Project MUSE®: Renaissance Drama

Project MUSE®: Renaissance Drama - Latest Articles https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/533 Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Renaissance Drama. daily 1 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 text/html en-US New Series 38 (2010) through New Series 40 (2012) Latest Articles: Renaissance Drama TWO Project MUSE® Renaissance Drama 2164-3415 0486-3739 Latest articles in Renaissance Drama. Feed provided by Project MUSE® Introduction https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493547 We need a change in point of view, which will come in time, but we might as well make a beginning. With this volume, Renaissance Drama publishes its fortieth issue. That, though, is in its “new series,” which began counting in 1964; it is the forty- ninth issue if one includes a decade of yearly issues and reports before the “new series” was inaugurated. Those earlier reports emerged out of a series of meetings held in conjunction with the annual Modern Language Association (MLA) convention, beginning in 1955. Attentive readers will also notice that the present issue appears neither forty nor forty- nine years after that date but fully fifty- eight. Depending on how one counts, then, every year ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493567">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/533/image/coversmall Introduction 2012-12-28 text/html en-US Introduction 2012-12-28 2012 TWO Project MUSE® 16468 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 2012-12-28 Taking Stock https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493548 What is a “development”? A question posed to contributors by the editors of this anniversary issue is: “what do you see as the most exciting (or least productive) development in the field” of Renaissance drama? Though there have certainly been “developments” over the last decades, they don’t represent growth or progress, one meaning of the word, as in “child development” or “economic development.” I see the three most important “developments” in the field over the last forty years as, first, the preoccupation with difference; second, the turn/ return to history in what has been labeled the “New Historicism”; and third, the so-called new textual or bibliographic studies, work on the history of the book and ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493567">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/533/image/coversmall Taking Stock 2012-12-28 text/html en-US Taking Stock 2012-12-28 2012 TWO Project MUSE® 28399 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 2012-12-28 Exclusive Of https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493549 Although I am happy to participate in this issue of Renaissance Drama, celebrating its forty or forty- nine years and contemplating the field and its future, I have to say that nothing in my training qualifies me to do so. At Columbia, where I was a graduate student from 1964 to 1968, one had to choose between studying the literature of the early modern period or studying its drama. I don’t recall whether this was a formal requirement. You entered the program assigned to a field—in my case, seventeenth- century English literature (exclusive of drama); then, for the oral exam, in addition to the major field, you were examined in a minor field in comparative literature, an author (the choices were, so far as I ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493567">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/533/image/coversmall Exclusive Of 2012-12-28 text/html en-US Exclusive Of 2012-12-28 2012 TWO Project MUSE® 36100 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 2012-12-28 Renaissance and/or Early Modern Drama and/or Theater and/or Performance: A Dialogue https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493550 When we were invited to muse about the state of the field, we thought it would be interesting to take these questions up as a dialogue; Barbara agreed to take the first swing at the questions, and Bill then to reply in what we hoped would not turn into a mise en abyme of commentary. Although the “dialogue” itself is a kind of fiction—we wrote back and forth, and forth and back—we’ve tried to preserve some of its flavor here. We so hate talking to one another, after all. Will’s invitation describes Renaissance Drama as “the annual publication on the institutions of theater and the cultures of performance in early modern Europe,” mentioning also its predecessor journal, Opportunities for Research in ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493567">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/533/image/coversmall Renaissance and/or Early Modern Drama and/or Theater and/or Performance: A Dialogue 2012-12-28 text/html en-US Renaissance and/or Early Modern Drama and/or Theater and/or Performance: A Dialogue 2012-12-28 2012 TWO Project MUSE® 29650 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 2012-12-28 Toward a New Theatricality? https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493551 There are reasons to think that professional criticism of early modern drama is emerging from a period of methodological consolidation, comforted by a sense of its canonical importance but nagged by a certain intellectual restlessness. Few areas of criticism can claim to have undergone a more radical reinvention over the past forty years, and arguably no field has had a more significant impact on the way that literary scholarship as a whole has come to be practiced in the academy. In retrospect, the rise of “historicism” as an international critical orthodoxy can be traced directly to the studies of Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe, and their contemporaries that were published during the 1980s and early 1990s by ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493567">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/533/image/coversmall Toward a New Theatricality? 2012-12-28 text/html en-US Toward a New Theatricality? 