Since the appearance of the first volume in 1979, the Records of Early English Drama (REED) series has made available an accurate and useable transcription of all surviving documentary evidence of dramatic, ceremonial, and minstrel activity in Great Britain up to the closing of the theatres in 1642. Although they are immensely valuable to scholars, the REED volumes sometimes prove difficult for students to use without considerable assistance. With this book, Elza Tiner aims to make the records accessible for classroom use. The contributors to the volume describe the various ways in which students can learn from working with these documents. Divided into five sections, the volume illustrates how specific disciplines can use the Records to provide resources for students including ways to teach the historical documents of early English drama, training students in acting and producing, historical contexts for the interpretation of literature, as well as the study of local history, women's studies, and historical linguistics. As a practical and much needed companion to the REED volumes, Teaching with the Records of Early English Drama will prove invaluable to both students and teachers of Medieval English Drama.

Starting from the early modern presumption of the incorporation of role with authority, Jean Lambert explores male teachers as representing and engaging with types of authority in English plays and dramatic entertainments by Shakespeare and his contemporaries from the late sixteenth to the early seventeenth century. This book examines these theatricalized portraits in terms of how they inflect aspects of humanist educational culture and analyzes those ideas and practices of humanist pedagogy that carry implications for the traditional foundations of authority. Teachers in Early Modern English Drama is a fascinating study through two centuries of teaching Shakespeare and his contemporaries and will be a valuable resource for undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars interested in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama, writing, and culture.

The study of early drama has undergone a quiet revolution in the last four decades, radically altering critical approaches to form, genre, and canon. Drawing on disciplines from art history to musicology and reception studies, The Routledge Research Companion to Early Drama and Performance reconsiders early "drama" as a mixed mode entertainment best studied not only alongside non-dramatic texts, but also other modes of performance. From performance before the playhouse to the afterlife of medieval drama in the contemporary avant-garde, this stunning collection of essays is divided into four sections: Northern European Playing before the Playhouse; Modes of Production and Reception; Reviewing the Anglophone Tradition; The Long Middle Ages Offering a much needed reassessment of what is generally understood as "English medieval drama", The Routledge Research Companion to Early Drama and Performance provides an invaluable resource for both students and scholars of medieval studies.

Twenty-six original essays by leading theorists and historians of the pre-seventeenth-century English stage chart a paradigmatic shift within the field. In contrast to the traditional emphasis on individual authors, the contributors to this storehouse of new historical information and critical insight explore the place of the stage within the larger society, as well as issues of performance and physical space, providing an innovative approach to both literary studies and cultural history.

This innovative project unites leading scholars of English, History and French to examine the challenges of teaching early modern literature, history and culture within higher education. The volume sets out a variety of approaches to teaching the period and aims to revitalize the connection between teaching and research.

Covering a period of nearly 40 years’ work by the author this collection of essays in the Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies series brings the perspective of a Drama academic and practitioner of early English plays to the understanding of how medieval plays and Robin Hood games of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were performed. It explores why, where, when, and how the plays happened, who took part, and who were the audiences. The insights are informed by a combination of research and the public presentation of surviving texts. The research included in the volume unites the early English experiences of religious and secular performance. This recognition challenges the dominant critical distinction of the past between the two and the consequent privileging of biblical and moral plays over secular entertainments. What further binds, rather than separates, the two is that the destination of funds raised by the different activities maintained the civic and parochial needs of the institutions upon which the people depended. This collection redefines the inclusive nature and common interests of the purposes that lay behind generically different undertakings. They shared an extraordinary investment of human and financial resources in the anticipation of a profit that was pious and practical. (CS1081).

Somerset is a large, diverse county in southwest England, bordered by Devon, Dorset, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, and the Bristol Channel. Before the onset of the Reformation in 1532 Somerset became prosperous as its agriculture, industries, and coastal trade all flourished in the relative cultural stability and coherence that characterized that earlier period. By the start of the Civil War in 1642, the unified culture present in the 1530s had given way to a fragmented society. Those conflicts and changes are abundantly illustrated in the many records of Somerset entertainments surviving from that tumultuous period. Somerset's diverse dramatic records span a period of time from 1258 to 1642. In the introduction James Stokes surveys the social and economic history of towns for which dramatic records survive and provides a commentary on the major kinds of entertainments represented in the collection. These include traditional drama, custom, and game, among which are Robin Hood play, skimmingtons, baitings, pageants, and shows; and performance by travelling professional entertainers, including players, minstrels, waits, puppeteers, and others. Topics discussed include, `women and performance,' `entertainments in schools,' `playing places and staging conventions,' and `patterns of travel by performers.' The Records of Early English Drama volumes make available historical transcripts that provide evidence of early English drama, music, ceremonial, dance, and other forms of communal public entertainment in Britain from the Middle Ages to 1642, together with the necessary interpretative introductions and notes to explicate the materials for the reader. Somerset, in two volumes, is the twelfth publication in the series. These records are an invaluable addition to the scholarship of early drama, establishing as they do part of the total context of the great drama of Shakespeare, his predecessors, and his contemporaries.