In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Eunuchs in London Theatre Anne Greenfield (bio) “. . . and one may say of Eunuchs the same that is usually said of Bastards, that for the most part they are very bad, but that sometimes we may chance to find one that may prove good for something.” Charles Ancillon, Eunuchism Display’d, 11 Charles Ancillon does not mince words when it comes

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Indigeneity and Immigration in Susan Glaspell’s Inheritors James H. Cox (bio) and Alexander Pettit (bio) In 1911, Susan Glaspell was “disentangling herself ” from her native Iowa and preparing to move to New York City, where her fellow Davenporter and future husband George Cram Cook would eventually join her.1 Her regionalist sensibilities

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Performing Ancestry: Reading August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson as a Performative Neo-Slave Narrative Patrick Maley (bio) The preservation and promotion, the propagation and rehearsal of the value of one’s ancestors is the surest way to a full and productive life August Wilson1 August Wilson considered remembering the struggles and triumphs

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Impregnable Towers and Pregnable Maidens in Early Modern English Drama Lindsay Ann Reid (bio) In William Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–93), the foolhardy Duke of Milan boasts that he has devised a fool-proof method for preserving the chastity of his daughter. “Knowing” all too well, as he puts it, “that tender youth is

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: The American Reception of Tourneur’s Volpone in the 1940s Purificación Ribes (bio) Introduction Maurice Tourneur’s French screen version of Volpone,1 the best film adaptation of Jonson’s satiric comedy,2 was released in Paris in 1941 and reached the United States in 1947, at a time of social, ideological and economic change. A detailed

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Antitheatricality and the Body Public by Lisa A. Freeman Logan J. Connors (bio) Lisa A. Freeman. Antitheatricality and the Body Public. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania, 2017. Pp. xi + 361. $55.00. In a new book about antitheatricality across different times and places, Lisa A. Freeman unearths a series of historical

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Theatrical Reality: Space, Embodiment and Empathy in Performance by Campbell Edinborough Amy Cook (bio) Campbell Edinborough. Theatrical Reality: Space, Embodiment and Empathy in Performance. Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2016. Pp. vii + 171. $95.00 Campbell Edinborough’s book takes seriously the embodied spectator, embedded in

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: The Translator on Stage by Geraldine Brodie Melanie Dreyer-Lude (bio) Geraldine Brodie. The Translator on Stage. New York: Bloomsbury Academic 2018. Pp. viii + 195. $29.95. Geraldine Brodie’s The Translator on Stage offers an in-depth and carefully researched examination of the relationship between the translation process

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: The Director’s Prism: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde by Dassia N. Posner James Fisher (bio) Dassia N. Posner. The Director’s Prism: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017. Pp. xxiii + 314 + 46 b/w illus. $99.95 cloth, $39.95 paper

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Edo Kabuki in Transition: From the Worlds of the Samurai to the Vengeful Female Ghost by Satoko Shimazaki Maki Isaka (bio) Satoko Shimazaki. Edo Kabuki in Transition: From the Worlds of the Samurai to the Vengeful Female Ghost. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Pp. xiii + 372 + 49 b/w illus. $60.00 cloth, $59.99 eBook

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England by Nicole R. Rice, Margaret Pappano Emma Lipton (bio) Nicole R. Rice and, Margaret Pappano. The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015. Pp. xii, 360. Paper, $42.00. 9 color plates. 15 figures

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Women on Southern Stages, 1800–1865: Performance, Gender and Identity in a Golden Age of American theatre by Robin O. Warren Heather S. Nathans (bio) Robin O. Warren. Women on Southern Stages, 1800–1865: Performance, Gender and Identity in a Golden Age of American theatre. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Press, 2016. Pp. x + 267

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy: Affect, Aesthetics, and the Canon by Mario Telò Anna Peterson (bio) Mario Telò. Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy: Affect, Aesthetics, and the Canon. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. xiii + 237. $55.00. The reception of Greek Comedy in antiquity is a thorny topic

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Verse Drama in England, 1900–2015: Art, Modernity and the National Stage by Irene Morra Kayla McKinney Wiggins (bio) Irene Morra. Verse Drama in England, 1900–2015: Art, Modernity and the National Stage. Series editors Patrick Lonergan and Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. Critical Companions Series. London, Bloomsbury, 2016. 304 pages

