should be used with caution as there are some notable errors; Chambers erroneously presents the Royal Household as a monolithic bureaucracy and states that the Lord Chamberlain oversaw the Revels office.

362

THE ARDEN HANDBOOK OF SHAKESPEARE AND EARLY MODERN DRAMA

Dessen, A. and L. Thompson (1999), Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama 1580–1642, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

This dictionary gathers evidence from c. 500 English professional plays to define, exemplify and cross-reference more than 22,000 stage directions in over 900 entries. Examples are provided of each term in context, with some terms being linked to numerous examples that indicate both frequency of use and range of ways that some terms might be used differently across multiple plays. An essential resource. *Greg, W. W. ([1939–59] 1970), A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration, 4 vols, London: Bibliographic Society.

A systematic, descriptive bibliography of over 830 playtexts, which shaped the development of bibliography as a discipline. Volume 3 includes a rich appendix with entries for play advertisements, paratexts, private collections and actor lists. Wiggins, M. and C. Richardson (2011–present), British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue, 9+ vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

This series, still in progress, aims to document all known dramatic works written by English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish writers in historical sequence. Drama is here defined capaciously, including entertainments, pageants, translations of plays by British authors, masques, tilts, dialogues and plays in print and manuscript. Entries for each event include dates, genres, known titles, sources, evidence for staging, textual and stage history, and details of modern editions. Indexes to each volume detail people and places mentioned. Other reference works may give greater detail on specific dramatic events, but this is the most comprehensive guide to the dramatic culture of Britain.

INDEX

Locators followed by “n.” indicate endnotes ‘The Absence of Religion in Shakespeare’ (Santayana) 259 acting companies. See playing companies acting styles 23–4 actors 24, 43–4, 78, 168, 300. See also playing companies boy 27–8, 31, 112, 119, 169 for court performances 30 employment in civic pageantry 149 European Continent 98 female-identified 183 parts 24–5, 38 repertory 109–21 white (black roles) 226 Adair, C. 276 Adams, J. Q. 134 Shakespearean Playhouses 132–3 Adelman, J. 260 Ad Horatij de Plauto & Terentio Judicium (Heinsius) 94 Aebischer, P. 295, 298–9, 303–4, 307 Performing Early Modern Drama Today 295–6 After Edward (Kirwan) 305 Against All England (Barrett) 63 Agamben, G. 264 Agas map 332 Ahmed, S. 245, 250–1, 287 Aït-Touati, F. 205–6, 214 n.4 Akhimie, P. 229 The Alchemist (Jonson) 42, 45 n.8, 90, 94, 191, 297–8 Allen, G. 324 n.2 Alleyn, E. 24, 45 n.2, 148 all-male stage 8, 11, 181, 188, 299 All’s Well that Ends Well (Shakespeare) 38 Alphonsus, King of Aragon (Greene) 97

Alternative Shakespeares (Drakakis, Hawkes & Henderson) 6 American Disabilities Act (ADA) 278 American Shakespeare Center (ASC) 295, 297, 300–2 Aminta (Tasso) 95 amphitheatres 33, 71, 130, 132–4, 290, 315, 318 reconstruction 134, 136 Amyntas, or the Impossible Dowry (Randolph) 99, 190 anachronism 7, 53, 60–2, 65 n.4, 77, 165, 221 Anatomie of Abuses (Stubbes) 59 Anglo-Italian Renaissance Studies (Routledge) 96 Annales, or a Generall Chronicle of England (Stow) 130 Annals of English Drama (Schoenbaum & Harbage) 335 anti-blackness 231, 287 Anti-Black Racism in Early Modern Drama (Chapman) 221 The Antipodes (Brome) 91 anti-theatricalism 261–2 Antonio and Mellida (Marston) 23, 31 Antonio’s Revenge (Marston) 34 An Apology for Actors (Heywood) 59 An Apology for the Believers in the Shakespeare Papers (Chalmers) 131 Appadurai, A. 163–4, 168 The Araygnment of Paris (Peele) 154, 157, 159 Arber, E. 336 ‘The Architectures of Shakespeare’ (Eriksen) 141 Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Social Justice (Ruiter) 233

364

Aretino, P. 173 arid historicism 9, 71 Ariosto, L. 212 I suppositi 95 Orlando Furioso 95 Aristotle 202, 205, 213 Aristotelianism 207 Physics 201, 203 Poetics 94 Works 94 Armin, R. 30 Armourers and Brasiers Company 149–51 Aronson, B. 287 artifacts and monuments 62 Art of Poetry (Horace) 94 Arvas, A. 229 Arviragus and Philicia (Carlell) 190 Ashlee, K. 287 Astington, J. 183 As You Like It (Shakespeare) 190, 225 audiences 14, 25–6, 30–1, 37, 55, 77, 90, 116, 141, 147, 157, 165, 183, 190, 234, 244–5, 249–50, 290, 306–7, 321 racial homogeneity 290 Augustine, religare 257 Austern, L. 119 authorship and collaboration 26–7, 37, 64, 262, 336 Axton, M., The Queen’s Two Bodies 264 Ayrer, J. 99, 102 n.22 Bacon, F. 203, 214 n.4 Novum organon 203 Bader, J. 304 Bagnall, N. 304–5 Baldwin, T. W. 93 Bale, J. 14, 315, 319, 323–4 Chief Promises 320 John Baptist’s Preaching 320 King Johan 320–2 The Temptation 320 The Ball (Shirley) 90 Barbarous Play: Race on the English Renaissance Stage (Bovilsky) 224 Barber, M. 304 Barker, R. 183, 185, 303 Barker, S. 186 Barrett, R., Against All England 63

INDEX

Bartholomew Fair (Jonson) 24, 91, 261, 297 Baskerville, J. 187 Baskerville, S. 187 Bate, J. 92–3 battlements 149 The Battle of Alcazar (Peele) 78, 97, 154–5, 157, 159 Beal, P., Index of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700 330 Bearden, E., Monstrous Kinds: Body, Space, and Narrative in Renaissance Representations of Disability 278 Beardon, E. 231 Beaumont, F. 95 Cupid’s Revenge 91 A King and No King 246 The Knight of the Burning Pestle 25–6, 35, 97 The Maid’s Tragedy 193 The Woman Hater 97 Women Pleased 91 Beckwith, S. 64 Becoming Christian (Britton) 263 Bedingfield, A. 187 Beeston, C. 187 Beeston, E. 187–8 Behn, A. 330 Beholding Disability in Renaissance England (Hobgood) 278 Bell (1577-8), London inn 33, 35, 119, 151–2, 316 Bel Savage (c. 1575), London inn 33, 35, 119, 151–3, 186, 316 Benjamin, W. 264 Ben Jonson (Bevington, Butler & Donaldson) 298 Bennett, J. 164, 171–2, 175, 177, 213 Bennett, S. 303 horizon of expectation 115 Performing Nostalgia 303 Bentley, G. E. 23, 181 The Jacobean and Caroline Stage 20 The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time 44 The Profession of Player in Shakespeare’s Time 44 Bentley, T., The Monument of Matrones 240

INDEX

Benveniste, E. 257–8 Bergel, G. 336 Berger, T. 335 Berry, H. 33, 153, 186, 316, 324 n.1 The First Public Playhouse 315 Bertie, R. 189 Bessell, J. 300 Bevington, D. 96, 316 Ben Jonson 298 From Mankind to Marlowe 56 Bibliography of the English Printed Drama (Greg) 29, 335–6 The Bird in A Cage (Shirley) 299 Blackfriars theatre 32–3, 35, 116, 131, 133, 138, 142, 186, 189 Black Legend 97, 170 Black Lives Matter 250, 285, 290 The Black Man 99 blackness 77, 169, 220, 225–6, 231–3, 291. See also race/racism humoral and animal imagery 291 Phoebe 225–6 racist allusions to 169–70 Blake, L. 250 Blatt, T. B. 321 The Blind Beggar of Alexandria (Chapman) 300 Bloom, G. 165 Blount, C. 189 Blurt Master Constable (Dekker) 97 Boar’s Head playhouse 119, 187 Boas, F. 99 Bodleian First Folio (facsimile) 328 Boleyn, A. 159 Bonduca (Beaumont & Fletcher) 115 The Book of the Courtier (Castiglione) 95 Borlik, T. 214 n.15 Bosman, A. 100, 102 n.25 culturegram 102 n.14 Renaissance intertheater 100 Bourdieu, P. 22 The Field of Cultural Production 9, 19 Bourne, C. L., Of Pilcrows 337 Bovilsky, L., Barbarous Play: Race on the English Renaissance Stage 224 Brackley, E., The Concealed Fancies 191 Bradbrook, M. 157 Bradley, A. C. 259 Brahe, T. 202

365

Brandon, C. 189 Brantôme. See de Bourdeille (seigneur de Brantôme), P. Braunmuller, A. R. 157 Brave Spirits playhouse 295, 297, 303, 309 n.7 Bray, D. 303 Brayne, M. 186–7 The Bride (Nabbes) 90 Brisset, R. 99 British Drama 1533-1642: A Catalogue (Wiggins & Richardson) 121 British History Online 120 British Literary Manuscripts Online (Gale) 337 Britton, D. 219, 248–9 Becoming Christian 263 Brome, R. 298, 300 The Antipodes 91 Brome Online 299 The Court Beggar 298 The Damoiselle 90 The New Academy 90 The Northern Lass 91 Brook, P. 82 Broome, J. 191 Brown, B. 164 Brown, K. 308 n.1 Browne, R. 187 Browne, S. 187 Browne, T. 203, 320 Brownstein, O. 134 Bruce, J. E. 233 Bruno, G. 12, 202–3, 209, 214 animistic universe 206–7 cosmic unity, lover’s perception 209 De gli eroici furori 208 The Heroic Frenzies 208 Bruster, D. 20, 165, 171 Bryant, J. A. 259 Bull (c. 1577), London inn 33, 35, 119, 151–3, 186, 189, 316 Bullinger, H. 257 Bullough, G. 101 Burbage, C. 318 Burbage, J. 130, 134, 187, 318, 324 n.2 Burbage, R. 32, 45 n.2, 117, 131, 148, 290 Burbage, W. 186–7

