Late Tudor and Stuart Drama: Readings in Feminist Theories and Histories
This series provides a forum for monographs and essay collections that focus on English drama from the late Tudor to the pre-Restoration Stuart periods (ca. 1550–1650). The editor is interested in intersectional and interdisciplinary feminist perspectives, broadly conceived, and encourages studies that investigate the discursive production of gender, sex and race in early modern English drama in relation to material, historical, social, cultural and political structures; that ask questions about justice and ethics, domestic politics, rhetoric and forms of care; that engage material culture and forms of alterity, transnational encounters and colonialism; that examine changes to and the effects of law, monarchy, the reformation, rebellion and the republic on dramatic texts. The series is aimed at the study of early modern drama from theoretical readings that locate new arguments, new ways of thinking and that also challenge notions of universality. “Late Tudor and Stuart Drama: Readings in Feminist Theories and Histories” welcomes submissions grounded in feminist, presentist, queer, anti-racist, transnational, transhistorical, class or affect and disability studies.
Keywords: English drama, feminism, theory, history, material culture, Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
All Books in this Series
Performing Widowhood on the Early Modern English Stage
By Asuka Kimura
Placed between death and life, female submissiveness and male audacity, chastity and sexual awareness, or tragedy and comedy, widows were highly problematic in early modern patriarchal society. They were also popular figures in the theater, arousing both male desire and anxiety. How did Shakespeare and his contemporaries represent them on the stage? What kind of costume, props and gestures were employed? What influence did actors, spectators and play-space have? This book offers a fresh and incisive examination of the theatrical representation of widows by discussing the material conditions of the early modern stage. It is also the only comprehensive study of this topic covering all three phases of Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline drama.
ISBN: 978-1-50152-020-4 (clothbound), 978-1-50151-389-3 (PDF), 978-1-50151-395-4 (EPUB) © 2023
The Edge of Christendom on the Early Modern English Stage
By Lisa Hopkins
This book explores how Shakespeare and his contemporaries represented places where Christians encountered Turks, including Malta, Tunis, Hungary and Armenia. Some forms of Christianity itself might seem alien, so the book also considers the interface between traditional Catholicism, new forms of Protestantism and Greek and Russian orthodoxy. It also finds the concept of Christendom was under threat in other places, some nearer to home. Edges of Christendom could be found in areas that were or had been pagan, such as Rome itself and the Danelaw, once covering northern England; they could even be found in English homes and gardens, where imported foreign flowers and exotic new ingredients challenged concepts of the native and natural.
ISBN: 978-1-50152-033-4 (clothbound), 978-1-50151-415-9 (PDF), 978-1-50151-417-3 (EPUB) © 2022
Thomas Middleton and the Plural Politics of Jacobean Drama
By Mark Kaethler
This book represents the first sustained study of Middleton's dramatic works as responses to James I's governance examines Middleton’s poiesis in relation to the political theology of Jacobean London. Kaethler explores early forms of free speech, namely parrhēsia, and rhetorical devices, such as irony and allegory, to elucidate the ways in which Middleton’s plural art exposes the limitations of the monarch’s sovereign image. Additionally, the author identifies that although Middleton’s drama spurs political awareness and questions authority, it nevertheless simultaneously promotes alternative structures of power, which manifest as misogyny and white supremacy.
ISBN: 978-1-50151-819-5 (clothbound), 978-1-50151-376-3 (PDF), 978-1-50151-399-2 (EPUB) © 2021
Dismemberment in the Medieval and Early Modern English Imaginary: The Performance of Difference
By Frederika Elizabeth Bain
The medieval and early modern English imaginary encompasses a broad range of dismemberments. This study argues that representations of bodily fragmentation illustrated and performed acts of exclusion and inclusion, detaching not only limbs from bodies but individuals from identity groups. Bain examines questions of legitimate and illegitimate violence, showing that such distinctions largely rested upon particular acts’ assumed symbolic meanings.
ISBN: 978-1-50151-786-0 (clothbound), 978-1-50151-323-7 (PDF), 978-1-50151-295-7 (EPUB) © 2020
New Directions in Early Modern English Drama: Edges, Spaces, Intersections
Edited by Aidan Norrie and Mark Houlahan
This collection examines some of the people, places, and plays at the edge of early modern English drama. Engaging with topics such as child actors, alterity, sexuality, foreignness, and locality, this volume demonstrates the people and concepts long seen as on the edge of early modern English drama made vital contributions both within the fictive worlds of early modern plays, and without, in the real worlds of playmakers, theatres, and audiences.
ISBN: 978-1-50151-821-8 (clothbound), 978-1-50151-374-9 (PDF), 978-1-50151-402-9 (EPUB) © 2020
Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries
Edited by Domenico Lovascio
This volume explores the diverse issues connected to female identities in the early modern English plays set in ancient Rome and puts Shakespeare’s Roman world in dialogue with a number of Roman plays by writers as diverse as Gwinne, Jonson, Fletcher, Massinger, May, and Richards. Thus, the collection seeks to challenge conventional wisdom about the plays under scrutiny by specifically focusing on their female characters, as well as sharpening our awareness of the fact that the Roman world on the early modern stage cannot be simplistically equated with Shakespeare’s.
ISBN: 978-1-50151-856-0 (clothbound), 978-1-50151-420-3 (PDF), 978-1-50151-405-0 (EPUB) © 2020
Convents and Novices in Early Modern English Dramatic Works
By Vanessa L. Rapatz
This study examines how the English came to terms with the meanings of convents and novices even after they disappeared from the physical and social landscape. In five chapters, it traces convents and novices across a range of dramatic texts by such writers as William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn. Convents, novices, and problem plays emerge as parallel sites of ambiguity that reflect the social, political, and religious uncertainties England faced after the Reformation.
ISBN: 978-1-50151-790-7 (clothbound), 978-1-50151-334-3 (PDF), 978-1-50151-314-5 (EPUB) © 2020
Greeks and Trojans on the Early Modern English Stage
By Lisa Hopkins
The Trojan prince Aeneas was supposedly the ancestor of the Tudors; given the English connection, no story was more interesting to Shakespeare and his contemporaries than that of Troy. This book explores the wide range of allusions to Greece and Troy in plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Chettle, Ford and Beaumont and Fletcher, looking not only at plays actually set in Greece or Troy but also those which draw on characters and motifs from Greek mythology and the Trojan War.
ISBN 978-1-50151-858-4 (clothbound) © 2019
The Unruly Womb in Early Modern English Drama: Plotting Women's Biology on the Stage
By Ursula A. Potter
This study provides an accessible, informative and entertaining introduction to women’s sexual health as presented on the early modern stage, and how dramatists coded for it. Beginning with the rise of green sickness (the disease of virgins) from its earliest reference in drama in the 1560s, Ursula Potter traces a continuing fascination with the womb by dramatists through to the oxymoron of the chaste sex debate in the 1640s. She illuminates how playwrights both satirized and perpetuated the notion of the womb’s insatiable appetite.
ISBN 978-1-58044-370-8 (clothbound) © 2019
Elizabeth I, the Subversion of Flattery, and John Lyly's Plays and Entertainments
By Theodora A. Jankowski
Theodora Jankowski looks at both the light and the dark side of the Elizabeth character in each of John Lyly's court plays, while at the same time considering how that allegory works in terms of the various issues Lyly debates within the plays. She demonstrates how Lyly, while praising the queen and accepting her beneficence, simultaneously manages to present his audiences with the "dark queen," the opposite side of the positive image of the Queen of England.
ISBN 978-1-58044-333-3 (clothbound), 978-1-58044-334-0 (PDF) © 2018