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Brief Notices ________ Lonergan, Patrick. Irish Drama and Theatre since 1950. London: Methuen, 2019. Pp. xi + 263. $26.95. This volume begins with a list of illustrations (ix), acknowledgments (x), a note on archival material (xi), and an introduction (1–10). The primary text includes the following chapters: “‘Thank Goodness That’s Over’

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Contributors Logan J. Connors is Associate Professor of Modern Languages & Literatures at the University of Miami. He the author of Dramatic Battles in Eighteenth-Century France (2012), a critical edition of Pierre-Laurent De Belloy’s tragedy, Le Siège de Calais (2014), and The Emergence of a Theatrical Science of Man in France (2020)

If we look at a possibly speculative dystopic world in which all that remains is a single family invested in self-destruction through violence and incest, can we see a critique of the patriarchal narratives that have perpetuated discrimination and abuse in turn of the current century society? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe what we've got is just a story of one dysfunctional family at the end of time. But

In August 1988, Mehran Karimi Nasseri arrived in Paris's Charles de Gaulle Airport. And he stayed. And he stayed. He stayed until 2006, when he was taken to hospital gravely ill. Nasseri had lost his passport and the papers that were supposed to grant him refugee status in Britain. Without paperwork to prove either his identity or his right to travel to the UK, Nasseri simply remained in Terminal 1

Ellen Ecker Dolgin. Shaw and the Actresses Franchise League: Staging Equality. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015. Pp. x + 243. $55.00. Ellen Ecker Dolgin's Shaw and the Actresses Franchise League: Staging Equality makes a lively and valuable contribution to feminist theatre studies. The book traces the course from stasis to motion in women's theatrical roles and their everyday lives in the late nineteenth

A miasma of plague hangs around Shakespeare's dramatic corpus, and Othello is a topical response to its occasional outbreak in 1603. Inevitably, its textual body is not only a palimpsest of traces recording epidemic outbreaks, but it is also a field of politico-clinical discourses that attempt to govern, quarantine, and direct the disease toward certain controllable ways. In other words, Othello is

Audiences for early modern English plays inhabited an island kingdom. Therefore the drama's preoccupation with the sea comes as no surprise. Maritime settings abound in comedy, tragedy, history, and romance. Even the most ostensibly land-bound genres, such as city comedy, incorporate the ocean in ways that signal its importance to the nation's identity and, more specifically, its economy. (1) Indeed

In 2002, Futerra, a British media company advocating sustainability, launched "The Seasons Alter," a four-minute video of Titania's "bad weather" speech. Played by two actresses, Titania chides the surly Oberon, chasing him around the sparse modernist set dominated by an enormous clock. He responds to her recital of environmental disasters stemming from their quarrel by placing the onus on her: "Do

This article examines David Greig’s The Events (2013) and Chris Thorpe’s quasi-verbatim Confirmation (2014), two plays conspicuous for engaging critically and analytically with aspects of extremism motivated by far-right politics. It performs a comparative analysis of both plays and enquires into how each negotiate and interrogate the ideology of the contemporary ethno-nationalist far-right. It offers

Kirsty Johnston. Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016. Pp. ix + 228. $29.95. In Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism, Kirsty Johnston undertakes a productive question that is not entirely rhetorical: what if the questions and creative work prompted by disability are, in fact, foundational to modern theatre's themes and

Kurt A. Schreyer. Shakespeare's Medieval Craft: Remnants of the Mysteries on the London Stage. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014. Pp. xviii + 258. $49.95. This is a first book, with all that that implies: the courage of discovery, wide reading, an assurance about putting past (and not so past) scholars right while approving the methodologically congenial, as well as confidence in its argument

Igor Djordjevic. King John (Mis)Remembered: The Dunmow Chronicle, the Lord Admiral's Men, and the Formation of Cultural Memory. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. Pp. xii + 204. $109.95. It has become a critical commonplace that King John was a figure laden with significance for Elizabethan historical dramatists. Maligned by medieval commentators such as Matthew Paris, who wrote that hell itself was made fouler

The deaths of the two princes of Richard III (1592) and young Prince Arthur in King John (1595-96) are pivotal moments in the dramatic structure of both plays. As with many of Shakespeare's children, their deaths are of more consequence, in terms of plot, structure, and overall narrative design, than their lives, and their dramatic significance is disproportionate to their relatively small number of

