The Tower of London in English Renaissance Drama historicizes the Tower of London's evolving meanings in English culture alongside its representations in twenty-four English history plays, 1579-c.1634, by William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and others. While Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I fashioned the Tower as a showplace of royal authority, magnificence, and entertainment, many playwrights of the time revealed the Tower's instability as a royal symbol and represented it, instead, as an emblem of opposition to the crown and as a bodily and spiritual icon of non-royal English identity.

Fortress, palace & prison, the 1000-year story of the Tower

An exploration of wit, witlessness and social and comic conventions in the plays of Shakespeare, Jonson and their contemporaries.

Shakespeare and London: A Dictionary is a topographical reference book of all the London locations, allusions and colloquial terms mentioned in Shakespeare's complete works. For many years critics have argued that Shakespeare did not engage with the city in which he lived, however London's topography and life is present in all his work, in its language, its locations and its characters. This dictionary offers a concise and fascinating insight into the city's impact on the Shakespearean imagination and provides readers with a wide-ranging guide to early modern London, its contemporary meanings and the ways in which Shakespeare employs these throughout the canon.

This book explores historical, socio-political, and metatheatrical readings of a whole host of dying bodies and risen corpses, each part of a long tradition of living death on stage. Just as zombies, ghouls, and the undead in modern media often stand in for present-day concerns, early modern writers frequently imagined living death in complex ways that allowed them to address contemporary anxieties. These include fresh bleeding bodies (and body parts), ghostly Lord Mayors, and dying characters who must carefully choose their last words – or have those words chosen for them by the living. As well as offering fresh interpretations of well-known plays such as Middleton’s The Lady’s Tragedy and Webster’s The White Devil, this innovative study also sheds light on less well-known works such as the anonymous The Tragedy of Locrine, Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge, and Munday’s mayoral pageants Chruso-thriambos and Chrysanaleia. The author demonstrates that wherever characters in early modern drama appear to straddle the line between this world and the next, it is rarely a simple matter of life and death. This book will be of great interest to students, scholars, and practitioners in theatre and performance studies, and cultural and social studies.

Shakespeare Studies is an annual peer-reviewed volume featuring work of performance scholars, literary critics and cultural historians. The journal focuses primarily on Shakespeare and his contemporaries but embraces theoretical and historical studies of socio-political, intellectual and artistic contexts that extend well beyond the early modern English theatrical milieu. In addition to articles, Shakespeare Studies offers unique opportunities for extended intellectual exchange through its thematically-focused forums, and includes substantial reviews. An international editorial board maintains the quality of each volume so that Shakespeare Studies may serve as a reliable resource for all students of Shakespeare and the early modern period – for research scholars as well as teachers, actors and directors. Volume 52 includes a Forum devoted the "Second Acts" of Shakespeare scholars with contributions from Mary Thomas Crane, Ayanna Thompson, Emily C. Bartels, Carla Della Gatta, Mary Jo Kietzman, Gina Bloom, Kevin Windhauser, Brinda Charry, Andrew J. Hartley, and Emma Whipday. Volume 52 includes contributions from the Next Generation Plenary of the Shakespeare Association of America as well as articles by Kinga Földváry ("From Melodrama to Tragedy and Back – Closing the Melodramatic Gap between Bollywood and Hollywood Shakespeare Adaptations"), Laura Higgins ("Locating Herself, Finding Her Voice: Mapping the Queen's Story in Shakespeare's Richard II"), Wesley Kisting ("The Theater of Conscience: Reforming Punishment in Measure for Measure"), Wolfgang G. Müller ("The Political Philosophies of Brutus and Cassius in Julius Caesar and the Theory of Preventive Tyrannicide"), and Greg M. Colón Semenza ("'Please, just no Shakespeare': Station Eleven's Utopian Economy of Cultural Distinction"). Book reviews consider important publications on Shakespeare and university drama; Shakespeare and race; textual studies, editing and performance; poetry, science and the sublime; and entertaining uncertainty in early modern theater.

The succession to the throne, Lisa Hopkins argues here, was a burning topic not only in the final years of Elizabeth but well into the 1630s, with continuing questions about how James's two kingdoms might be ruled after his death. Because the issue, with its attendant constitutional questions, was so politically sensitive, Hopkins contends that drama, with its riddled identities, oblique relationship to reality, and inherent blurring of the extent to which the situation it dramatizes is indicative or particular, offered a crucial forum for the discussion. Hopkins analyzes some of the ways in which the dramatic works of the time - by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster and Ford among others - reflect, negotiate and dream the issue of the succession to the throne.

Early modern audiences, readerships, and viewerships were not homogenous. Differences in status, education, language, wealth, and experience (to name only a few variables) could influence how a group of people, or a particular person, received and made sense of sermons, public proclamations, dramatic and musical performances, images, objects, and spaces. The ways in which each of these were framed and executed could have a serious impact on their relevance and effectiveness. The chapters in this volume explore the ways in which authors, poets, artists, preachers, theologians, playwrights, and performers took account of and encoded pluriform potential audiences, readers, and viewers in their works, and how these varied parties encountered and responded to these works. The contributors here investigate these complex interactions through a variety of critical and methodological lenses.

Breaking new ground in the study of tragedy, early modern theatre, and literary London, Metropolitan Tragedy demonstrates that early modern tragedy emerged from the juncture of radical changes in London’s urban fabric and the city’s judicial procedures. Marissa Greenberg argues that plays by Shakespeare, Milton, Massinger, and others rework classical conventions to represent the city as a locus of suffering and loss while they reflect on actual sources of injustice in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London: structural upheaval, imperial ambition, and political tyranny. Drawing on a rich archive of printed and manuscript sources, including numerous images of England’s capital, Greenberg reveals the competing ideas about the metropolis that mediated responses to theatrical tragedy. The first study of early modern tragedy as an urban genre, Metropolitan Tragedy advances our understanding of the intersections between genre and history.

This study provides the first comprehensive examination of every prop in Shakespeare's plays, whether mentioned in stage directions, indicated in dialogue or implied by the action. Building on the latest scholarship and offering a witty treatment of the subject, the authors delve into numerous historical documents, the business of theater in Renaissance England, and the plays themselves to explain what audiences might have seen at the Globe, the Rose, the Curtain, or the Blackfriars Playhouse, and why it matters. Students of the plays will be able to read beyond Shakespeare's words and visualize the drama as it might have appeared on the stage. Scholars will find a wealth of previously unmined material for reconstructing Renaissance theatrical practices. School drama groups, amateur theaters and directors and prop masters of professional troupes will find help in mounting their own productions as the Bard's audiences would have seen them.