What do we see when we look at early modern plays in contemporary theatre? Well, this is a very UK-based, and probably London-based answer, but we generally see a lot of white, able-bodied cis men in plays about white, able-bodied cis men; we generally see the same 10-15 plays of the 400 or so early […]
I’m afraid this blog post will seem especially pedantic and churlish, because it is about the unexpected embedding of a strange word in conversations about early modern theatre history: the word ‘permanent’. Theatre history tends to distinguish between playhouses it considers permanent, and those it considers impermanent, despite the fact that no Elizabethan, Jacobean or […]
We are thankful to Leah Scragg for her review, here, of Edward’s Boys’ The Woman in the Moon (8-11 March 2018). You can read the director, Perry Mills, on the production elsewhere on our site, and we also have interviews with the cast. *** Edward’s Boys, under the direction of Perry Mills, might well be said to […]
Further to Andy’s post on story, this post asks questions about the nature and necessity of coherent “story”—and of audiences following “plot”—in early modern commercial dramatic performance. It does so by putting literary and archival material into conversation with archaeological discoveries, and as such I’m thankful to Heather Knight of MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology) […]
what’s the matter? This post follows up some of the points raised by Andy in his discussion of “story” and early modern theatre as part of his Performing Words series. Here, I suggest that the term “matter” might afford a more historically nuanced—and appropriate—vocabulary for thinking about the intersection of “story,” words, and performance. the […]