Shortly before the reinterment of the remains of King Richard III in Leicester Cathedral on March 22,2015, the Guardian historian, David Priestland, lamented what he termed "the hullabaloo over the bones of a king dead for over 500 years" to be followed by an "archbishop-led re-interment service"--events he found to be "reminiscent of the saints' cults of the middle ages," a "reboot of the medieval

Writing in The Freewoman in 1912, Rebecca West--herself a supporter of women's suffrage--denounced with characteristic acerbity the increasing popularity of "degradations of the drama written by propagandists," complaining that "the public taste has already been so perverted that dislocated Suffrage speeches... stand the chance of wide popularity." (1) Despite her dismissive tone, West's description

Antoine DuVerdier's 1585 Bibliotheque includes the first modern reference to a mystery play dedicated to Saint Margaret of Antioch, with this notice: "La Vie de sainte MARGUERITE, Vierge & Martyre, fille de Theodosien, a quarante-quatre Personnages; imprimee a Paris, in-80, par Alain Lotrian" (The life of saint MARGARET, virgin and martyr, daughter of Theodosian, with 44 Roles; printed in Paris, in-80

For the last fifteen years or so, I have been teaching a university course at Lund University, Sweden, which combines the academic study of one of Shakespeare's plays (through lectures, the submission of essays, and so on), with a more practical approach: the students are cast in, rehearse (with me as their director), and finally perform a slightly abridged version of the play, in English, in full

Prayer is a distinctive speech act that appears everywhere and in many forms in early modern plays, including Shakespeare's. (1) This is not because playwrights were particularly pious but because they wrote in the speech of their time, in which prayer had long since become a familiar habit--not only in church but also in the privacy of ones home, in everyday speech, in theological controversy, and

"An engine to catch starres": Thomas Tomkis and Natural Philosophy (1) Ibumazar is a play filled with things, from mundane household goods to lists of ancient and contemporary alchemists and magi to the eponymous astrologer's collection of astrolabes, horoscopes, and almanacs. It is also the first play in English to feature a scene with a telescope onstage. (2) However, whether many of the things in

This essay explores Shakespeare's use of the classical legend of Medea in 2 Henry VI and shows how the remainder of the first tetralogy is haunted by her first crime, the killing of her young brother Absyrtus. (1) The mutilated body of Absyrtus held a particular interest for classically-minded English writers of the early modern period; in 2 Henry VI it is invoked by the Lancastrian Young Clifford

This essay focuses primarily on the Italian film Cesare deve morire (2012), an adaptation and appropriation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar acted by prisoners in Rebibbia District Prison, Rome. (1) If we use Linda Hutcheons definition of adaptation as "a derivation that is not a derivative--a work that is second without being secondary" and Jean Marsdens description of appropriation as "seizure for

In The Witch of Edmonton, a 1621 domestic tragedy by Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley, Susan Carter discovers to her surprise that she is a whore. This news is a shock for the virtuous yeoman's daughter, who has only just married Frank Thorney, the outwardly pleasant son of a poor gentleman from her village. Shortly after their wedding night, Frank has informed Susan that he must leave

Shakespeare's representation of Julius Caesar differs notably from those of his contemporaries, as well as from the picture of Caesar that emerges from his most obvious classical source, Plutarch's Lives. Plutarch's Caesar is shrewd, resilient, and relatively dignified; Shakespeare's, in contrast, is physically weak and surprisingly obtuse, prey to laughable grandiosity. Other early modern authors

Farah Karim-Cooper. The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment. New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016. Pp. xiii +309. $114.00 cloth, $35.95 paper, $28.99 eBook. Continuing the long-standing yet ever evolving scholarly treatment of the early modern body, Farah Karim-Cooper crafts a study that is narrow in focus yet wide-ranging in breadth by casting

In 2012, the University of Leicester in the UK led the search for the remains of King Richard III, the last prince of the House of York, buried in 1485 under what, nearly 450 years later, would turn out to be a municipal car park. This momentous discovery has lent to those of us living or working in Leicester and York a new understanding of the phrase "history in the making," as we took part in the