366

Burckhardt, J., The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy 54, 57, 62, 265 Burke, P. 92 Burton, J. 223–4 polychronicity of race 224 Race in Early Modern England 225 Bussy d’Ambois (Chapman) 96 Butchers’ Hall 150 Butler, M., Ben Jonson 298 Byrd, W. 119 Cadman, D. 101 n.7 Calisto and Melibea (de Rojas) 97 Callaghan, D. 182 The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists (Hoenselaars) 4 The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race (Thompson) 221 Campana, J., Renaissance Posthumanism 231 Campaspe (Lyly) 323 Cancellar, J., The Pathe of Obedience 321 Capell, E. 130 capitalism 69–70, 82, 266 Carlell, L. Arviragus and Philicia 190 The Spartan Ladies 189 Carlson, M. 109, 117 Cartmell, D. 243 Cary, E., The Tragedy of Mariam 29, 191, 308 n.2 Castelvetro, L. 95 Castiglione, B., The Book of the Courtier 95 Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700 (CELM) 330–1 Catiline (Jonson) 335 Cavendish, J., The Concealed Fancies 191 Cavendish, M. 184, 191 Celestina (de Rojas) 97 censorship and regulation 28 Cerasano, S. P. 41, 185 Cervantes, M. de Don Quixote 97 Exemplary Novellas: Love’s Pilgrimage 97 Chakravarty, U. 7, 220–1 ‘The Renaissance of Race and the Future of Early Modern Race Studies’ 219

INDEX

Chalmers, G. 131–2 An Apology for the Believers in the Shakespeare Papers 131 Chambers, E. K. 23, 28, 54, 56–7, 133, 181 documents of control 25, 45 n.1 The Elizabethan Stage 20, 121 The Mediaeval Stage 9, 20, 53–5 and problem of periodization 54 William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems 20 The Chances (Fletcher) 97 The Changeling (Middleton & Rowley) 297 Chapman, G. 5, 26, 169 The Blind Beggar of Alexandria 300 Bussy d’Ambois 96 The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Byron 96 Chapman, M. Anti-Black Racism in Early Modern Drama 221 Race in the European Renaissance: A Classroom Guide 234 Charles I 189 Charles II 181 Charles V (Holy Roman Emperor) 165–7 Cheney, P. 26 Chess, S. 183, 277–8, 282 n.7, 307 Male-to-Female Crossdressing in Early Modern English Literature 282 n.1 Chettle, H. 112–13 Chief Promises (Bale) 320 chorus 138 Christ Church Greyfriars 159 n.6 Christian Rite and Christian Drama (Hardison) 55 A Christian Turned Turk (Daborne) 70 Christmas his Masque (Jonson) 186 Christus redivivius (Grimald) 320 Chruso-thriambos 148 Chrysanaleia (Munday) 159 Chung, R. 306 Cinthio, G. 95 city inns 10, 151–4, 186. See also playhouses (theatres) history 153 licencing arrangement 152 City of London Corporation 153

INDEX

The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England (Rice & Pappano) 63 civic drama 28–9, 42, 147–59 The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (Burckhardt) 54, 57, 62, 265 Civitas Londinium. See Agas map Clare, E. 278 Clare, J. 28 Cleander (Massinger) 189 Cleopatra (Daniel) 96 climate events 81 Clopper, L. 59 Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period 57 closet drama 29, 101 n.7 clothing 76, 168, 170 blackness 170 and military tools 169 second-hand 168 clowning 29–30 Clubb, L. G. 96 Cockett, P. 192 Cockpit playhouse 119, 130, 136, 187 cognitive ecology 112 Cohen, W. 69 Drama of a Nation 69, 98 Cohn, A. 101 Coleman, C. 185 Collier, J. P. 132 Collins, P. H. 288 Collinson, P. 267 n.8 Comedia famosa de la monja alférez (The Famous Comedy of the Lieutenant Nun, de Montalbán) 193 The Comedy of Errors (Shakespeare) 81 commedia dell’arte 95, 182 commercial drama 5, 56 Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy (United States) 3 communities 257, 277, 279, 305–6, 308, 319, 324 Comoedia vom König in Spanien vnd dem Viceroy in Portugal 99 The Concealed Fancies (Cavendish & Brackley) 191 concealment space 138

367

Concise Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (Watson) 330 concordia discors 211 Condell, E. 22, 186–7 Condell, H. 186 conduits 149 Conflict of Conscience (Wood) 91 The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Byron (Chapman) 96 continental impact 92–8 Cook, A. J., The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London 25 Cook, C. 249 Cooper, H. 63 Shakespeare and the Medieval World 57–8 Cooper, T. 257 Copernicus 12, 210, 259 heliocentric universe 202, 205 Copland, W., Jack Juggler 319 Coriolanus (Shakespeare) 74 Cornélie (Garnier) 96 Corpus Christi play 9, 55, 63, 319 cosmos 11–12, 201–14 Cottis, D. 295 The Court Beggar (Brome) 298 court performances 30–1, 34, 42, 185–6, 239 Covid-19 pandemic 14, 296, 306–7, 309 n.7 digital performance technologies 14, 296 Cox, J. D. 22, 65 n.2 Craig, H. 335 Craik, K. 242 Crane 207 Crane, M. T. 203 Crashaw, W. 59, 100 Crawford, J. 76 Craythorne, M. 186 Creation Theatre 307 Crenshaw, K. W. 227 Cripple (The Fair Maid of the Exchange) 275–7, 279–81 Crisp, Q. 305 Critical Race Conversations (RaceB4Race Collective) 220 cross-dressing 31, 76–7, 109, 168, 261, 279, 302

368

Crosse, G. 118 Cross Keys (1577-8), London inn 33, 35, 119, 151, 153, 186, 316 Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History (Cummings & Simpson) 57–8 Cummings, B. 258, 260 Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History 57–8 Cummings, J. 336 Cunis, A. 301 Cupid’s Banishment (White) 185 Cupid’s Revenge (Beaumont & Fletcher) 91 Curtain playhouse 36, 129, 132–4, 151, 159 n.6, 187, 315–17 The Custom of the Country (Fletcher & Massinger) 97 Cvetkovich, A. 241 Cymbeline (Shakespeare) 35, 42, 62, 260 Daborne, R., A Christian Turned Turk 70 Dadabhoy, A. 287 The Damoiselle (Brome) 90 Daniel, S., Cleopatra 96 Darney, P. 304 Database of Dramatic Extracts (DEx) 331 Database of Early English Playbooks (DEEP) 29, 45 n.5, 335–6 Davenant, W. Fleet Street playhouse 136 The Siege of Rhodes 185 David and Bethsabe (Peele) 157 Davidson, P. 185 Davies, C. 318 Davis, A. 60, 62 Day, J., The Travels of the Three English Brothers 6, 228 de Bourdeille (seigneur de Brantôme), P. 239 de Dominis, M. A. 170, 172, 174 Defence of Poetry (Sidney) 31, 94 Degenhardt, J. H. 12–13, 41 De gli eroici furori (Bruno) 208 de Grazia, M. 54, 167 Dekker, T. 11, 29, 112, 147, 261, 300 Blurt Master Constable 97 Match-me in London 97 Northward Ho! 90 Old Fortunatus 99

INDEX

The Roaring Girl 13, 31, 76, 163, 183, 193, 275–6, 280 The Shoemaker’s Holiday 90 The Virgin Martyr 266 del Toro, G., The Shape of Water 230–1, 233 Democritus 202 de Montalbán, P., Comedia famosa de la monja alférez (The Famous Comedy of the Lieutenant Nun) 193 Depledge, E. 3 Dering, E. 191 de Rojas, F. Calisto and Melibea 97 Celestina 97 Deroux, M. 291 Derrida, J. 258 Descensus Astraeae (Peele) 156–8 Dessen, A. 45 n.8 Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama 42–3, 121, 137, 139 de Vere, E. 207 Devereux, W. 189 The Device of the Pageant Borne before Woolstone Dixi (Peele) 155 The Devil Is an Ass (Jonson) 61, 163 The Devil’s Law Case (Webster) 295 The Devil Takes a Wife, or The Tale of Belfagor (Machiavelli) 95 de Witt, J. 135, 137 Swan playhouse sketch 135–6 Dhar, A. 231 Dhillon, A. 250 dialectical approach 71 Diary (Henslowe) 38–9, 41, 120, 331 Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama (Dessen & Thomson) 42–3, 121, 137, 139 Dido, Queen of Carthage (Marlowe & Nashe) 297 Diehl, H. 262 DiGangi, M. 229 Digges, T. 202 digital performance 307–8 technologies 14, 296 digital resources 8, 14, 327–8 Dillon, J. 141, 315, 318 disability and trans studies 275–81, 282 n.1 as embodied knowledge 279 issue of bathroom politics 277 literary studies 277–8

