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This volume considers transnational and intercultural aspects of early modern theatre, drama and performance. Its twelve chapters, loosely cosmographically grouped into West, North and South, compose a complex image of early modern theatre connections as a socially, economically, politically and culturally realised tissue of links, networks, influences and paths of exchange. With particular attention to itinerant performers, court festival, and the significant black, Muslim and Jewish impact, they combine disciplines and methods to place Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the wider context of early performance culture in English, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Czech and Italian speaking Europe. Their shared methodological approach examines transnational connections by linking abstract notions of wider theatre historical significance to concrete historical facts: archaeological findings, archival records, visual artefacts, and textual evidence. Crucial to the volume is this systematic yoking of theories with surviving historical evidence for the performative event – whether as material object, text, performative routine, theatregrams, rituals, festivities, genres, archival evidence or visual documentation. This approach enables it to explore the infinite variety of early modern performance culture by expanding the discourse, questioning the received canon, and rethinking the national restrictions of conventional maps to reveal a theatre that truly is without borders.
imminent and just about to overtake Him.’ 12 It is this emphasis on human fallibility which Alice Dailey also ascertains in many of the deaths at the stake narrated in Foxe's Actes and Monuments . 13 While the plays that thematise martyrdom are rare in England during the period before the Civil War, on the Continent there was an extensive dramatic literature dwelling on saints’ lives, with major authors like Corneille producing
virtuosity acting and the stultifying conventions of dramatic literature. Futurist theatre sought to incorporate elements of modern life, and not just as a theme or subject matter but as an integral element of its performative texture. Instead of reflection and representation they offered immersion and visceral experience. Futurist theatre operated with the elements of dynamism, simultaneity, interpenetration, clashing noises and colours in order to express in a non-intellectual, poly-sensual manner the experience of the modern world. Adamowicz and Storchi, Back to the
Richard Carlile, Republican, 15 September 1820, p. 79. 3 Chase, 1820, pp. 10, 146–9, 171, 173–86. 4 House of Commons, Parliamentary Papers, Report from the Select Committee on Politics and performance in 1820 Dramatic Literature, with the Minutes of Evidence (London: House of Commons, 1831–32) (hereafter SC Dramatic Literature), p. 219. 5 SC Dramatic Literature, p. 225. 6 K. Barker, The Theatre Royal Bristol, 1766–1966 (Salisbury: Compton, 1974), p. 98; C. Hibbert, George IV: Regent and King (London: Allen Lane, 1973), p. 156. 7 S. Rosenfeld, The York Theatre
compounded when investigating the theatre of the nineteenth century. Until the 1980s, the history of this busy and productive industry has been framed in almost entirely literary terms, or historicised through anecdote on the one hand and fact-gathering antiquarianism with little analysis or theorisation on the other. When considered as a branch of literature, the orthodox narrative of the theatre in the nineteenth century is that of the ‘decline of the drama’.25 The literary critical focus has been almost entirely on theatre as it survives through its dramatic literature
), Performance and Politics in Popular Drama: Aspects of Popular Entertainment in Theatre, Film and Television, 1800–1976 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 7 House of Commons, Parliamentary Papers, Report from the Select Committee on Dramatic Literature, with the Minutes of Evidence (London: House of Commons, 1831–32), p. 66. 8 Report from the Select Committee on Dramatic Literature, p. 66. 9 Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 70. 10 Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work
back, a sense of uneasiness that Caryl Churchill plays with humorously in Heart’s Desire (the first part of her double bill, Blue Heart), and manipulates with spooky effectiveness in A Number. I end Chapter 2 with an analysis of a play about a ghost, J. M. Barrie’s Mary Rose, which I discuss in relation to Eden End. Ghosts are ‘returners’ by their very nature. Return is what defines them. It is what they do. ‘What has this thing appeared again tonight?’ Horatio asks at the beginning of Hamlet, in relation to dramatic literature’s best-known ghost. I explore Mary Rose
stage, it is rich in spectacle and scandal – designed to succeed in the popular theatre. Yet Hamlin proposes that in both moralising and stagecraft it looks back to the mystery plays of the earlier fifteenth century. It thus offers a unique Elizabethan example of staging God himself, though done in such a peculiar way as to avoid censure. Monika Fludernik also focuses on one play, William Rowley's A Shoemaker, A Gentleman , comprising one of the few existing treatments of martyrdom in early modern dramatic literature. She studies this play within the context of
scepticism towards the phenomenon. The folklorist Katherine Briggs’s ground-breaking study, Pale Hecate’s Team (1962), frequently draws inferences about popular belief, using dramatic literature partly as evidence of it. Briggs’s very wide scope and range of interests limits the depth of her study somewhat, although the extensive reading behind it makes it very useful. In a fairly similar vein is Anthony Harris’s Night’s Black Agents (1980), Introduction 7 although his book is focused specifically on drama. Harris discusses many of the plays he covers in terms of their
’s benevolent authorities’.55 Patrick is defiant and conscious of the injustice of his situation. Perhaps, at some level, Head is recognising the questionable moral position of the colonial process by allowing a native voice of dissent. As a play of and about Dublin, Hic et ubique can clearly be identified as an Anglo-Irish work in the sense that it identifies strongly with Ireland’s English settlers, describing their experience and sympathising with their point of view. In this work, we can see the emergence of a dramatic literature that was specifically Irish, as its