Without a bent for melancholia there is no psyche, only a transition to action or play. --Julia Kristeva, Black Sun (1) [The play] is not about life as it is lived at all, but about life as it might be lived, about the thought which is not licensed, and about the abolished unconscious. --Howard Barker, Arguments (2) Howard Barker (1946-) creates a tragic world, the avowed arche and telos of which are

I begin with the Globe Theatre's Facebook page on February 4, 2013, the day of the press release from the University of Leicester announcing the discovery of Richard Ill's body: "Our neighbours Southwark Cathedral have a beautiful stained glass window depicting the death of Richard III. Next time you are on your way to us stop off and have a look." Providing a link to the Cathedral's own website, they

Julian Jimenez Heffernan. Shakespeare's Extremes: Wild Man, Monster, Beast. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pp. xi + 234. $90.00. Early in his introduction, Julian Jimenez Heffernan explains "This book is about the frontier life of three Shakespearean characters: Edgar [in King Lear], Caliban [in The Tempest] and Julius Caesar. By exploring their human limits I hope to prove that, in Shakespeare's

Erith Jaffe-Berg. Commedia dell'Arte and the Mediterranean: Charting Journeys and Mapping "Others." Transculturalisms, 1400-1700. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. Pp. x + 173. $104.95. With this volume, Erith Jaffe-Berg brings to a wide audience the Mediterranean perspective of Italian Commedia dell'Arte and its civic context. Focusing on Commedia's glory days of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries

The reinterment of Richard Ill's remains in Leicester Cathedral on March 26, 2015, opened deep historical rifts in the UK over the cultural and political ownership of the king's dead body. The dispute--at times acrimonious--between the cities of Leicester and York was hardly surprising. What was at stake, both in the discovery of these six-hundred-year-old bones in a supermarket car park in Leicester

Bjorn Quiring. Shakespeare's Curse: The Aporias of Ritual Exclusion in Early Modern Royal Drama. Trans. Michael Winkler and Bjorn Quiring. Discourses of Law. New York: Routledge, 2014. Pp. ix + 268. $145.00. For Bjorn Quiring's Shakespeare's Curse: The Aporias of Ritual Exclusion in Early Modern Royal Drama, curses are not simply the stuff of Lear's theatrical howls or Margaret's vituperative pronouncements

Tara E. Pedersen. Mermaids and the Production of Knowledge in Early Modern England. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015. Pp. xi + 155. $104.95. Hybridity, monstrosity, and difference: these unstable early modern ontological categories are difficult to locate precisely or theorize vigorously. Tara E. Pedersen's Mermaids and the Production of Knowledge in Early Modern England, however, deftly mobilizes conceptions

Shannon Blake Skelton. The Late Work of Sam Shepard. London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2016. Pp. x + 256. $112.00. In The Late Work of Sam Shepard, Shannon Blake Skelton makes the case for a critical reconsideration of Shepard's work since the late eighties, arguing that these later pieces contain less uncertainty than his earlier work and exhibit major changes in Shepard's outlook. Shepard has always been

Joan Fitzpatrick Dean. All Dressed Up: Modern Irish Historical Pageantry. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014. Pp. xvii + 335 + 8 color plates. $39.95. In 2004, Irish theatre scholar Lionel Pilkington called for an expansion of the focus of Irish theatre studies to include more sustained investigations of forms of performance outside of the theatre itself, including mumming, pageantry, and

Julia Prest. Controversy in French Drama: Moliere's Tartuffe and the Struggle for Influence. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Pp. xi + 247. $100.00. Julia Prest's Controversy in French Drama: Moliere's Tartuffe and the Struggle for Influence elucidates standard narratives of the 1664-69 Tartuffe controversy and adds new dimensions by examining a wide swath of primary and secondary sources. Combining

Jeffrey Masten. Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare's Time. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. xii + 353. $59.95. To introduce readers to what a practice of "queer philology" might look like, Jeffrey Masten opens this wonderful new book with a discussion of "Q." A single letter, of course, constitutes an element that we might describe as one of the most

Ralf Hertel. Staging England in the Elizabethan History Play: Performing National Identity. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Pp. ix + 271. $149.95. In Staging England in the Elizabethan History Play: Performing National Identity, Ralf Hertel argues that early modern English drama helped to shape "the collective imagination" and develop "the nation as imagined community"