In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Horses and Harries:Medieval Depictions of Virtue and Vice in 1 Henry IV Ann Hubert (bio) 1 Henry IV interrogates honor: its acquisition, its possession, its loss, its legitimacy. As Shakespeare presents it, honor is a call simultaneously driving characters to action, to inaction, to deception; it is a concept strongly defining constructions

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Watching Chekhov in Tehran:From Superfluous Men to Female Revolutionaries Rebecca Ruth Gould (bio) Introduction At thirty-five, Ivanov feels aged beyond his years. He is torn apart by his own paralysis. His wife is dying. He is deeply in debt. Society is changing, and new social and cultural movements are vying for public attention. Revolution

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Between the Rainbow Nation and the Melting Pot:Troubling Reconciliation with The Fall Jared Strange (bio) Introduction: A New Turn Toward South Africa? She stands atop the table, extending a hand as if pushing her way through the living tableau. "I heard Eric Garner across the Atlantic," she says, reaching from Cape Town in the world of

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Mother Medea and Her Children:Maternal Ambivalence in the Medean Plays of Marina Carr, Cherríe Moraga, and Rachel Cusk Verna A. Foster (bio) Euripidean Medea as a Model for Maternal Ambivalence When Euripides's Medea killed her children, she gave birth to a seemingly unending number of literary progeny over twenty-five centuries. Euripides's

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Reading Drama in Tudor England by Tamara Atkin Cyndia Susan Clegg (bio) Tamara Atkin. Reading Drama in Tudor England. Material Readings in Early Modern Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. Pp. xxx + 239. $140.00 Reading Drama in Tudor England argues that "well before the opening of London's commercial theatres, drama

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting by Amy Cook Gibson Alessandro Cima (bio) Amy Cook. Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2018. vi + 148. $24.95. With the announcement that Halley Bailey, a black R&B singer, would portray Ariel in an upcoming live-action

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: The Nervous Stage: Nineteenth-Century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre by Matthew Wilson Smith Sarah McCarroll (bio) Matthew Wilson Smith. The Nervous Stage: Nineteenth-Century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xvi + 221 b/w illus. $39.95. To assert that the

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee Aaron Botwick (bio) Hermione Lee. Tom Stoppard: A Life. New York: Knopf, 2021, Pp. 896. $37.50 (Hb). When Eugen Sträussler died in 1942, his widow, Marta, withheld the information from her two sons, Tomáš and Petr. Later, she asked a friend to take them for a walk and share the news on

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Contributors Aaron Botwick is an Assistant Professor of English at Hostos Community College, City University of New York. He received his PhD from The Graduate Center, CUNY. His research focuses on suicide and British modernism, and he is particularly interested in the relationship between fictional suicide, the press, and early experiments

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Bill Irwin's Clowning:Zany Labor of the "Physical Intellect" Dave Peterson (bio) When Bill Irwin frantically rushes about stage, missing cues and looking lost, everything is going just as planned. His hapless clown character always seems to be working hard, and coming up just short. Irwin's work came to prominence in the 1980s and was

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: The Rhetoric of Wounds in Coriolanus; or, a Tragedy of Renaissance Rhetoric Jaspreet S. Tambar (bio) It is the sad lot of the tragic hero that he is essentially misunderstood. His pride and failure to engage the vicissitudes of vulgar society and its inclinations to deceit and vice are met with a hard misapprehension of malice in his stubborn

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: "Art against art":Sentimentality, Mid-Century Drama, and the North American Crises Denys Van Renen (bio) In this essay, I examine two English comedies that appeared in the context of North American crises. The first is a little-studied play, The Jealous Wife (1761), written by George Colman the Elder and staged during the Seven Years'

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Undoing Shakespearean Temperance Maurice Hunt (bio) There are about two dozen articles or book chapters on Shakespeare's plays that either entirely or in part—and in some cases only for several pages—focus on the classical virtue of temperance.1 And only ten have "temperance" or forms of this word in their title. The authors of virtually