INDEX

non-normative bodies 279 paucity 277 social manoeuvring 280 The Discarded Image (Lewis) 259 Discoveries (Jonson) 94 Dissembling Disability in Early Modern English Drama (Row-Heyveld) 278 diversification disability and trans studies 13, 275–81 race and diversity 285–91 Dobson, M. 3 Doctor Faustus (Marlowe) 5, 26, 37, 91, 99, 153, 206–7, 295, 297, 299 Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Stern) 38 Dodsley, R. 3 A Select Collection of Old Plays 2 Dolan, F., Whores of Babylon 263 Dollimore, J. 6 Donaldson, I., Ben Jonson 298 Don Ieronimo 99 Donne, J. 203–4 Don Quixote (Cervantes) 97 Drakakis, J. 6. See also Alternative Shakespeares (Drakakis, Hawkes & Henderson) Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Clopper) 57 Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson: The Effects of Society and Economics on Elizabethan-Jacobean Drama (Knights) 69 Drama League 306 Drama of a Nation (Cohen) 69, 98 Drapers’ Company 156 Drayton, M. 112 Drury Lane 187 du Bartas, G., La Seconde Sepmaine 97 The Duchess of Malfi (Webster) 5, 40, 75, 148, 261, 290, 295–7, 299, 307 Dudley, R. 189 Duffin, R. 119 Duffy, E., The Stripping of the Altars 260 Dugan, H. 12, 231 Dustagheer, S. 116, 299 Shakespeare’s Two Playhouses: Repertory and Theatre Space at the Globe and the Blackfriars, 1599-1613 138 The Dutch Courtesan (Marston) 90

369

Dutton, R. 22, 28, 121, 260 Theatre and Religion 260 Dymock, E. 102 n.24 Earl Godwin and His Three Sons 112 Early English Books Online (EEBO) 118, 327–8 Early English Books Tract Supplement 328 Early European Books 328 Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology (Smith, Jones & Grier) 229, 233 Early Modern London Theatres (EMLoT) 120, 334–5 Early Modern Scholars of Colour Network 291 n.2 Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability (Love) 278 Eastop, J. 295 economic life 69–70 education system (India) 3 Edward I (Peele) 155, 157–9 Edward II (Marlowe) 2, 96, 297, 303–6 Edward III 329 Edward IV (Heywood) 6, 73, 75 Edward’s Boys 119, 302–3, 305 EEBO Text Creation Partnership (EEBOTCP) 329 Egan, G. 315 Eighteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue project 330 Eklund, H., Teaching Social Justice through Shakespeare 286 Elizabethan London public theatres 56, 77, 129, 131, 135, 206, 285, 288, 315, 321 re-politicized 303–7 The Elizabethan Stage (Chambers) 20, 121 The Elizabethan World Picture (Tillyard) 259 Elizabeth I 97–8, 188, 239–40, 245, 246, 320 Elyot, T. 257 Em-Lou Productions 304 Emmerson, R. 62 Empedocles 210–11 Emperor of the East (Massinger) 91 Empires of Love: Europe, Asia, and the Making of Early Modern Identity (Nocentelli) 228

370

Endymion (Lyly) 12, 204, 206–10, 298 Engendering the Stage: The Records of Early Modern Performance 181 Engle, L. 4 Studying Shakespeare’s Contemporaries 3 English Drama from Early Times to the Elizabethans (Rossiter) 55 English Handwriting Online 1500-1700 337 Englishmen for My Money (Haughton) 90–1 English Mystery Plays (Woolf) 55 The English Reformation Revised (Haigh) 260 English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) 329–30 Ensemble Theatre 295 Entertainment at Bisham (Russell) 185 Epicene (Jonson) 31, 94 Erickson, P. 80, 219, 224 Eriksen, R., The Architectures of Shakespeare 141 Erler, M. 151, 154, 318 Erne, L. 26, 101 Escolme, B. 243 Estill, L. 327 Eton’s Boys 320 Euphues (Lyly) 323 Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulis 191 Eurocentric transcendentalism 231 European contexts (early modern English drama) 10, 89, 98 impact of English drama upon 98–100 impact on English drama 92–8 language (see language) translation 92 Evans, C. 14 Evans, H. 186 Evans, R., ‘cosmopolitan islanders’ 101 Evelyn, J. 184 Every Man in His Humour ( Jonson) 42, 94 Every Man Out of His Humor ( Jonson) 34, 42 Everys, E. 189 Every Woman in Her Humour (Machin) 190 Ewbank, I. 157–8

INDEX

Exemplary Novellas: Love’s Pilgrimage (Cervantes) 97 Eyestrings Theatre 295 Fairfield, L. P. 321 The Fair Maid of the Exchange (Heywood) 13, 275–6, 281 The Fair Maid of the Inn (Fletcher) 97 The Fair Maid of the West (Heywood) 78–9, 228 The Faithful Shepherdess (Fletcher) 32 The Family of Love 261 The Famous Chronicle of King Edward the First (Peele) 8 The Famous Victories of Henry V 153 Farmer, A. 335–6. See also Database of Early English Playbooks (DEEP) Farrant, A. 186 Farrant, R. 32, 186 The Fatal Contract (Heminge) 299 ‘The Feast of Corpus Christi in the West Country’ (Johnston) 63 Feerick, J. E. 11–12 Feuillerat, A. 30 Field, N. 27 The Field of Cultural Production (Bourdieu) 9, 19 field of dramatic production 9, 19 literary/book/theatre histories 21 Findlay, A. 192, 260 Shakespeare and His Sisters project 308 n.2 Theatre and Religion 260 The First London Theatre (Wallace) 315 The First Public Playhouse (Berry) 315 Fish, S. 258–60 ‘One University Under God?’ 258 Fisher, M. H. 287 Fisher, W. 277–8 Fishmongers’ Company Show 155 Fitzherbert, T. 257 Fitzpatrick, T. 136–7, 139–41, 142 n.1 The Fleire (Sharpham) 91 Fletcher, J. 95, 97 The Chances 97 Cupid’s Revenge 91 The Custom of the Country 97 The Fair Maid of the Inn 97 The Faithful Shepherdess 32

INDEX

Henry VIII 61–2, 190 The History of Cardenio 97 A King and No King 246 Love’s Cure 193 The Maid’s Tragedy 193 The Two Noble Kinsmen 62 The Woman Hater 97 Women Pleased 91 Florio His Firste Fruites (Florio) 152 Floyd, G. 285 Folgerpedia 337 Folger Shakespeare Library 132, 220 Digital Anthology of Early Modern Drama (EMED) 337 LUNA 328 The Forces of Hercules 98 Ford, J. 3, 296 ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore 5, 119, 297–8 Fortune playhouse 119, 131, 135, 147, 151, 183, 187 Four Prentices of London (Heywood) 5, 8, 12, 137–8, 226 Francisco, T., Shakespeare and the 99%: Literary Studies, the Profession, and the Production of Inequity 70 Frankland, E. 193, 194 n.5, 305–7 Frederick V of Bohemia 245 Freeman, E. 279 Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (Greene) 115, 298 Frith, M. 183 From Mankind to Marlowe (Bevington) 56 Fryer, P. 290 Fuchs, B. 98, 101, 101 n.6, 170 Fudge, E. 231 Fulwell, U., Like Will to Like 90 Furness, H. H. 101 Gadd, I. 336 Gager, W. 44 Galenic theory 214 n.4, 242 Galileo, G. 12, 202 Sidereus nuncius 201 Gallathea/Galatea (Lyly) 114, 305–7, 309 n.8, 323 A Game at Chess (Middleton) 6, 11, 164–6, 168–9 agency of assemblages 172–7 Black House 165, 170–7

371

Black Knight 165, 170–6 Fat Bishop, depiction 170–6 White House 170, 173–6 Gammer Gurton’s Needle 96 Ganymede, B. 76 Garber, D. 201 Gardiner, H. 65 n.1 Mysteries’ End: An Investigation of the Last Days of the Medieval Religious Stage 55 Garner, S. 287 Garnier, R. 96 Cornélie 96 Marc-Antoine 29, 94, 96 Gascoigne, G., Supposes 95 Geertz, C. 72 gender identity 76, 169 gender normativity 278 genres, dramatic 31–2, 55, 90 George, London inn 119 Gieskes, E. 9 Gilborn, D. 287 Glacken, C. J. 291 Global Renaissance 228 Global Shakespeares Digital Performance Archive 228 Globe playhouse 33, 36, 38, 42, 54, 116, 129–32, 134–5, 165, 187, 189, 204, 297, 301–2, 317, 318 Hollar’s drawing 137 reconstruction 135–8, 142 sound circulation 139 Golding, A. 211 Goldsmiths’ Company 148–9 Gondomar, C. de 165–6, 168, 171 Gorboduc (Norton & Sackville) 34 Gordon, C. 277–8 Gordon, D. J. 154 Gosson, S. 14, 92, 261–2, 323–4 Playes Confuted 261 Schoole of Abuse 59, 152–3, 261 Gough, M. 192 Gowing, L. 72, 239 Grady, K. 221 Graff, G. 64 Greenberg, M. 228 Greenblatt, S. 6, 56–7, 70, 100 Greene, R. 3, 6, 44, 45 n.2, 61, 318 Alphonsus, King of Aragon 97