2012-12-28 2012 TWO Project MUSE® 25131 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 2012-12-28 The Play’s Not the Thing https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493552 In 1973, when i contributed to Renaissance Drama, new series, volume 6, an essay called “Sir Amorous Knight and the Indecorous Romans; or, Plautus and Terence Play Court in the Renaissance,” there was no question that Renaissance Drama was just the venue for my essay. In 1973 (and even in 1975, when the volume was actually published, two years later) there was still such a thing as “The Renaissance.” “Drama” was no less definite. Like “The Renaissance,” “drama” was something you could point to: along with lyric poetry and the novel, it was a literary genre, not that nebulous affair waiting in the wings, “performance.” The chivalric and Ovidian trappings of early sixteenth-century productions of Plautus’s and ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493567">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/533/image/coversmall The Play’s Not the Thing 2012-12-28 text/html en-US The Play’s Not the Thing 2012-12-28 2012 TWO Project MUSE® 30090 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 2012-12-28 The Dream of a Perfect History https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493553 There are times, many more than I would openly admit, when I envy the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, who in 1919 published Hersttij der middleleeuwen, which in English translation was then entitled The Waning of the Middle Ages and is now, after a subtler retranslation, known as The Autumn of the Middle Ages. The source of my envy stems from the fact that I thought, early in my career, that Huizinga confidently presented his study (in its original manifestation) as a “holistic” examination of life in medieval France and the Netherlands. In the preface to his book he wrote, “The point of departure for this was the attempt to better understand the work of the van Eycks and that of their successors and to ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493567">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/533/image/coversmall The Dream of a Perfect History 2012-12-28 text/html en-US The Dream of a Perfect History 2012-12-28 2012 TWO Project MUSE® 33719 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 2012-12-28 Acting and Ontology in Molière https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493554 Though the French seventeenth century has left a number of accounts of actors and acting, a consistent feature is their theoretical underdevelopment. This underdevelopment may seem perplexing since a signal achievement of so-called classical France was the invention of theory itself in a specifically modern sense. We meet the self-consciously professional discipline René Descartes brought to the scientific “search for truth,” imposing order on the rational pursuit of knowledge through close logical analysis of the conditions of possibility of rational thought as such. We get the systematic lessons in statecraft laid down in Cardinal Richelieu’s posthumous Testament politique (Political Testament) ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493567">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/533/image/coversmall Acting and Ontology in Molière 2012-12-28 text/html en-US Acting and Ontology in Molière 2012-12-28 2012 TWO Project MUSE® 53714 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 2012-12-28 What’s the Worst Thing You Can Do to Shak/x/espeare? https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493555 ¶ Reade him, therefore; and againe, and againe: And if then you doe not like him, surely you are in some manifest danger, not to vnderstand him. And so we leaue you to other of his Friends, whom if you need, can bee your guides: if you neede them not, you can leade your selves, and others. And such Readers we wish him. Before, or perhaps after, all, the worst thing you can do to Shakespeare is not to read him. Here, at the envoi-cum-media launch that was the First Folio, John Heminge and Henry Condell offer an economy of reading that threatens the putative reader-buyer with the “manifest danger” that “unreadability” might conjure. This rhetorical unreadability that reflects on you stands surety ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493567">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/533/image/coversmall What’s the Worst Thing You Can Do to Shak/x/espeare? 2012-12-28 text/html en-US What’s the Worst Thing You Can Do to Shak/x/espeare? 2012-12-28 2012 TWO Project MUSE® 71835 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 2012-12-28 Recent Trends in Editing of Renaissance Drama Anthologies https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493556 In 1977, I published a short piece on “Teaching Texts for Renaissance Drama” in Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 20 (1977), 7–21, a journal that has since that time been incorporated into Renaissance Drama, the periodical whose fifty years of accomplishment we are celebrating with this current issue. Then in 1987 I contributed a chapter on “Drama Editing and Its Relation to Recent Trends in Literary Criticism” to Editing Early English Drama: Special Problems and New Directions, edited by Alexandra Johnston. The first of these publications featured a tabulation of Renaissance plays, indicating for each the anthologies or other texts in which they had appeared. The second explored the development ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493567">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/533/image/coversmall Recent Trends in Editing of Renaissance Drama Anthologies 2012-12-28 text/html en-US Recent Trends in Editing of Renaissance Drama Anthologies 2012-12-28 2012 TWO Project MUSE® 27069 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 2012-12-28 Authority and Theatrical Community: Early Modern Spanish Theater Manuscripts https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493557 Who is the effective “author” of our most beloved Renaissance plays? Shakespeare or the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, who mounted those plays and might change, as Hamlet complained, the meaning of the written scripts? His friends and first editors John Heminge and Henry Condell or the many