William Percy's Mahomet and His Heaven (1601) is extraordinary. Not only is it the only early modern play purportedly based upon the Qur'an, but it is also the first to place the Prophet Muhammad on the stage. While there existed a remarkable range of texts concerning Islamic characters and themes in Renaissance England, from chronicles and pamphlets to popular drama, the publication of this edition of Mahomet and His Heaven represents a major step forward in the study of Islam on the early modern stage. Roughly contemporary with Shakespeare's Othello, William Percy makes the remarkable and potentially highly provocative gesture of locating the Prophet as its central character, presiding over an apocalyptic drought to chastise the sins of mankind. The play takes place in around the mosques of 'Medina' and the action mirrors early Christian 'translations' of the Qur'an, the Islamic holy text that was rarely available in England at the time. Furthermore, the play provides a fascinating insight into the way that Islamic characters were portrayed on the early modern stage, containing as it does remarkably detailed stage directions, stipulating for example that the Prophet wears 'all greene and greene his Turban' and that his Angels are 'rainbow powdered'. Such details offer an entirely new perspective upon this aspect of early modern stagecraft. Matthew Dimmock presents here the play in its entirety, with a critical introduction which introduces some of its key themes, and places it in a textual and social context. A section of detailed explanatory scholarly notes follow the play, containing a full translation of the short Latin sections and references to the many political and literary parallels. This book should be required reading for historians, literary scholars and students dealing with notions of race, religion, magic, astrology and stagecraft in early modern England.

This book focuses on the importance of topical reading in understanding Islamic figures and themes, and applies this approach to two landmark Elizabethan plays: George Peele’s Battle of Alcazar and William Percy’s Mahomet and his Heaven. The former is the first English play to present a Moor as a major character, while the latter is the first English play to be based on Quranic material and feature the Prophet of Islam as a major character. In both plays, the book argues, topical concerns played a major role in the formation of Islamic characters and themes, rendering the term ‘representation’ highly debatable. The book also briefly covers other Elizabethan plays that contained Islamic elements, such as Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and The Merchant of Venice, and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus. Topical issues covered in the work include British-Muslim relations, the Spanish Armada, Elizabethan patriotism in literature, Catholic-Protestant tensions in the late 16th century, the gynaecocracy debate, and Elizabethan alchemy and magic.

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Rethinking Theatrical Documents brings together fifteen major scholars to analyse and theorise the documents, lost and found, that produced a play in Shakespeare's England. Showing how the playhouse frantically generated paratexts, it explores a rich variety of entangled documents, some known and some unknown: from before the play (drafts, casting lists, actors' parts); during the play (prologues, epilogues, title-boards); and after the play (playbooks, commonplace snippets, ballads) – though 'before', 'during' and 'after' intertwine in fascinating ways. By using collective intervention to rethink both theatre history and book history, it provides new ways of understanding plays critically, interpretatively, editorially, practically and textually.

An exploration of early modern encounters between Christian Europe and the (Islamic) East from the perspective of performance studies and performativity theories, this collection focuses on the ways in which these cultural contacts were acted out on the real and metaphorical stages of theatre, literature, music, diplomacy and travel. The volume responds to the theatricalization of early modern politics, to contemporary anxieties about the tension between religious performance and belief, to the circulation of material objects in intercultural relations, and the eminent role of theatre and drama for the (re)imagination and negotiation of cultural difference. Contributors examine early modern encounters with and in the East using an innovative combination of literary and cultural theories. They stress the contingent nature of these contacts and demonstrate that they can be read as moments of potentiality in which the future of political and economic relations - as well as the players' cultural, religious and gender identities - are at stake.

thevolume represents a significant contribution to the complex history of the conceptualization and pictorialization of the Prophet Muhammad in the West. It gives a rapid and though deep overview of the history of the making of an image of the Prophet Muhammad in Europe and thus reflects the whole history of the making of the image of Islam in the Latin West, from the early medieval times till the 19th century. The book also provides the reader with ready access to the most recent scholarship concerning the image of Muhammad in Europe, in the form of comprehensive footnotes provided throughout the text and an extensive bibliography.