372

Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay 115, 298 James IV 91 A Looking-Glass for London 61 Greene, T. 187 Greenfield, P. 63 Greg, W. W. 133, 153 Bibliography of the English Printed Drama 29, 335–6 Grier, M., Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology 229, 233 Griffin, E. 98 Grimald, N., Christus redivivius 320 Grundling, E. 188 Guarini, G., Il pastor fido or Faithfull Shepheard 95, 99 Guicciardini, F. 95 Gunston, B. 189 Gurnis, M., Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling 262 Gurr, A. 32, 135–6, 138 Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London 25 The Shakespearian Playing Companies 23 Gwinne, M., Vertumnus sive Annus Recurrens 335 Habib, I. 78, 222, 290 Haigh, C., The English Reformation Revised 260 Hall, K. F. 77, 79, 219, 222, 224, 227, 233, 249, 291 binarism of black and white 291 fairness 226 Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England 41, 224 Halliwell-Phillipps, J. O. 132 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 32, 35, 40, 56, 98, 101, 117, 168, 261 Hammill, G. 265 Hampton, T. 60 Happé, P. 321, 323 Harbage, A. Annals of English Drama 335 Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions 25 Hardison, O. B. 55–6 Christian Rite and Christian Drama 55 Harrington-Odedra, G. 308 n.2

INDEX

Harris, J. G. 60 Harrison, J. 186 Harrowing of Hell 61 Hartman, S. 222 HathiTrust 330 Hattrell, E. 189 Haughton, W., Englishmen for My Money 90–1 Hawkes, T. 6. See also Alternative Shakespeares (Drakakis, Hawkes & Henderson) Hegel, G. 54 Heinemann, M. 264 Puritanism and Theatre 263 Heinsius, D., Ad Horatij de Plauto & Terentio Judicium 94 Hell Mouth 9, 61 Heminge, W., The Fatal Contract 299 Heminges, J. 22, 147, 186, 246 Henderson, D. E. 6. See also Alternative Shakespeares (Drakakis, Hawkes & Henderson) Hendricks, M. 219 Heng, G. 223–4, 266 Henry, P. 148, 185 Henry IV (Shakespeare) 73, 99 Henry V (Shakespeare) 41, 90, 138 Henry VI (Shakespeare) 95 Henry VIII (Shakespeare & Fletcher) 61–2, 190 Henslowe, P. 43, 111, 113, 115, 118–19, 131, 135, 168 Diary 38–9, 41, 120, 331 Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project 120, 335 Herbert, D. A. 193 Herbert, H. 119, 131, 188–9 Herbert, M. 29 Herbert, P. 335 Herbert, W. 335 The Heroic Frenzies (Bruno) 208 Herrick, R. 114 heterosexual courtship 76 Heywood, Jasper 319 Heywood, John 96 The Play of the Weather 141 Heywood, T. 11, 147 An Apology for Actors 59 Edward IV 6, 73, 75

INDEX

The Fair Maid of the Exchange 13, 275–6, 281 The Fair Maid of the West 78–9, 228 The Four Prentices of London 5, 8, 12, 137–8, 226 A Woman Killed with Kindness 2, 75 Hezekiah (Udall) 320 Hidden Room (Texas) 295 Hill, C. 263–4 Hill, T. 5, 10–11, 119 Hill-Gibbin, J. 304 Hillman, R. 96, 101 Hirschfeld, H. 112 Hispanophobic myth 98 ‘An Historical Account of the English Stage’ (Malone) 131 history and historiography 14 The History of Cardenio (Fletcher) 97 Histriomastix (Prynne) 153, 261 Hobgood, A. P. 277–8 Beholding Disability in Renaissance England 278 Recovering Disability in Early Modern England 277 Hodges, C. W. 130 Hodgson, M. 308 n.2 Hoenselaars, T. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists 4 European contexts (early modern English drama) 10 holberd(es) 114 Hollar, W., Globe drawing 135, 137 Holles, J. 170 homosexuality 303–5 Hope playhouse 129, 132, 318 Horace 93, 211 Art of Poetry 94 Horne, D. 155 Howard, J. E. 6, 9, 244 Howes, E. 130–1, 134 Hsia, R. P. 92 human and non-human relations 213 Hunter, G. K. 157 Hunter, S. 287 Hutchings, M. 115 Hutson, L. 34, 265 hybrid morality 56

373

Hyman, W. B., Teaching Social Justice through Shakespeare 286 Ichikawa, M. 138 Shakespearean Entrances 137 identity 7, 60–1, 169, 280, 289 artisan labour and urban 53, 63–4 culture and 8, 14 gender 76, 169 modern theories of 7 race and national 40–1, 287 Ieronimo (van den Bergh) 99 Il pastor fido or Faithfull Shepheard (Guarini) 95, 99 Impatient Poverty 319 An Index of Characters in Early Modern English Drama: Printed Plays, 1500-1660 (Berger, Bradford & Sondergard) 121 Index of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700 (Beal) 330 indoor theatres 25, 32–3, 35, 43, 134 Ingram, W. 22, 43, 152–3, 316, 324 n.1 Inns of Court 33–4, 72, 109, 119, 211 Inquiry (Malone) 131 interlinguicity 90 International Spenser Society 225 Internet Archive 120, 330, 334 interpretive archaeology 301–2 intertextual criticism 235 n.12 Iphigenia at Aulis (Euripides) 191 Ireland, W. H. 131 Islam and Early Modern English Literature (Robinson) 225 Isle of Dogs (Nashe) 28 I suppositi (Ariosto) 95 Iyengar, S., Shades of Difference 224–5 Jack Juggler (Copland) 319 Jackson, K. 258, 260, 262, 265 Jackson, Z. I. 97, 231 Jacobean and Caroline masques 34, 184 The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (Bentley) 20 Jacobean playhouse 129, 135, 206, 285 de-politicized 303–7 James IV (Greene) 91 James VI and I 148, 170, 188 Jardine, L. 6

374

Jarman, D. 303–4, 306 Jensen, P. 59 Jenstad, J. 332 Jephthah 113 The Jew of Malta (Marlowe) 4, 78, 95, 99, 115, 117–18, 266 Jodelle, É. 94, 96 John Baptist’s Preaching (Bale) 320 John of Gaunt, ‘This England’ 97 Johnson, A. 141 Johnson, J. 322 Johnson, L. 10, 119, 121, 316 Shakespeare’s Lost Playhouse: Eleven Days at Newington Butts 129 Johnson, S. 130 Johnston, A. F., ‘The Feast of Corpus Christi in the West Country’ 63 Jones, A. R., Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory 168–9 Jones, E. 219 Jones, I. 34, 136, 184–5 Jones, N. R., Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology 229, 233 Jones, R. 30, 336 Jonson, B. 3, 5, 11, 24, 26–7, 34, 37, 44, 45 n.2, 69, 82, 93–5, 119, 141, 147, 204, 296 The Alchemist 42, 45 n.8, 90, 94, 191, 297–8 Bartholomew Fair 24, 91, 261, 297 Catiline 335 Christmas his Masque 186 The Devil Is an Ass 61, 163 Discoveries 94 Epicene 31, 94 Every Man in His Humour 42, 94 Every Man Out of His Humor 34, 42 Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly 35 The Magnetic Lady 95 The Masque of Blackness 191 The Masque of Queens 185 The May Lord 191 Oberon 185 Poetaster 42 Sejanus 94, 115 A Tale of a Tub 91 Volpone 45 n.8, 90, 94–5, 206, 297–8

INDEX

Joubin, A. A., Shakespeare and East Asia 228 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 277 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare) 74–5, 99, 138 Kangaju, S. 250 Kantorowicz, E., The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology 264 Karim-Cooper, F. 13, 169, 298–9 ‘The Materials of Race: Staging the Black and White Binary in Early Modern Theatre’ 41 Kastan, D. S. 22, 258–60 Kathman, D. 27, 33, 35, 119, 148, 186, 318 Kaufman, M. J. 306, 309 n.8 Keenan, S. 120 Travelling Players in Shakespeare’s England 38 Kemp, S. 277–9, 305 Kempe, W. 30 Kepler, J. 206, 210, 214 Kesson, A. 152, 305–6 King, J. 319 A King and No King (Beaumont & Fletcher) 246 King Edward VI School 302 King Johan (Bale) 320–2 King Lear (Shakespeare) 42, 80–2, 90, 117, 206 The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Kantorowicz) 264 Kinney, A. J. 4 Kirwan, P. 296 After Edward 305 Knell, W. 153 The Knight of the Burning Pestle (Beaumont) 25–6, 35, 97 The Knight of the Burning Rock 39 Knights, L. C. 9, 70, 82 Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson: The Effects of Society and Economics on Elizabethan-Jacobean Drama 69 market economy 69 Knollys, L. 189 Knutson, R. L. 38, 41, 121, 139, 321

INDEX

Kolve, V. A., The Play Called Corpus Christi 55 Korda, N. 111, 120, 174, 176, 185–6 Kuhn, J. 115 Kyd, T. 5, 29, 96, 98, 151, 318 Soliman and Perseda 99 The Spanish Tragedy 2, 5, 24, 93–4, 97, 99–100, 117–18 Lactantius, religare 257 Lacy, T. 90 La Guisiade (Matthieu) 96 Lake, P. 59 Lambarde, W., A Perambulation of Kent 152 Lancashire, A. 151 Lander, J. 62 Langley, F. 43 language 89–92, 242, 257, 290, 328–9 defamiliarization 91 and dialects 90 hybridity 90–1 interlinguicity 90 intertraffic 92 of space 142 translation 92 Larson, K. R. 192 La Seconde Sepmaine (du Bartas) 97 Latour, B. 60, 171 Latta, C. 244, 251 Layston, A. 186 Lazarus Theatre 295, 297, 303–4, 308 n.2 Legge, T., Richardus Tertius 44 Lenz, C. R. S. 6 Leon, K. 250 Lesser, Z. 319, 335–6. See also Database of Early English Playbooks (DEEP) Leveen, L. 141 Leverhulme Trust 181 Levy, F. J., Tudor Historical Thought 62 Lewis, C. S. 259 The Discarded Image 259 Lewis, C. T. 257 liberalism 258, 264 licensing system 28, 152 Lidster, A. 14, 158 Like Will to Like (Fulwell) 90 Lin, E. T. 121, 182 Lindley, D. 35