editors who altered and added to his texts over the centuries? Spanish golden age drama invites a complex answer to this question, for Lope de Vega called Gaspar de Porres, the impresario who staged many of his early plays, an “autor famoso.”1 Porres collaborated with Lope in publishing the Parte IV of his Comedias (plays),2 supplying the manuscripts he owned and signing the preface for his friend’s volume. Lope is ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493567">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/533/image/coversmall Authority and Theatrical Community: Early Modern Spanish Theater Manuscripts 2012-12-28 text/html en-US Authority and Theatrical Community: Early Modern Spanish Theater Manuscripts 2012-12-28 2012 TWO Project MUSE® 44774 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 2012-12-28 Defining the Proper Members of the Renaissance Theatrical Community https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493558 For most people, “Renaissance Drama” is like a diner fronted with a garish sign spelling out shakespeare in flashing bulbs. My point in this essay is that scholars shouldn’t be joining the rest of the world in that misconception. Even though many—if not most—of us write some sort of cultural criticism, we routinely turn to Shakespeare (with a detour now and then toward Jonson) to sum up all of Renaissance culture. It’s as if EJ’s Luncheonette in Manhattan were taken to be a model for Mother’s in New Orleans and the Tip Top Cafe in San Antonio. When scholars limit themselves to Shakespeare, the oddness of Renaissance culture is unnoticed. Consideration of the field from the vantage point of Thomas ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493567">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/533/image/coversmall Defining the Proper Members of the Renaissance Theatrical Community 2012-12-28 text/html en-US Defining the Proper Members of the Renaissance Theatrical Community 2012-12-28 2012 TWO Project MUSE® 54838 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 2012-12-28 No Field Is an Island: Postcolonial and Transnational Approaches to Early Modern Drama https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493559 The turn to postcolonial approaches, inaugurated by Peter Hulme, Ania Loomba, and others in the late 1980s and early 1990s, has hugely invigorated the field of English Renaissance drama, giving us an increasingly complex picture of the role that the theater played as England, and later Great Britain, embarked on its commercial and imperial expansion. The interest in England’s relations with the lands and peoples that lay beyond its borders has led to a range of fascinating work on race, empire, and economics, among other topics.1 After a brief excursus to the New World, exemplified by the signal work of Peter Hulme and of Stephen Greenblatt on The Tempest, the field has focused on the ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493567">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/533/image/coversmall No Field Is an Island: Postcolonial and Transnational Approaches to Early Modern Drama 2012-12-28 text/html en-US No Field Is an Island: Postcolonial and Transnational Approaches to Early Modern Drama 2012-12-28 2012 TWO Project MUSE® 51550 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 2012-12-28 “Après le déluge, More Criticism”: Philology, Literary History, and Ancestral Reading in the Coming Posttranscription World https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493560 “Work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation” is a motto found throughout the work of the Glaswegian artist and writer Alasdair Gray—and it is one which might well be applied to those engaged in what has been called “digital humanities.” The future offers the promise, by 2017 if the estimates of the Text Creation Partnership (TCP) are correct, of not just the whole of printed Renaissance drama but every surviving printed book in English from the early modern period, transcribed and available for searching and “data mining” on the laptops of every academic, postgraduate, and undergraduate in the field. Whatever this nation will be, if “nation” is really the right word for the inhabitants of this ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493567">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/533/image/coversmall “Après le déluge, More Criticism”: Philology, Literary History, and Ancestral Reading in the Coming Posttranscription World 2012-12-28 text/html en-US “Après le déluge, More Criticism”: Philology, Literary History, and Ancestral Reading in the Coming Posttranscription World 2012-12-28 2012 TWO Project MUSE® 60708 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 2012-12-28 Renaissance Drama: Future Directions https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493561 The most important development in our field latterly has been our (re)discovery of history. This is not the result of a single piece of work, a single author, or even a single thought: it has been a product of the Internet. The kind of research once possible for only a privileged academic with access to a rare book library can now be undertaken by anyone whose university subscribes to EEBO (Early English Books Online), ECCO (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online), or LION (Literature Online); it can be dabbled in by professional academic, graduate, and undergraduate alike. New and further historical material is being mounted online all the time. Recently the Burney Collection Database has been placed on the ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493567">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/533/image/coversmall Renaissance Drama: Future Directions 2012-12-28 text/html en-US Renaissance Drama: Future Directions 2012-12-28 2012 TWO Project MUSE® 25520 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 2012-12-28 Still No Precise Subject: The View from French https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493562 Many american scholars in French studies spend a year or so in Paris during graduate school: in libraries, but also in seminars, in often silent anthropological