Early Theatre

Premodern Critical Race Studies and the Question of History

2022-07-22T18:10:09+00:00

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Introduction: Repertory, Dramaturgy, and Embodiment

2021-06-09T16:17:53+00:00

This introduction outlines the essays in the Early Theatre Issues in Review forum ‘Playing in Repertory’, placing them in the context of new movements in the study of early modern English repertories for contemporaneous and contemporary performance.

'You shall see me do the Moor': The Blackfriars Children and the Performance of Race in Poetaster

2021-04-16T01:34:19+00:00

The repertory of the Blackfriars children frequently alluded to plays performed by adult companies across the Thames. In Jonson’s Poetaster, a boy player performs a scene as ‘the Moor’ from Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar. These parodies of adult performances in the children’s repertory not only evidence early modern acting style but also specifically reference styles of performing racial difference on the early modern stage. I argue that this parody showcased playing skill associated up to this point with adult actors, and that the Blackfriars children used these references to racialized characters to highlight skill and appeal to audience taste.

Birth of a Tragedy Queen: Richard Robinson and the Repertory of the King's Men, 1610-11

2021-05-01T22:32:47+00:00

In his 2004 essay, ‘The Sharer and His Boy’, Scott McMillin hypothesized that what he called ‘restricted roles’ in early modern English drama, roles in which female characters take cue lines only from a small group of other characters, resulted from moments when new leading boy actors were being trained by their masters. This essay applies McMillin's hypothesis to two new plays that entered the King’s Men’s repertory around 1610, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy, asking how they might have interacted with earlier plays within the company’s repertory to shape the training of Richard Robinson as its new leading tragic boy.

Artist Development and Collective Therapy in the Repertory: The Case of After Edward

2021-04-15T11:10:34+00:00

This article discusses the exploration of the repertory model in Tom Stuart’s 2019 play After Edward, produced at Shakespeare’s Globe. Performed in repertory with a production of Edward II, After Edward dramatizes Diana Taylor’s sense of repertoire; the embodied skills of the actor and the heterochronic site of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse allow Stuart as actor and writer to reconcile his lived experience as a gay man with his work as an actor. Based on this case study, this article argues that After Edward enacts a praxis of ensemble as artist development.

New Work In and Beyond Repertory at the Royal Shakespeare Company and Shakespeare’s Globe

2021-04-22T17:40:31+00:00

This article explores the role of new writing within two contemporary Shakespearean institutions, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and Shakespeare’s Globe. Focusing on the 2010 premieres and subsequent touring productions of David Greig’s Dunsinane for the RSC and Howard Brenton’s Anne Boleyn at the Globe, this article reflects on how these plays derive distinctive meanings from their repertory connection to Shakespeare. At the same time, I argue that by reconceiving accepted historical narratives and figures, these plays also challenge causal links between past and present, including the supposed lineage between Shakespeare and contemporary writers that both institutions espouse.

‘Pretie conveyance’: Jack Juggler and the Idea of Play

2020-08-19T19:59:05+00:00

This essay addresses the controversy around the antitheatrical epilogue to the anonymous Tudor play Jack Juggler. Based on a close reading of heterogenous voices in the prologue combined with analysis of diverse traditions of playing invoked by the drama, it argues that the audience’s communal authority, centred in a shared experience of watching this comedy, threatens the epilogue’s pedantic, single-voice authority.

The Inconvenience of Stage Posts: Green World Locales at the Rose Theatre

2021-07-22T01:36:20+00:00

A long-running debate surrounds the staging of ‘green worlds’ in early modern drama, with some commentators envisioning a bare stage while others believe that performances utilized multiple properties. One area of contention concerns the extent to which theatres used stage posts to represent trees. This article considers four plays (by Shakespeare, Munday, and Porter) performed at the Rose Theatre in the period 1594-8 and makes a case for the employment of various properties in forest scenes. Reference to the playhouse’s architecture after it was renovated in 1592, in particular the location of its stage posts, underpins the argument.

‘Riddling Shrift': Confession, Speech, and Power in Romeo and Juliet and ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore

2020-12-29T02:10:20+00:00

This essay maps the complex intersubjective dynamics of confession as illuminated in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, plays in which the ritual of shrift has a pivotal narrative and thematic role. The essay focuses on the friar characters and the office of shrift with which they were associated, and argues that Shakespeare and Ford draw on the durable cultural currency of auricular confession in post-Reformation England to ultimately disruptive ends, as characters consistently and increasingly reconfigure the intersubjective scripts of confession, using its conventions to draft new architectures of performative power.

Envy, Leanness, and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

2021-11-19T21:44:17+00:00

One of the most famous lines in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is Caesar’s ominous claim that ‘Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look’ (1.2.193). Understanding the implications of this line requires appreciating the extent it activates the early modern discourse of envy. Because Shakespeare makes his Cassius dispositionally envious — an invention not found in Plutarch — comprehending the full import of the enviousness his ‘lean and hungry look’ entails is vital to grasping the playwright’s characterization. Unpacking the association between leanness and envy in Renaissance literary culture reveals how Shakespeare’s handling of his source had immediate thematic resonance for his audience.

Editorial

2022-11-19T16:53:21+00:00

Marking Early Theatre's twenty-fifth year, this editorial announces new board members and shares ways readers and contributors can help shape the journal in future.

Alcaics on Restoration Actresses by the Cambridge Classical Scholar James Duport

2021-10-19T01:18:59+00:00

This note brings attention to a neo-Latin ode in Alcaic stanzas entitled ‘In Roscias nostras, seu Histriones Feminas’ (‘On Our Roscias, or Female Actors’), which was written by the Cambridge classical scholar James Duport before 1676. A translation and commentary on the poem provide access for the first time to this learned reaction to the new cultural phenomenon in the Restoration of the professional actress.