375

Lingua, or the Combat of the Tongue (Tomkis) 99 Linked Early Modern Drama Online (LEMDO) 332 Linton, S. 276 Little, A. J. 229, 287 White People in Shakespeare 226 Little Ice Age (Northern Europe) 71 Lodge, T. 44, 61, 151 A Looking-Glass for London 61 Loengard, J. S. 316 Loewenstein, D. 259 Loftis, J. 98 London pageantry, modes 147 Londons Love 148 London Stage Database, 1660-1800 120 A Looking-Glass for London (Greene & Lodge) 61 Loomba, A. 6, 77, 219, 223–4 Race in Early Modern England 225 Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism 224 Loone, B. 250 Lopez, J. 5, 298, 302 The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama 299 Lord Chamberlain’s Men (King’s Men) 14, 27–8, 33, 36, 38, 43, 115, 131, 148, 153, 168, 173, 315, 317–18 Lord Mayor’s Show 28, 39, 42, 110, 119, 147–8, 332 Lord Strange’s Men and Their Plays (MacLean & Manley) 335 Lost Plays Database (LPD) 41, 120–1, 331 Love, G. 13, 301 Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability 278 Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly (Jonson) 35 Love’s Cruelty (Shirley) 99 Love’s Cure (Fletcher & Massinger) 193 Love’s Labour’s Lost (Shakespeare) 192 Love’s Victory (Wroth) 5, 8, 191–2, 308 n.2 Lowin, J. 148 Lucretius 205 Lupton, J. R. 171–2, 264–5 Lusty Juventus 151 Luzarne (lynx) 156

376

Lyly, J. 4, 14, 32, 44, 95, 191, 207, 309 n.8, 323–4 Campaspe 323 Endymion 12, 204, 206–10, 298 Euphues 323 Gallathea/Galatea 114, 305–6, 309 n.8, 323 Midas 163 Sappho and Phao 323 Venus 323 Macbeth (Shakespeare) 4, 117, 140, 142 MacDonald, J. G. 224 MacDonald, M. 205 Machiavelli, N. 95–6 The Devil Takes a Wife, or The Tale of Belfagor 95 Machin, L., Every Woman in Her Humour 190 MacIsaac, C. 303 MacLean, S. 41, 44, 158, 334 Lord Strange’s Men and Their Plays 335 Macpherson Inquiry 288 The Magnetic Lady ( Jonson) 95 magnetism (Gilbert) 205 The Maid’s Tragedy (Beaumont & Fletcher) 193 Maisano, S., Renaissance Posthumanism 231 The Malcontent (Marston) 34, 37 Male-to-Female Crossdressing in Early Modern English Literature (Chess) 282 n.1 Malone, E. ‘An Historical Account of the English Stage’ 131 Inquiry 131 Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare 131 Malone Society 39 Mankind 141 Manley, L. 151 Lord Strange’s Men and Their Plays 335 The Map of Early Modern London (MoEML) 327, 332–3 Marc-Antoine (Garnier) 29, 94, 96 Marchitello, H. 204 marginalization 5, 82, 193

INDEX

Marlowe, C. 1, 3, 5, 14, 24, 26, 44, 45 n.2, 78, 95, 98, 153, 204, 295, 303–5, 318, 323–4 Doctor Faustus 5, 26, 37, 61, 91, 99, 153, 206–7, 295, 297, 299 Edward II 2, 96, 297 The Jew of Malta 4, 78, 95, 99, 115, 117–18, 266 The Massacre at Paris 95–6 Tamburlaine 26, 29–30, 37, 97, 153, 169, 336 Marotti, A. 258, 260, 262, 265 Marrapodi, M. 96 marriage 75–7 Marschalk von Spanje 99 Marston, J. 32, 34, 93, 95, 147, 169 Antonio and Mellida 23, 31 Antonio’s Revenge 34 The Dutch Courtesan 90 The Malcontent 34, 37 Martinelli, D. 182 Marx, K. 164 masculinity and femininity 72–4, 82, 83 n.1, 281 Mason, J., The Turk 99 The Masque of Blackness ( Jonson) 191 The Masque of Queens ( Jonson) 185 The Masque of Virgins 12, 239–40, 243–5, 247, 250–1 masques 29–30, 34, 45 n.7, 110, 141, 185, 246 The Massacre at Paris (Marlowe) 95–6 Massai, S. 119, 335–6 Massinger, P. 3, 95 Cleander 189 The Custom of the Country 97 The Emperor of the East 91 Love’s Cure 193 The Renegado 13, 266 and sexuality 266 The Virgin Martyr 266 Masten, J., Textual Intercourse 26 Match-me in London (Dekker) 97 material culture 11, 163 agency of assemblages 172–7 historicism and critical fetishism 171–2 human-non-human relations 171, 175 methodological fetishism 164–5, 171 New Materialism 164, 166

INDEX

objects and subjects 167–72 premodern attitudes 171, 177 in Protestant culture 164 race 169, 177 ‘The Materials of Race: Staging the Black and White Binary in Early Modern Theatre’ (Karim-Cooper) 41 Matthews, D., Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England 57–8 Matthieu, P., La Guisiade 96 Matusiak, C. 187–8 Maxwell, A. 191 The May Lord ( Jonson) 191 Mazzio, C. 204 ‘Shakespeare and Science’ 214 n.4 McCarthy, H. 13–14 McEachern, C. 243–4, 250 McInnis, D. 321 McManus, C. 5, 11, 120 McMillin, S. 38, 41, 44, 94, 121, 158 McMullan, G. 190 Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England 57–8 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare) 248, 261, 263 The Mediaeval Stage (Chambers) 9, 20, 53–5 Mejia LaPerle, C. 290 Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature 229 memorial reconstructions 45 n.4 Menzer, P. 117, 299–300 The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare) 4, 79, 99, 168, 227, 235 n.12, 266 Merchant Taylors’ School 149–50 Mercurius Fumigosus 188 Merrie Conceited Jests of George Peele Gentleman (Peele) 156 The Merry Devil of Edmonton 38 Merry Wives of Windsor (Shakespeare) 90 The Metamorphoses (Ovid) 211 methodological fetishism 164–5, 171 #MeToo movements 250 Mexia, P., Silva de Varia Leccion 97 Michalak, P. 250 Midas (Lyly) 163 Middleton, T. 3, 11, 12, 29, 31–2, 93, 147, 169, 211, 261, 296 anti-Catholicism 172–4 The Changeling 297

377

frequent racialization of Spain 170 A Game of Chess (see A Game at Chess (Middleton)) London 157 No Wit/Help Like a Woman 114 The Revenger’s Tragedy 2, 5, 40, 42, 99–100, 297–8 The Roaring Girl 13, 31, 76, 163, 183, 193, 275–6, 280 The Second Maiden’s Tragedy 97 Timon of Athens 12, 204, 206–7, 210–14 The Triumphs of Truth 149, 157, 159 The Witch 91 Women Beware Women 75 A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare) 24, 35, 57, 75, 81, 99, 171, 245, 318 Milk, H. 305 Mills, P. 302 Miola, R. 93 Mirza, H. S. 288 Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling (Gurnis) 262 modernity 12, 53, 56–8, 171–2, 203–4, 265–6 Moll Cutpurse (The Roaring Girl) 13, 76–7, 275–7, 279–81 A Monster Late Found Out and Discovered (Rawlidge) 153 monstrosity 231 Monstrous Kinds: Body, Space, and Narrative in Renaissance Representations of Disability (Bearden) 278 Montagu, W., The Shepherd’s Paradise 184–5 The Monument of Matrones (Bentley) 240 Morrill, J. 264 Mucedorus 154 Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare) 12, 99, 135, 240, 243–5, 247, 250 Beatrice 243, 245, 248–50 Benedick 248, 250 Borachio 244–6, 249 Claudio 243–9 Don John and Pedro 243–5, 247–9, 251 Leonato 244, 247–51 Mueller, S., Mistress Provoe case 183–4

378

Muir, K. 142 Mulcaster, R. 149–50 Mulis, J. 189 Mullaney, S. 91 Munday, A. 11, 147–8, 155 Chrysanaleia 159 A Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theaters 59 Munro, L. 5, 11, 41, 61, 115, 297–8, 301 Muscovite 156 Muscovy Company 156 Museum of London Archaeology 121, 133–4 music 35, 119, 250, 290, 323, 329 Muslims. See religion and religious cultures Myles, R. 306 Mysteries’ End: An Investigation of the Last Days of the Medieval Religious Stage (Gardiner) 55 Nabbes, T., The Bride 90 Nagel, A. 61–2 Nashe, T. 44 Isle of Dogs 28 Summer’s Last Will and Testament 4 National Theatre (UK) 295, 304 natural philosophy 206–7, 209 nature and culture 213 Ndiaye, N. 182, 231, 290 Neely, C. T. 6 The Negro 79 Nelsen, P. 135 Neoplatonism 208 The New Academy (Brome) 90 Newgate Sessions Hall 159 n.6 New Historicism 20, 83 n.1, 260, 265 Newington Butts playhouse 36, 119, 129, 132, 316 Newman, J. 186 Newton, J. 190 Nice Wanton 319 Nicholas, R. 307 Nobody and Somebody 99 Nocentelli, C., Empires of Love: Europe, Asia, and the Making of Early Modern Identity 228 non-print venues 219–20 Nora, P., lieux de mémoire 61 Norden, J., map of London (1593) 131–2

