Early Theatre
https://earlytheatre.org/earlytheatre
<p> <img src="/public/site/images/jadmin/welcomeheader.png" alt=""></p> <p> </p>McMaster Universityen-USEarly Theatre2293-7609<p>Contributors to <em>Early Theatre </em>retain full copyright to their content. All published authors are required to grant a limited exclusive license to the journal. According to the terms of this license, authors agree that for one year following publication in <em>Early Theatre</em>, they will not publish their submission elsewhere in the same form, in any language, without the consent of the journal, and without acknowledgment of its initial publication in the journal thereafter.</p>“Read it for restoratives”: Pericles and the Romance of Whiteness
https://earlytheatre.org/earlytheatre/article/view/4910
<p>This essay reads <em>Pericles</em> (1608) through the lens of early modern critical whiteness studies. Tracing how the play reworks the colour-coding of its medieval source text along new racial lines, this essay sees Pericles’s melancholia as an allegory of the always incomplete condition of whiteness. It then shows how Pericles uses the erotic mechanics of romance to pursue his quest for whiteness. Ultimately, the essay underlines the relevance of Pericles’s quest to Shakespeare’s cultural moment before discussing the voices of resistance to the project of whiteness embedded within the play, and the uses of that play for our own times.</p>Noémie Ndiaye
Copyright (c) 2023 Noémie Ndiaye
2023-06-062023-06-0626110.12745/et.26.1.4910The Erotics of Salvage
https://earlytheatre.org/earlytheatre/article/view/4996
<p>In the aftermath of the storm in <em>The Tempest</em>, as Miranda suffers vicariously with the shipwrecked passengers, Prospero imposes meaning onto the environmental catastrophe. Imbricating maritime salvage, physical saving, and theological salvation, Prospero insists on a temporality of supersession in which catastrophe allows one political order to displace an older, corrupt paradigm. But the act of salvaging deepens Miranda’s erotic attachment to Ferdinand and complicates the social affiliations of the island. Alternately, Caliban, inverting the erotics of salvage, dramatizes how racialized perception saturates experiential encounters with the storm.</p>John Yargo
Copyright (c) 2023 John Yargo
2023-06-062023-06-0626110.12745/et.26.1.4996 ‘My maine hope is, to begin the sport at Millaine’: Italy in Philip Massinger’s The Duke of Milan
https://earlytheatre.org/earlytheatre/article/view/5086
<p>Philip Massinger’s<em> The Duke of Milan</em> (1621) clearly sits in the tradition of the Elizabethan and Jacobean Italianate tragedy and is resonant of stories, ideas, theories, and characters from Italian history and its literary tradition. This essay discusses the play as one of the earliest examples of Massinger’s interest in Italy and its culture. It investigates the play’s Italian setting and examines the influence of the Italian cultural and political legacy to offer new insights into the development of Anglo-Italian relations and England’s home and religious politics in the early 1620s.</p> <p> </p> <p> </p>Cristina Paravano
Copyright (c) 2023 Cristina Paravano
2023-06-062023-06-0626110.12745/et.26.1.5086Fear and Trembling: Performing the Protestant Conscience in Thomas Middleton’s The Lady’s Tragedy
https://earlytheatre.org/earlytheatre/article/view/5190
<p>With its glorified ghost, godly avenger, and idolatrous Tyrant, Thomas Middleton’s <em>The Lady’s Tragedy</em> appears to offer a thinly veiled allegory of Protestant triumphalism. Little attention has been paid, however, to how its characters do — or do not — respond to the play’s many crises of conscience. This essay sets Middleton’s tragedy against English Protestant understandings of the trembling body and vexed conscience. It demonstrates that while the play’s multiple instances of trembling seem to unsettle its Protestant triumphalism, its special effects, intended to provoke audience trembling, might nevertheless deepen playgoers’ attachment to the Protestant cause.</p>Jillian Snyder
Copyright (c) 2023 Jillian Snyder
2023-06-062023-06-0626110.12745/et.26.1.5190Amateur Theatre at the Early Modern Inns of Court? The Implications of a Performance Copy of Jonson’s 1640 Folio
https://earlytheatre.org/earlytheatre/article/view/5240
<p>This article discusses a recently rediscovered copy of Ben Jonson's 1640 <em>Workes</em> that contains seventeenth-century annotations to <em>Epicene</em> that suggest preparations for performance. We trace the folio copy’s provenance with the Powell family in Nanteos, Wales, and consider the possibility that it may have been annotated when in the possession of Sir Thomas Powell, a lawyer and judge who spent much of his life in London. We argue that the annotated play-text can be connected to four other playbooks by William Shakespeare and James Shirley that have been previously associated with seventeenth-century amateur theatricals, and that the new evidence provided by the Jonson text points plausibly to a practice of amateur performance at and around Gray's Inn in the middle of the century.</p>Tom HarrisonJames Loxley
Copyright (c) 2023 Tom Harrison, James Loxley
2023-06-062023-06-0626110.12745/et.26.1.5240Editorial
https://earlytheatre.org/earlytheatre/article/view/5511
<p>This editorial launches our open call for book reviews editor(s), announces our 2023 essay prize winners, and commemorates the life of our late colleague and editorial board member Dr JoAnna Dutka. </p>Melinda J. GoughErin E. Kelly
Copyright (c) 2023 Melinda J. Gough; Erin E. Kelly
2023-06-062023-06-0626110.12745/et.26.1.5511José A. Pérez Díez, ed. Love’s Cure, or The Martial Maid by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022.
