From Subject to Earthly Matter: The Plowman’s Argument and Popular Discourse...
This essay examines the 1525 interlude, Gentleness and Nobility, credited to John Heywood and John Rastell, which features a debate among a Plowman, a Knight, and a Merchant on the origins and justice...
View ArticleJohn Cholmley on the Bankside
Because we know almost nothing about John Cholmley, Philip Henslowe’s financial partner in the building of the Rose playhouse, imaginative hypotheses have moved in to fill the void. In this essay I...
View ArticleReinstating Shakespeare's Instrumental Music
The current orthodoxy is that before 1609, music in Shakespeare was largely restricted to songs, trumpets, and drums; instrumental music, i.e. consort music with strings and woodwinds, if it existed...
View ArticleTheatre of Judgment: Space, Spectators, and the Epistemologies of Law in...
This article investigates how Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair exploits conceptual affinities between theatrical spectatorship and the collaborative practices of evidence-gathering and critical...
View Article'The Hole in the Wall': Sacred Space and 'Third Space' in The Family of Love
A city comedy of disputed authorship, The Family of Love deals with the spatial constitution of the sacred. Familists convene in a seedy London inn, dubbed the 'Hole in the Wall,' and, under the...
View ArticlePerformance, Print, and the Senses: Aretino and the Spaces of the City
This article considers the performance of the sensuous in Aretino’s comedies with particular interest in the spatial relations in the everyday practice of the senses in urban Venice or Rome, for...
View Article'What makes thou upon a stage?': Child Actors, Royalist Publicity, and the...
The Queen’s Men use the bodies of actors as the principal spatial medium of their plays; in the True Tragedy of Richard the Third, for example, the bodies of child actors playing representatives of...
View Article'The Great Choreographer': Embodying Space in Fuenteovejuna
Social dances embody and perform kinesthetic structures of courtesy and courtship. The relative positions of dancers, their gestures, eye contact and posture, and manipulation of personal...
View ArticleThe Will of Simon Jewell and the Queen’s Men Tours in 1592
The will of Simon Jewell, a player of the Queen’s Men who died in August 1592, was first discovered in 1974. The will, filled with information about the company’s finances, has since been recognized...
View Article'This place was made for pleasure not for death': Performativity, Language,...
Using J.L. Austin’s theory of performative language, which stands in peculiar relationship to the literary or the dramatic, this paper traces how language and action function together in specific...
View ArticleShared Borders: The Puppet in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair
The Records of Early English Drama from Kent, Somerset, and Cambridge reveal connotations of vagrancy, transgressive sexual behavior, and theft associated with both puppets and puppeteers. Puppets had...
View Article‘Bound up and clasped together’: Bookbinding as Metaphor for Marriage in...
Analytical studies of book production in dramatic metaphors most commonly make reference to printing technologies and book replication and dissemination. This essay reconsiders the new bibliography by...
View ArticleAccidents Happen: Roger Barnes's 1612 Edition of Marlowe's Edward II
Roger Barnes’s 1612 quarto edition of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II has been dismissed as non-authoritative. Interrogating the notion of authority underlying this dismissal, this article suggests...
View ArticleOld Testament Adaptation in The Stonyhurst Pageants
This article examines the relationship between the Douay-Rheims translation of the bible and The Stonyhurst Pageants preserved at Stonyhurst College in northern Lancashire. Going beyond Carleton...
View ArticleHornpipes and Disordered Dancing in The Late Lancashire Witches: A Reel Crux?
This note considers a potential crux on the word 'reel' in Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome's The Late Lancashire Witches (1634), as referring to the country dance of the same name as well as a...
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