INDEX

Northbrooke, J. 70 Northern Lass (Brome) 91 Northward Ho! (Dekker & Webster) 90 Norton, D. 189 Norton, T., Gorboduc 34 Novum organon (Bacon) 203 No Wit/Help Like a Woman (Middleton) 114 Oberon ( Jonson) 185 objects, role 11, 20, 62, 164, 167–72 O’Connell, M. 64, 65 n.3 O’Connor, M. F. 6 O’Dair, S., Shakespeare and the 99%: Literary Studies, the Profession, and the Production of Inequity 70 Of Pilcrows (Bourne) 337 Old Fortunatus (Dekker) 99 The Old Wives Tale (Peele) 4, 157 Olive, S. 3 Onesti, C. 250 ‘One University Under God?’ (Fish) 258 Onyeka 290 open-access, online databases 14, 327, 331 Ordish, T. F. 132 Original Practices (OP) 295, 299–303 Orlando Furioso (Ariosto) 95 Ornstein, R. 259 Orrell, J. 137 The Quest for Shakespeare’s Globe 134–5 Orvis, D. 245 Ostler, T. 186 Ostler, W. 186 Othello (Shakespeare) 13, 30, 35, 75, 91, 117, 164, 168–9, 175, 220, 225, 246, 266 outdoor venues 25, 32, 35–6, 38, 43, 109, 134 Ovid 93, 211 The Metamorphoses 211 The Owle Schreame 297 Oxford Handbook of Intersectionality in Early Modern Literature (Coles & DiGangi) 227 Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment (Traub) 6

INDEX

palimpsests 53, 60–2 Palmerin de Oliva 97 Panofsky, E. 61, 65 n.4 Panton, M. E. H. 186 Pappano, M. A., The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England 63 Parable of Virgins 244 paratexts, theatrical 26, 36–7, 335–6 Paris Garden 152 Parker, P. 219 Parnassus Plays 37, 44 passions 243, 245 The Pathe of Obedience (Cancellar) 321 patronage 37, 63, 120, 189, 191, 333–4 Pauline theology 263 Paul’s Boys 149 Peadle, C.. 188 Peadle, T. 188 Peadle, W., Jr. 188 Peadle, W., Sr. 188 Pearson, M. 301–2 Peele, G. 3, 11, 44, 147, 153, 154–5 The Araygnment of Paris 4, 154, 157, 159 The Battle of Alcazar 78, 97, 154–5, 157, 159 City pageants 11, 154, 156, 159 David and Bethsabe 157 Descensus Astraeae 156–8 The Device of the Pageant Borne before Woolstone Dixi 155 Edward I 8, 155, 157–9 Merrie Conceited Jests of George Peele Gentleman 156 The Old Wives Tale 4, 157 The Troublesome Raigne of John King of England 153, 157 Peele, J. 154 Pemberton, J. 148 Pepys, S. 118 A Perambulation of Kent (Lambarde) 152 Perdita Project 330 performance theory 24 Performing Early Modern Drama Today (Aebischer & Prince) 295–6 Performing Nostalgia (Bennett) 303 Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage (Thompson) 224 Pericles (Shakespeare) 62

379

periodization 53, 55, 58, 224 Chambers and 54 field-coverage model 64 geographical bias 62 historiographies 59–60, 62 institutional ideology and disciplinary training 64 Perry, C. 6 Shakespeare and the Middle Ages 57 Pettitt, T. 141 Phillips, A. 187 Physics (Aristotle) 201, 203 Pilkington, H. 322 Pinder, A. 189 plague 28, 38, 59, 63, 192, 289 Plato 202, 205, 262 Platter, T. 109, 111, 117–18 The Play Called Corpus Christi (Kolve) 55 Playes Confuted (Gosson) 261 Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Gurr) 25 playhouses (theatres) 1, 4, 10, 26, 32–3, 35, 38–9, 53–4, 59, 71, 109, 129, 147, 315. See also specific theatre chronology 318–19 design 10, 139, 142 doors, reconstruction 134–8 halls and schools 149–51 history of 130–4 indoor 25, 32–3, 35, 43, 134 manuscripts 38, 40 map (City of London) 131–3, 148 as markets 163, 168, 177 outdoor 25, 32, 35–6, 38, 43, 134 ownership and business of playing 43–4 performance venues beyond 10–11 playing venues outside London 38–9 purpose-built 10–11, 33, 38, 44, 63, 130, 134, 147, 187 racial regime 79 resources (see theatre and cultural spaces (resources)) sound 138–40 tiring house 139 within and without 139 playing companies 1, 10, 21, 23, 27, 32, 37, 39, 41–2, 63–4, 99, 109–10, 119, 183, 186, 188–90 agency of 112 apprentices 112

380

economic practices of 43 hired men 112 meetings, agenda 113 repertories 41 sharers 112 working conditions 112–14 The Play of the Weather (Heywood) 141 plays, publication of 40 DEEP 335 Early Modern Dramatic Paratexts 335–6 SRO 336–7 plays and early texts CELM 330–1 EEBO 327–8 EEBO-TCP 328 ESTC and USTC 329–30 LPD 331–2 Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare (Malone) 131 playwrights 25–6, 43–4, 61, 78, 100, 115, 138, 142, 164, 204, 225, 315, 323. See also specific playwrights Plowden, E., Reports 264 Plutarch 205 Poetaster ( Jonson) 42 Poetics (Aristotle) 94 Poley, J. 187 political theology 13, 264–5 Political Theology (Schmitt) 264–5 Pollard, A. W., Short-Title Catalogue 328 Polyglot Encounters 101, 103 n.29 Pope, A. 130 Porter, C. 11 Powell, T. 319 Praz, M. 102 n.12 Preiss, R. 182 pre-modern drama 55–6 Price, E. 296 Prince, K. 243, 295, 298, 303 Performing Early Modern Drama Today 295–6 print sources 14 The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London (Cook) 25 Privy Council 38, 132, 134, 142, 153, 182 The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time (Bentley) 44 The Profession of Player in Shakespeare’s Time (Bentley) 44

INDEX

props and costumes 11, 39–40, 44 ProQuest platform 328 Prynne, W., Histriomastix 59, 153, 261 Ptolemaic model 202 Puar, J. 278 Pullison, T. 155 Purcell, S., model of co-investigation 192 The Puritan 261 puritanism 261–3, 267 n.8 Puritanism and Theatre (Heinemann) 263 purpose-built theatre 10–11, 33, 38, 44, 63, 130, 134, 147, 187 Puttenham, G. 91, 95 Pythagoras 202, 205, 207, 210–11 Queen’s Men 14, 44, 63, 152, 157–8, 315, 332 The Queen’s Two Bodies (Axton) 264 Queer Faith (Sanchez) 263 queer studies 74, 82, 181, 185, 242 The Quest for Shakespeare’s Globe (Orrell) 134–5 Quilligan, M. 167 Raber, K. 231 Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature (Mejia LaPerle) 229 race and diversity 13 critical whiteness studies 286–8 equal playing field 288–9 racial inequity 285 teaching and research 287, 290–1 RaceB4Race Collective 220, 234, 289 Race in Early Modern England (Burton & Loomba) 225 Race in the European Renaissance: A Classroom Guide (Chapman) 234 race/racism 6–7, 12, 77–80, 174–5, 177, 219–20, 235 n.7, 266 animality and 231 archival considerations 221–3 critical studies 223 defining 223–6 and diversity (see race and diversity) and enslavement 230 fluidity of 223–4 and gender 9, 77, 223 and intersectionality 12, 227–32 liberal post-racialism 221

INDEX

methodological considerations 232–4 and national identity 40–1, 287 polychronicity 224 race-work 232–4 and sexuality 229 (see also sexuality, emotions and embodiment) whiteness 226–7 racial embodiment 12, 229 racial melancholy 287 racial subjectivity 169 Ralph Roister Doister (Udall) 90, 140–1 Randall, D. B. J. 97 Randolph, T., Amyntas, or the Impossible Dowry 99, 190 Rasmussen, E. 4 Studying Shakespeare’s Contemporaries 3 Rastell, J. 318 Rawlidge, R., A Monster Late Found Out and Discovered 153 Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England (Matthews & McMullan) 57–8 Read Not Dead Archive 308 n.1, 337 Read Not Dead series 192, 295, 297, 300–1, 305, 308 n.2 Reasonable, J. 111 The Records of Early English Drama (REED) project 20, 23, 63, 118, 120, 333 Recovering Disability in Early Modern England (Hobgood & Wood) 277 Red Bull playhouse 187, 306–7 Redcliffe Hill playhouse 186 Redgrave, G. R., Short-Title Catalogue 328 Red Lion (London theatre) 36, 63, 119, 129, 151, 316, 321, 324 Redwood, C. W. 133 Reed, I. 2–3 REED Patrons and Performances 334 Reformation 9, 55–6, 59–60, 70, 92, 98, 260, 319–20, 322–3 Reid, P. 172 religion and religious cultures 12–13, 257, 324 Abrahamic faiths 13, 266 Christianity 13, 259–61, 266 Islam/Islamophobia 13, 78, 266 Judaism 13

