Book Series: Medieval Institute Publications

Late Tudor and Stuart Drama: Gender, Performance, and Material Culture

Helen Ostovich and I co-edit a series, “Late Tudor and Stuart Drama: Gender, Performance, and Material Culture,” for Medieval Institute Publications. This series provides a forum for monographs and essay collections that investigate the material culture, broadly conceived, of theatre and performance in England from the late Tudor to the pre-Restoration Stuart periods (c. 1550–1650). We invite proposals for book-length studies engaging in the material vitality of the dramatic text, political culture, theatre and performance history, theatrical design, performance spaces, gendering court entertainments, child- and adult-actors, music, dance, and audiences in London and on tour. We are also interested in the discursive production of gender, sex, and race in early modern England in relation to material historical, social, cultural, and political structures; changes to and effects of law; monarchy and the republic in dramatic texts; theatre and performance, including performance spaces that are not in theatres. Further topics might include the production and consumption of things and ideas; costumes, props, theatre records and accounts, gendering of spaces and geographies (court, tavern, street, and household, rural or urban), cross-dressing, military or naval excursions, gendered pastimes, games, behaviors, rituals, fashions, transnational encounters, the disabled, and the demonic and their reflection in text and performance.

Publishing with MIP

MIP offers rapid turn-around times, the newest digital policies, and global distribution. Books are distributed worldwide through our publishing partner, De Gruyter.

Further Information

For questions or to submit a proposal, please contact the Acquisitions Editor, Tyler Cloherty (tylercloherty44@gmail.com), or visit our website: www.wmich.edu/medievalpublications/late-tudor-stuart-drama

Books in the series:

Thomas Middleton and the Plural Politics of Jacobean Drama

By Mark Kaethler

This 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.

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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.

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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.

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Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

Edited by Domenico Lovascio

This volume explores with an unprecedented thoroughness and variety of perspectives the diverse issues connected to female identities in the early modern English plays set in ancient Rome. Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries puts Shakespeare’s Roman world in dialogue with a number of Roman plays by writers as diverse as Matthew Gwinne, Ben Jonson, John Fletcher, Philip Massinger, Thomas May, and Nathanael Richards. Thus, the collection seeks to challenge conventional wisdom about the plays under scrutiny by specifically focusing on their female rather than male characters, as well as sharpening our awareness of the fact that the Roman world on the early modern stage cannot be straightforwardly and simplistically equated with Shakespeare’s

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Buy Elizabeth I, the Subversion of Flattery, and John Lyly’s Plays and Entertainments from ISD