Description
Book SynopsisThe collection, edited by Annalisa Castaldo and Rhonda Knight, features essays by scholars interested in exploring how the material culture of sixteenth and early seventeenth English theatrical culture influenced the creation and presentation of drama and how understanding this culture can enrich scholars’ current interactions with these plays as well as offer insights to actors and directors. The essays include discussions of plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Middleton as well as lesser known works and playwrights. This collection is unique in that it includes the body of the actor as a material object that is encountered and manipulated by other actors on the stage. These essays demonstrate how props, bodies and the architectural dimensions of early modern stages have both practical and symbolic registers.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Preface: An Introduction and Primer to the American Shakespeare Center by Sarah Enloe Introduction by Annalisa Castaldo and Rhonda Knight Chapter 1: Whose Experiment is it Anyway?: Some Models for Practice-as-Research in Shakespeare Studies by Stephen Purcell Chapter 2: Shakespeare’s Spirits: Staging the Supernatural on the Early Modern Stage by Jim Casey Chapter 3: Staging Epilepsy in Othello by Sid Ray Chapter 4: ’Sore hurt and bruised’: Visual Damage in Othello” by Catherine Loomis Chapter 5: ’Heave Up!’: The ‘Wicked Weight’ of Shakespeare’s Antony and York’s Christ” by R. W. Jones Chapter 6: Hiding in Plain Sight: Eavesdropping and the Physicality of the Stage by Annalisa Castaldo and Rhonda Knight Chapter 6: The ‘Dead Body Problem’: The Dramaturgy of Coffins on the Renaissance Stage by Sarah Neville Chapter 7: ’Cushion come forth’: Materializing Pregnancy on the Stuart Stage” by Sara B. T. Thiel Chapter 8: Maternal Revision in Middleton’s More Dissemblers Besides Women by Amanda Zoch Afterword: The Actors Speak About the Contributors Index