381

post-Reformation 164 pre-Christian Indo-European civilizations 258 Protestants and Catholics 70, 260–1, 263 Puritans and courtiers 259, 261 relation to politics 263–4 secularization 265 as transhistorical reality 265 religious and racialized discourses 169 Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Jones & Stallybrass) 168–9 Renaissance Drama 36/37 102 n.15 Renaissance humanism 205, 230–1 Renaissance intertheater (Bosman) 100 Renaissance Posthumanism (Campana & Maisano) 231 Renaissance Season 300, 309 n.4 The Renegado (Massinger) 13, 266 repertory system 10, 23, 38–9, 41, 43, 109–21 company biographies 120 development 111 genealogies 110 primary sources 120 public playing 110 and repertoire 40, 112 secondary sources 121 Reports (Plowden) 264 Research Excellence Framework (REF) 289 Research in Action workshops 301–2, 309 n.6 research methods and problems 9 resources 337 digital 8, 14, 327–8 plays and early texts 327–32 publication of plays 327, 335–7 theatre and cultural spaces 327, 332–5 Revels Office 42, 110–11, 118, 186 The Revenger’s Tragedy (Middleton) 2, 5, 40, 42, 99–100, 297–8 Ribner, I. 259–60, 267 ‘Shakespeare, Christianity, and the Problem of Belief’ 259 Rice, N. R., The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England 63 Richard, N., Messallina 61 Richard II (Shakespeare) 96–7, 264

382

Richard III (Shakespeare) 62, 74, 99, 291 Richardson, C., British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue 121 Richardus Tertius (Legge) 44 Rickman, N. 307 Ritchie, F. 3 The Roaring Girl (Dekker & Middleton) 13, 31, 76, 163, 183, 193, 275–6, 280 Robertson, J. 154 Robinson, B. 12–13 Islam and Early Modern English Literature 225 Rodenburgh, T. 99, 102 n.24 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 4, 95, 99, 118, 141, 259, 318 Rosa, T. 246 Rose playhouse 63, 111, 118–19, 129, 131–2, 135, 137, 147, 183, 188, 315, 318 Rossiter, A. P., English Drama from Early Times to the Elizabethans 55 The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama (Lopez) 299 Rowe, N. 130 Row-Heyveld, L., Dissembling Disability in Early Modern English Drama 278 Rowley, S. 148 Rowley, T. 148 Rowley, W. 148 The Changeling 297 The Travels of the Three English Brothers 6, 228 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) 3, 295, 297 Rubright, M. 280–1 Ruiter, D., Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Social Justice 233 Russell, C. 263 Russell, E., Entertainment at Bisham 185 Russell, L. H. 185 Rutter, C. C. 302 Rutter, T. 121 Rymer, T. 64 Sabor, P. 3 Sackville, T., Gorboduc 34 Saenger, M. 90 Saintsbury, G. 45 n.9

INDEX

Salters’ Company 154, 156 Salzman, P. 191 Samson, A. 324 n.7 Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (SWP) 116, 142, 297, 300–1, 304–5 Sanchez, M. E. 7, 229, 232, 265 Queer Faith 263 Santayana, G., ‘The Absence of Religion in Shakespeare’ 259 Sappho and Phao (Lyly) 323 Saracen’s Head playhouse 119, 152 Scanlon, L. 60 Schafer, E. 298 Schmitt, C., Political Theology 264–5 Schoenbaum, S. 130 Annals of English Drama 335 William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life 130 Schoole of Abuse (Gosson) 59, 152–3, 261 Schreyer, K. 9 Schwyzer, P. 62 The Sea Voyage (Fletcher & Massinger) 115 A Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theaters (Munday) 59 The Second Maiden’s Tragedy (Middleton) 97 Secret Shakespeare (Wilson) 260 Sedgwick, E. K. 6, 241 Seidler, K. 101 Sejanus (Jonson) 94, 115 A Select Collection of Old Plays (Dodsley) 2 self-consciousness 8 Seneca, L. A. Seneca His Tenne Tragedies 29 Troas 319 Serres, M. 60 sex/gender system 71–3 sexuality, emotions and embodiment 12, 229, 241–2 affective and agentic performances 242 chastity 239–40, 244–5 cultural beliefs 241 and cultural power 241 femininity 72–4, 82, 83 n.1, 248 history of 242–3 methodological approach 241 patriarchal heterosociality 245, 251 queer performativity 241 Shades of Difference (Iyengar) 224–5

INDEX

‘Shakespeare, Christianity, and the Problem of Belief’ (Ribner) 259 Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Loomba) 224 Shakespeare, W. 1–2, 12, 26, 44, 45 n.2, 53, 56, 64, 72, 78, 93, 98, 109, 169, 204, 211, 285–7, 309 n.4, 318 aesthetic 5 All’s Well that Ends Well 38 As You Like It 190, 225 The Comedy of Errors 81 Coriolanus 74 cultural capital 6–7 Cymbeline 35, 42, 62, 260 Folio 22, 32, 147, 335 Hamlet 32, 35, 40, 56, 98, 101, 117, 168, 261 Henry IV 73, 99 Henry V 41, 90 Henry VI 95 Henry VIII (All Is True) 61–2, 190 Julius Caesar 74–5, 99, 138 King Lear 42, 80–2, 90, 117, 206 Love’s Labour’s Lost 192 Macbeth 4, 117, 140, 142 Measure for Measure 248, 261, 263 The Merchant of Venice 4, 79, 99, 168, 227, 235 n.12, 266 The Merry Wives of Windsor 90 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 24, 35, 57, 75, 81, 99, 171, 245, 318 Much Ado About Nothing 12, 99, 135, 240, 243–51 Othello 13, 30, 35, 75, 91, 117, 164, 168–9, 175, 220, 225, 246, 266 Pericles 62 Richard II 96–7, 264 Richard III 62, 74, 99, 291 Romeo and Juliet 4, 95, 99, 118, 141, 259, 318 school and university curriculum/system 3, 7 The Taming of the Shrew 99, 171 The Tempest 34–5, 81, 91, 95, 99, 138–9, 201–2, 206–7, 225, 230–1, 233 Timon of Athens 12, 204, 206–7, 210–14 Titus Andronicus 24, 78, 98, 100, 115, 291

383

Troilus and Cressida 35 Twelfth Night 76, 99, 168, 245, 261 The Two Noble Kinsmen 62 The Winter’s Tale 42, 99, 246 Shakespeare and East Asia (Joubin) 228 Shakespeare and Race festival 220 Shakespeare and Science (Mazzio) 214 n.4 Shakespeare and the 99%: Literary Studies, the Profession, and the Production of Inequity (O’Dair and Francisco) 70 Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (Spivack) 65 n.2 Shakespeare and the Drama of His Time (Wiggins) 4 Shakespeare and the Medieval World (Cooper) 57–8 Shakespeare and the Middle Ages (Perry & Watkins) 57 Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition (Weimann) 56 Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (Harbage) 25 Shakespearean Entrances (Ichikawa) 137 Shakespearean Playhouses (Adams) 132–3 Shakespeare Association of America 121, 220, 222 Shakespeare Bulletin 226 Shakespeare Documented (Wolfe) 120, 334–5 Shakespeare in Quarto 328 Shakespeare Institute Players 302 Shakespeare (journal) 141 Shakespeare Quarterly 219 Shakespeare’s contemporaries, performing 13–14, 295, 303, 305–6, 308 past-ing present 303–7 reconstruction, revival and presenting (past) 299–303 twenty-first-century engagement/ repthology 295–9 Shakespeare’s Globe 3, 10, 116, 129, 192, 295, 297–300, 308 n.1, 308 n.2, 337 Shakespeare’s Lost Playhouse: Eleven Days at Newington Butts (Johnson) 129 Shakespeare Studies 134 Shakespeare’s Two Playhouses: Repertory and Theatre Space at the Globe and the Blackfriars, 1599–1613 (Dustagheer) 138

384

The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Gurr) 23 Shanks, M. 301 Shannon, L. 74, 231 The Shape of Water (del Toro) 230–1, 233 Shapin, S. 203 Shapiro, J. 77 Sharpe, J. A. 72 Sharpham, E., The Fleire 91 Shaw, J. 231 Shell, A. 60–1, 259, 265 Shelton, J. 97 The Shepherd’s Paradise (Montagu) 184–5 Sherman, W. 60 Shirley, J. 3, 151 The Ball 90 The Bird in A Cage 299 Love’s Cruelty 99 The Young Admiral 189 The Shoemaker’s Holiday (Dekker) 90 Shore, J. 6, 73–5 Shore, M. 73 Short, C. 257 Short-Title Catalogue (Pollard & Redgrave) 328 Short-Title Catalogue (Wing) 328 The Show Must Go Online (TSMGO) initiative 306–7 Shuger, D. 262–3, 266, 267 n.9 Sidereus nuncius (Galileo) 201 Sidney, P. 95, 202–3 Defence of Poetry 31, 94 Siebers, T. 279 The Siege of Rhodes (Davenant) 185 Silva, A. 327 Silva de Varia Leccion (Mexia) 97 Simons, J. 93 Simpson, J., Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History 57–8 Sinfield, A. 6 Sir Thomas More 28 Skinners’ Company 155–6 Smith, B. 139 Smith, C. L., Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology 229, 233 Smith, D. 316 Smith, E. 245