https://earlytheatre.org/earlytheatre/article/view/5501
<p>Review of <em>Love's Cure, or The Martial Maid </em>by José Pérez Díez, ed. </p>Eric Griffin
Copyright (c) 2023 Eric Griffin
2023-06-062023-06-0626110.12745/et.26.1.5501Jeremy Lopez, ed. The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama. London and New York: Routledge, 2020.
https://earlytheatre.org/earlytheatre/article/view/5496
<p>This is a review of Jeremy Lopez, ed. The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama. </p>Emma Smith
Copyright (c) 2023 Emma Smith
2023-06-062023-06-0626110.12745/et.26.1.5496Shelby Richardson, ed. The Witch of Edmonton by Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2021.
https://earlytheatre.org/earlytheatre/article/view/5490
<p>Review of <span lang="EN-CA">Shelby Richardson, ed. <em>The Witch of Edmonton</em> by Laura Jayne Wright.</span></p>Laura Wright
Copyright (c) 2023 Laura Wright
2023-06-062023-06-0626110.12745/et.26.1.5490Carol Mejia LaPerle, ed. Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Press, 2022.
https://earlytheatre.org/earlytheatre/article/view/5499
<p>Review of Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature edited by Carol Mejia LaPerle</p>Dennis Britton
Copyright (c) 2023 Dennis Britton
2023-06-062023-06-0626110.12745/et.26.1.5499Tom Bishop, Gina Bloom, and Erika T. Lin, eds. Games and Theatre in Shakespeare’s England. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021.
https://earlytheatre.org/earlytheatre/article/view/5500
<p>Review of Tom Bishop, Gina Bloom, and Erika T. Lin, eds. Games and Theatre in Shakespeare’s England by Mark Kaethler</p>Mark Kaethler
Copyright (c) 2023 Mark Kaethler
2023-06-062023-06-0626110.12745/et.26.1.5500Eleanor Rycroft. Facial Hair and the Performance of Early Modern Masculinity. London and New York: Routledge, 2019.
https://earlytheatre.org/earlytheatre/article/view/5504
<p>Review of <em>Facial Hair and the Performance of Early Modern Masculinity </em>by Eleanor Rycroft.</p>Rob Carson
Copyright (c) 2023 Rob Carson
2023-06-062023-06-0626110.12745/et.26.1.5504Domenico Lovascio. John Fletcher’s Rome: Questioning the Classics. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022.
https://earlytheatre.org/earlytheatre/article/view/5494
<p>Review of John Fletcher’s Rome: Questioning the Classics by Domenico Lovascio</p>Gordon McMullan
Copyright (c) 2023 Gordon McMullan
2023-06-062023-06-0626110.12745/et.26.1.5494W.B. Worthen. Shakespeare, Technicity, Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
https://earlytheatre.org/earlytheatre/article/view/5497
<p>Review of "Shakespeare, Technicity, Theatre" by W.B. Worthen</p>Marie Trotter
Copyright (c) 2023 Marie Trotter
2023-06-062023-06-0626110.12745/et.26.1.5497