English comedy from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth century abounds in song lyrics, but most of the original tunes were thought to have been lost--until now. By deducing that playwrights borrowed melodies from songs they already knew, Ross W. Duffin has used the existing English repertory of songs, both popular and composed, to reconstruct hundreds of songs from more than a hundred plays and other stage entertainments. Thanks to Duffin's incredible breakthrough, these plays have been rendered performable with period music for the first time in five hundred years. Some Other Note not only brings these songs back from the dead, but tells a thrilling tale of the investigations that unraveled these centuries-old mysteries [Publisher description]

Dynamic Matter investigates the life histories of Renaissance objects. Eschewing the critical tendency to study how objects relate to human needs and desires, this work foregrounds the objects themselves, demonstrating their potential to transform their environments as they travel across time and space. Integrating early modern material theories with recent critical approaches in Actor-Network Theory and object-oriented ontology, this volume extends Aristotle’s theory of dynameos—which conceptualizes matter as potentiality—and applies it to objects featured in early modern texts such as Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, and William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Individual chapters explore the dynameos of matter by examining its manifestations in particular forms: combs are inscribed with words and brushed through human hair; feathers are incorporated into garments and artwork; Prince Rupert’s glasswork drops explode; a whale becomes animated by the power of a magical bracelet; and books are drowned. These case studies highlight the potentiality matter itself possesses and that which it activates in other matter. A theorization of objects grounded in Renaissance materialist thought, Dynamic Matter examines the richness of things themselves; the larger, multiple, and changing networks in which things circulate; and the networks created by these transformative objects. In addition to the editor, the contributors to this volume include Anna Riehl Bertolet, Erika Mary Boeckeler, Naomi Howell, Emily E. F. Philbrick, Josie Schoel, Maria Shmygol, Edward McLean Test, Abbie Weinberg, and Sarah F. Williams.

Among the dramatists who wrote for the professional playhouses of early modern London was a small group of writers who were neither members of the commercial theater industry writing to make a living nor aristocratic amateurs dipping their toes in theatrical waters for social or political prestige. Instead, they were largely working- and middle-class amateurs who had learned most of what they knew about drama from being members of the audience. Using a range of familiar and lesser-known print and manuscript plays, as well as literary accounts and documentary evidence, Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare's Theater shows how these playgoers wrote and revised to address what they assumed to be the needs of actors, readers, and the Master of the Revels; how they understood playhouse materials and practices; and how they crafted poetry for theatrical effects. The book also situates them in the context of the period's concepts of, and attitudes toward, playgoers' participation in the activity of playmaking. Plays by playgoers such as the rogue East India Company clerk Walter Mountfort or the highwayman John Clavell invite us into the creative imaginations of spectators, revealing what certain audience members wanted to see and how they thought actors might stage it. By reading Shakespeare's theater through these playgoers' works, Matteo Pangallo contributes a new category of evidence to our understanding of the relationships between the early modern stage, its plays, and its audiences. More broadly, he shows how the rise of England's first commercialized culture industry also gave rise to the first generation of participatory consumers and their attempts to engage with mainstream culture by writing early modern "fan fiction."

This book explores how the figure of the Prophet Muhammad was misrepresented in English and wider Christian culture between 1480 and 1735. By tracing the ways in which 'Mahomet' was written and rewritten, contested and celebrated, this study explores notions of identity and religion, and the resonances of this history today.

This book is about two very different kinds of company. On the one hand it concerns Shakespeare's poet-playwright contemporaries, such as Marlowe, Jonson, and Fletcher. On the other, it examines the contribution of his fellow actors, including Burbage, Armin, and Kemp. Traditionally, criticism has treated these two influences in separation, so that Shakespeare is considered either in relation to educated Renaissance culture, or as a man of the theatre. Shakespeare in Company unites these perspectives. Bart van Es argues that Shakespeare's decision, in 1594, to become an investor (or 'sharer') in the newly formed Chamberlain's acting company had a transformative effect on his writing, moving him beyond the conventions of Renaissance dramaturgy. On the basis of the physical distinctiveness of his actors, Shakespeare developed 'relational drama', something no previous dramatist had explored. This book traces the evolution of that innovation, showing how Shakespeare responded to changes in the personnel of his acting fellowship and to competing drama, such as that produced for the children's companies after 1599. Covering over two decades of theatrical history, van Es explores the playwright's career through four distinct phases, ending on the conditions that shaped Shakespeare's late style. Paradoxically, Shakespeare emerges as a playwright unique 'in company'—special, in part, because of the unparalleled working conditions that he enjoyed.