INDEX

Smith, I. 80, 169, 175, 229, 287 ‘We Are Othello’ 220 Smith, P. 243 Smith, Z., White Teeth 234 n.4 Snow, C. P., two-culture system 205 social media channels 307 sola scriptura 60 Solga, K. 303 Soliman and Perseda (Kyd) 99 Somerset, A. 334 source 93, 97, 120–1 The Spanish Tragedy (Kyd) 2, 5, 24, 93–4, 97, 99–100, 117–18 The Spartan Ladies (Carlell) 189 special effects (theatre) 42 Speire, K. 189 Spiller, E. 203 Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise 265 Spivack, B. 56 Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil 65 n.2 Spottiswoode, P. 300 stage directions 42–3, 139, 158 Stallybrass, P. 167 Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory 168–9 State Papers Online, 1509–1714 120 Stationers Register Online (SRO) 156, 331, 336–7 Steevens, G. 130 Steffen, W. 231–2 Steggle, M. 118, 321 Stein, G. 305 Stern, T. 25, 119, 300 Documents of Performance in Early Modern England 38 Stevenson, J. 185 St George 150 St Giles’ parish hall 151 St Katharine Cree 151 Stockwood, J. 317 Stokes, J. 183 Stow, J., Annales, or a Generall Chronicle of England 130 St Paul’s playhouse 32, 130, 149–50, 206, 316 Stratford Shakespeare Festival 192–3 Streitberger, W. R. 30, 152 Strier, R. 316

INDEX

The Stripping of the Altars (Duffy) 260 Stryker, S. 276 Stuart, T. 305 Stubbes, P., Anatomie of Abuses 59 studia humanitatis curriculum 205 Studying Shakespeare’s Contemporaries (Engle & Rasmussen) 3 Sueyoshi, A. 287 Summer’s Last Will and Testament (Nashe) 4 Sun Tavern 112, 114 Supposes (Gascoigne) 95 Swan playhouse 132, 135–6, 159 n.6, 318 Syme, H. S. 112 Tabard, London inn 119 A Tale of a Tub (Jonson) 91 Tallow Chandlers’ Hall 150 Tamburlaine (Marlowe) 26, 29–30, 37, 97, 153, 169, 336 The Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare) 99, 171 Tarleton, R., Tarletons Jests 153 Tarlton, R. 30, 318 Tasso, T., Aminta 95 Tavares, E. E. 10 Taylor, D. 116 Taylor, J. 147 Teaching Social Justice through Shakespeare (Hyman & Eklund) 286 The Tempest (Shakespeare) 34–5, 81, 91, 95, 99, 138–9, 201–2, 206–7, 225, 230–1, 233 The Temptation 320 Teramura, M. 113 Test, E. M. 193 Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) 333 Thames (river) 148 Thatcher, M. 304 theatre and cultural spaces (resources) EMLoT 334–5 MoEML 332–3 REED 333 REED Patrons and Performances 334 Theatre and Religion (Dutton, Findlay & Wilson) 260 theatregrams 96 Theatre playhouse 56, 129–30, 132, 134–5, 151, 186–7, 245, 315–18

385

theatres. See playhouses (theatres) Theatre Without Borders 101 theatrical impersonation 281 theatrical labour 181, 185–8 managers 186 owners and investors 186–7 performance troupe, leading 188 shares and profits 187 Theobald, L. 130 Theological-Political Treatise 265 The Thief of Bagdad 235 n.12 Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Hall) 41, 224 Thomas Middleton (Taylor & Lavagnino) 296 Thomason Tracts 328 Thompson, A. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race 221 Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage 224 Thomson, L. 45 n.8 Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama 42–3, 121, 137, 139 The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London (Wilson) 157 Tieck, L. 101 Tillyard, E. M. W. 259, 262 The Elizabethan World Picture 259 Tilney, E. 28, 30 Timon of Athens (Middleton & Shakespeare) 12, 204, 206–7, 210–14 ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (Ford) 5, 119, 297–8 Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare) 24, 78, 98, 100, 115, 291 Tomkis, T., Lingua, or the Combat of the Tongue 99 Tomlinson, S. 185 Tonson, J. 130 Tosh, W. 301 Totehill, H. 320 Tottel, R. 319 touring 23, 38–9, 44, 53, 63–4, 188 The Tragedy of Mariam (Cary) 29, 191, 308 n.2 Tragoedia von Hieronymo Marschall von Spanien 99 transgender capacity 193, 194 n.4, 281

386

translatio 101 n.6 translation 29, 92, 95–7, 99–101, 102 n.24, 191, 193, 319 Traub, V. 229, 241 Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment 6 Travelling Players in Shakespeare’s England (Keenan) 38 The Travels of the Three English Brothers (Day, Wilkins & Rowley) 6, 228 Tribble, E. 112, 119, 204 Trinity Hall 151, 159 n.5 The Triumphs of Truth (Middleton) 149, 157, 159 Troas (Seneca) 319 Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare) 35 The Troublesome Raigne of John King of England (Peele) 153, 157 truth-seeking/making 286 Tudor Historical Thought (Levy) 62 The Turk (Mason) 99 Turner, H. S. 214 n.4 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare) 76, 99, 168, 245, 261 two-culture model 205, 210 two-door model (playhouse) 138–40, 142 n.1 The Two Noble Kinsmen (Fletcher & Shakespeare) 62 Twycross, M. 318 Udall, N. Hezekiah 320 Ralph Roister Doister 90, 140–1 Ugden, J. 322 Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater (Williams) 278 Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC) 328–30 universities 44–5, 72, 286, 296 school and 289, 297 University of Cambridge, English Handwriting Online 1500–1700 337 University Wits 4, 44–5 Urania 191 Urania Theatre Company 308 n.2 van Buchel, A., Swan playhouse sketch 136 van den Bergh, A., Ieronimo 99

INDEX

van Wedel, L. 155 Varnado, C. 226–7, 235 n.12 Vaux, A. 189 Venus pudica 61 Vertumnus sive Annus Recurrens (Gwinne) 335 Victoria & Albert Museum, Charles V portrait 165–7 Villain’s Theatre 295, 303, 305 Vincent, W. 183 Vindicta mihi 94 Virgil 205 The Virgin Martyr (Dekker & Massinger) 266 Viswanathan, G. 3 Volpone (Jonson) 45 n.8, 90, 94–5, 206, 297–8 Wagner, S. 169 Wainwright, A. 234 Wallace, C. W. 133 The First London Theatre 315 Wallace, J. 305 Walton, H. 318 Walworth, W. 159 Ward, E. 182–3 A Warning for Fair Women 32, 75 Waters, J. 190 Watkins, A. 185 Watkins, J., Shakespeare and the Middle Ages 57 Watson, G. 111 Concise Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature 330 Wax Chandlers 150 Wayne, D. E. 69 Wealth and Health 90 ‘We Are Othello’ (Smith) 220 Webster, J. 3, 11, 78, 147, 261, 295, 307, 331 The Devil’s Law Case 295 The Duchess of Malfi 5, 40, 75, 148, 261, 290, 295–7, 299, 307 Northward Ho! 90 The White Devil 261 Weimann, R., Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition 56 Weird Sisters (Macbeth) 140 Wene, M. 189

INDEX

West, W. N., theatrical playing 182 Whatever You Be 306 White, P. W. 59, 65 n.1 White, R., Cupid’s Banishment 185 White Bear playhouse 295 The White Devil (Webster) 261 Whitefriars playhouse 116, 133 whiteness 12, 79–80, 169–70, 226–7 studies, critical 286–8 White People in Shakespeare (Little) 226 White Teeth (Smith) 234 n.4 Whores of Babylon (Dolan) 263 Wickham, G. 153, 316, 324 n.1 Early English Stages, 1300–1660 20, 56 Wiggins, M. 5, 20, 138, 321 British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue 121, 335 decentring of Shakespeare 5 Shakespeare and the Drama of His Time 4 Wilkins, G., The Travels of the Three English Brothers 228 Willcox, P. 336 Williams, D. 97 Williams, K. S., Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater 278 William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life (Schoenbaum) 130 William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (Chambers) 20 Williamson, E. 169, 173 Willoughby, K. 189 Wilson, Richard. 4, 260 Secret Shakespeare 260 Theatre and Religion 260 Wilson, Robert 112 The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London 157 Wing, D. G. 330 Short-Title Catalogue 328 Winston, J. 34 The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare) 42, 99, 246 Wise, A. 337 The Witch (Middleton) 91 Witmore, M. 259 Wolfe, H., Shakespeare Documented 120, 334–5

387

The Woman Hater (Beaumont & Fletcher) 97 A Woman Killed with Kindness (Heywood) 2, 75 women 5, 72, 174, 181, 240 ambassadors, entertaining 240 as devisers 185 dramatists 190–2 feats of activity 184–5 female rope-dancers 182–3, 188 gender non-conformity 183–4, 193 participation in early modern theatre 11, 191–2 patrons and spectators 188–90 performance 120, 181–5 research directions 192–3 theatrical labour 185–8 Women Beware Women (Middleton) 75 Women Pleased (Beaumont & Fletcher) 91 Women’s Project Theater 306 Wood, C. 61–2 Wood, D. H. 277–8 Recovering Disability in Early Modern England 277 Wood, N., Conflict of Conscience 91 Woodliffe, O. 187 Woodliffe, S. 187 Woolf, D. 62 Woolf, R. English Mystery Plays 55 hybridization 65 n.2 Woolf, V. 259 Woolfe, N. 186 Works (Aristotle) 94 Worshipful Company of Tylers and Bricklayers 119 Wright, L. 307 Wrightson, K. 72 Wroth, M., Love’s Victory 5, 8, 191–2, 308 n.2 Wybarn, E. 189 Wynter, S. 230 Yargo, J. 232 Yates, J. 60 Young, S. 228 The Young Admiral (Shirley) 189 Zoom productions 306–7

388

389

390

391

392