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus by Sarah Nooter Adriana Brook (bio) Sarah Nooter. The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. x + 309. $99.99. Moving on from the well-received When Heroes Sing: Sophocles and the Shifting Soundscape of Tragedy (Cambridge, 2012)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Ruins: Classical Theater and Broken Memory. Theater: Theory/Text/Performance by Odai Johnson Krishni Burns (bio) Odai Johnson. Ruins: Classical Theater and Broken Memory. Theater: Theory/Text/Performance. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2018. Pp. IX+348. $85.00 Ruins: Classical Theater and Broken Memory offers a comprehensive

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Shakespeare's Two Playhouses: Repertory and Theatre Space at the Globe and the Blackfriars, 1599-1613 by Sarah Dustagheer Tom Rutter (bio) Sarah Dustagheer. Shakespeare's Two Playhouses: Repertory and Theatre Space at the Globe and the Blackfriars, 1599-1613. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. x + 226

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Actor Mindreading:Cognitive Processes Underpinning Theories and Practices of European Stage Acting in the Eighteenth Century Dalit Milshtein and Avishai Henik (bio) Introduction Theatrical Practice as a Fount of Knowledge about Cognitive Processes How—and based on which cognitive processes—do we understand others, interpret their overt

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Trans* Historical Drama:Bodily Congruence in Beaumont, Fletcher, and Massinger's Love's Cure and Taylor Mac's Hir Huw Griffiths (bio) "The more your beard grows in, the more literal you get." Taylor Mac, Hir1 Love's Cure, first printed in the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher folio but first performed in its existing state either around 1615

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Two Lamentable Tragedies and True Crime Publics in Early Modern Domestic Tragedy Sheila Coursey (bio) Reading the early critical history of Two Lamentable Tragedies (c.1601) is a fairly entertaining journey of creative editorial insults. R.A. Law labeled the play as "gruesome and crude beyond redemption," while W. W. Greg condemned it

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama by Eleanor Johnson Clifford Davidson (bio) Eleanor Johnson. Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Pp. Viii + 254. Hardbound $90; Paperback $30

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: The Urban Plays of the Early Abbey Theatre: Beyond O'Casey by Elizabeth Mannion Patrick Lonergan (bio) Elizabeth Mannion. The Urban Plays of the Early Abbey Theatre: Beyond O'Casey. New York: Syracuse University Press, 2014. P. xvii +218. $34.95. The international reputation of Ireland's Abbey Theatre is strongly influenced

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Shakespeare's Big Men: Tragedy and the Problem of Resentment by Richard van Oort Andrew Moore (bio) Richard van Oort. Shakespeare's Big Men: Tragedy and the Problem of Resentment. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. Pp. xiii + 255. $48.75 cloth, $48.75 eBook. In his new book, Shakespeare's Big Men: Tragedy and the

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Vision and Audience in Medieval Drama: A Study of The Castle of Perseverance by Andrea Louise Young Matthew Sergi (bio) Andrea Louise Young. Vision and Audience in Medieval Drama: A Study of The Castle of Perseverance. The New Middle Ages Series. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pp. xvii + 228. $95.00. In Vision and Audience

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Contributors Richard Ashby is Honorary Research Associate in the English Department at Royal Holloway, University of London, and the author of King Lear 'After' Auschwitz: Shakespeare, Appropriation and Theatres of Catastrophe in Post-War British Drama (Edinburgh University Press, 2020). Sheila Coursey is an Assistant Professor of English

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

Richard II begins with a dead body. There is no corpse present on XVstage and no funeral procession, yet the body of Thomas Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester and the king's uncle, haunts the beginning of the play and sets the tone for its exposition. It haunts the opening scene as two opponents--Henry Bolingbroke and Thomas Mowbray--accuse each other of various crimes in front of the king, among them Bolingbroke's

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