This review considers Joseph Mansky's Libels and Theater in Shakespeare’s England: Publics, Politics, Performance.

This introduction presents a new collection of essays examining the role of conversion in early modern English drama. Together, the contributions demonstrate how the theatre served as a space for dramatizing the political, theological, and psychological complexities of identity transformation. With case studies ranging from city comedy to colonial propaganda, the volume emphasizes conversion’s entanglement with race, gender, and performance. Drawing on recent scholarship, the authors highlight drama’s unique capacity to stage conversional doubt, sincerity, and dissimulation — establishing theatre as both a site of ideological reinforcement and a medium for interrogating the limits of belief and belonging.

This monograph builds a case for the central, formative contribution of Shakespearean drama to the culture of conversion in post-Reformation England.

This chapter begins to build a framework for understanding the relation between conversion and a key structure of early modern thought: theatrical performance. Taking early modern London as a specific focus, the analysis considers the embeddedness of conversional thinking within the city’s concentration of media resources, placing particular emphasis on the ability of theatrical affordances to facilitate creative experimentation and critical examination around received categories of identity. The central text under consideration is Dekker and Middleton’s The Honest Whore, but the analysis is also generally applicable to the theatrical culture and broader media environment of early modern London.

This essay provides an overview of the theory, methodology, and technical innovation driving the creation of Distant Reading Early Modernity (DREaM), a digital humanities platform that makes a massive corpus of early modern texts amenable for use with macro-scale analytical tools. Key focus areas include (i) introduction to DREaM and the Early Modern Conversions project, (ii) the argument for our approach to the early modern archive, (iii) overview of the digital tools available through DREaM-Voyant, (iv) the making of DREaM, and solutions to technical problems deriving from non-standardized spelling.

We provide a comprehensive introduction to DREaM (Distant Reading Early Modernity), a hybrid text analysis and text archive project that opens up new possibilities for working with the collection of early modern texts in the EEBO-TCP collection (Phases I & II). Key functionalities of DREaM include i) management of orthographic variance; ii) the ability to create specially-tailored subsets of the EEBO-TCP corpus based on criteria such as date, title keyword, or author; and iii) direct export of subsets to Voyant Tools, a multi-purpose environment for textual visualization and analysis.

This essay considers Thomas Middleton’s politically controversial A Game at Chess in relation to recent scholarship that addresses the idea of a theatrical public in early modern London. This approach provides a more nuanced understanding of the political attitudes of Middleton and his contemporaries. Rather than presenting the dramatist as a spokesperson for a single political interest, the essay shows how A Game at Chess integrates diverse perspectives on matters of popular concern, thereby cultivating a forum wherein people could come together to think through issues on a collective basis.