This review consider's Michael Kidd's Black Protagonists of Early Modern Spain: Three Key Plays inTranslation.
Olfactory effects in John Marston’s late Elizabethan plays for the Children of Paul’s – Antonio and Mellida, Antonio’s Revenge, Jack Drum’s Entertainment, and What You Will – demonstrate how his children’s company drama works with its specific production site. By including tobacco, perfume, torch fumes, and incense, odours familiar to residents of and visitors to the Paul’s area, Marston prompts his audiences to reconceptualize one of London’s most important sites through scrutiny of its multi-layered smellscape. In the process, he develops an olfactory profile for the new Paul’s that associates his theatre with refined luxury, fashion, and sometimes risqué sensuality.
This review considers Darren Freebury-Jones's Shakespeare's Borrowed Feathers: How Early Modern Playwrights Shaped the World’s Greatest Writer.
This review considers Stephanie Hovland and Sally-Beth MacLean's edited collection, Bear Gardens/Hope Playhouse.
This review considers John Kuhn's Making Pagans: Theatrical Practice and Comparative Religion in Early Modern England.
This essay investigates the first person plural perspective, “we,” in Richard Brome’s Antipodes (c. 1636). The discovered intimacy, cooperative action, ingenious improvisation, and occasional chaos seen in the play generate acute representations of emergent common purpose and experience. Comparing Brome’s treatments and attitudes with those in other works, especially Francis Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), the essay places these elements of the Antipodes in their theatrical environment, reveals how they are challenged by modern scholarship contesting assumptions about mutuality, and illuminates them with reference to philosophical and psychological attempts to pin down the place of “we”-experience in the individual.
This review considers Scott Oldenburg and Matteo Pangallo's edited collection None A Stranger There: England and/in Europe on the Early Modern Stage.
This review considers Daniel Blank's Shakespeare and University Drama in Early Modern England.
This review considers Leslie Thomson's From Playtext To Performance On the Early Modern Stage: How Did They Do It?
This paper argues that we can understand the many ballad and song references within The Knight of the Burning Pestle as memes, cultural referents which allow for several layers of meaning to be added onto the play. The paper discusses the ballads and songs as memes operating individually within the play and as “memeplexes” created by the complex and overlapping interactions of songs as they appear in multiple plays or other types of literature.
This review considers Christopher Swift's Ritual, Spectacle, and Theatre in Late Medieval Seville: Performing Empire.
This review considers Nora J. Williams's Canonical Misogyny: Shakespeare and Dramaturgies of Sexual Violence.
This review considers Tim Keenan's edited collection The Shakespeare North Playhouse: Replica Theatres and Their Uses.
This essay examines John Heywood’s Henrician court drama The Play of the Weather to argue that in this play Heywood articulates a specifically courtly dramaturgy and politics focused on the vice figure, Merry Report. The first part of the essay discusses the nature of Henry’s court, while the second part discusses in detail Merry Report’s performance as a court officer. Overall, my focus in this this essay is on Heywood’s construction in Play of the Weather of the court as a privileged theatrical space for the debate and reconciliation of even such contentious matters as the English weather.
Scholars have analyzed the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, a medieval English host desecration play, primarily from an English perspective, even though the play is set in Aragon and its banns and colophon claim Mediterranean origins. This paper argues these paratexts present the play as a product of interregional travel and create parallels between literary and commercial exchange. Exploration of a manuscript note that erroneously attributes the play to a Spanish playwright reinforces this point. English and Iberian sources reveal how the Croxton play’s dual setting shapes its central themes of trade, conversion, and inter-religious conflict.
Correction to pp 42-43, “The Dangers of Idealized Femininity in Early Modern Sophonisba Tragedies,” Early Theatre 28.2 (2025), 35–52, https://doi.org/10.12745/et.28.2.6006.
This review considers Serena Laiena's The Theatre Couple in Early Modern Italy, Self-Fashioning and Mutual Marketing.
This review considers Daniel Swift's The Dream Factory: London’s First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare.
This review considers William David Gree, Anna L. Hegland, and Sam Jermy's edited collection The Theatrical Legacy of Thomas Middleton, 1624-2024.