study of their French counterparts, so similar in preoccupations and yet sometimes so very other in their way of pursuing them. From my year I remember in particular one encounter with a French student also working on theater. She asked kindly, having asked some months previously, how I was imagining the shape of my thesis after the year’s reading. I proffered some sentences recently formulated for a successful grant abstract back home. “Ah,” she said, “toujours pas de sujet précis, alors” (still no precise subject, then). Anyone who’s ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493567">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/533/image/coversmall Still No Precise Subject: The View from French 2012-12-28 text/html en-US Still No Precise Subject: The View from French 2012-12-28 2012 TWO Project MUSE® 46945 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 2012-12-28 The Work of Italian Theater https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493563 On March 27, 1552, Silvestro Cartaio—Silvestro the papermaker—was expelled for five months from the Sienese organization with which he had been associated since 1544, the Congrega dei Rozzi. The charge, according to the documents of the Congrega, was that he had performed a “chomedia” in Rome without the consent of his fellow Rozzi, all of them artisans like himself.1 It’s not entirely clear what the offending play was called. But most of Cartaio’s nine extant plays are blistering critiques of contemporary Sienese social norms and politics, delivered by the figure of the villano (peasant), who was the focus of many of the Rozzi’s works. Of interest is that this maker and seller of paper was blamed not for ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493567">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/533/image/coversmall The Work of Italian Theater 2012-12-28 text/html en-US The Work of Italian Theater 2012-12-28 2012 TWO Project MUSE® 63921 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 2012-12-28 William Shakespeare’s Regnal Connections: Whose Court Is This Anyway? https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493564 “Shortly after his arrival in London to ascend the throne of England, King James took under his protection the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, who were thenceforth known as the King’s Men.”1 This twentieth—and nineteenth—century way of thinking about Shakespeare in his milieu should by this time seem as out- of-date as the notion that Stratford-upon- Avon was a sleepy country village. Yet it is easy to understand how the yoking of England’s premier poet with King James still holds an attraction for the authors of recent biographical comments about William Shakespeare. “The King’s Men”: the phrase has a jaunty feel to it, redolent of camaraderie and masculinity—as in “Robin Hood and his Merrie Men,” “Men of Harlech,” ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493567">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/533/image/coversmall William Shakespeare’s Regnal Connections: Whose Court Is This Anyway? 2012-12-28 text/html en-US William Shakespeare’s Regnal Connections: Whose Court Is This Anyway? 2012-12-28 2012 TWO Project MUSE® 33178 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 2012-12-28 Tragedy and Trauerspiel for the (Post-)Westphalian Age https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493565 Our present historical situation . . . has not only made us more aware of the ambiguity of the world and of the inauthentic nature of daily life, but . . . has also revived our interest in the tragic writers and thinkers of the past. Given Lucien Goldmann’s background as a left-leaning, exiled Romanian Jew, we can supply numerous referents for his “present historical situation”—from the general chaos of two world wars and the Cold War to the individual horrors of anti-Semitism and fascism in his native land. His claim also allows us to ask whether it might not now also be apt, given the “ambiguities” of our times, to turn to “the tragic writers and thinkers of the past,” here, to theorists of tragedy in ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493567">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/533/image/coversmall Tragedy and Trauerspiel for the (Post-)Westphalian Age 2012-12-28 text/html en-US Tragedy and Trauerspiel for the (Post-)Westphalian Age 2012-12-28 2012 TWO Project MUSE® 62427 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 2012-12-28 Hannah Arendt Strasse https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493566 Took this photo in Berlin in May 2006. My twin sister, Ellen, and I were touring Peter Eisenman’s Holocaust memorial, which had been erected near the Brandenburg Gate the year before. As our jet-lagged feet marked the perimeter of Eisenman’s city of stela, Ellen suddenly asked me, “Isn’t that the woman that you’re working on?” I looked around, expecting to see an illustrious female colleague (Victoria Kahn? Nancy Struever? our mother?). “No—over there—the street sign,” she continued, pointing. And there hovered a signpost labeled hannah-arendt-strasse, announcing a two-block-long street that borders one edge of Eisenman’s installation. I took this photo, which I went on to feature on my desktop, business ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493567">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/533/image/coversmall Hannah Arendt Strasse 2012-12-28 text/html en-US Hannah Arendt Strasse 2012-12-28 2012 TWO Project MUSE® 41368 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 2012-12-28 Notes on Contributors https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493567 Leeds Barroll is the founder of the Shakespeare Association of America, a founding editor of Shakespeare Studies and Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, and the lead editor for the early modern volume of the Revels History of Drama in English series. He is also a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, the author of four volumes on early modern drama and culture, and the recipient of a Festschrift, Center or Margin?. His current work is on early modern England and the East. David Bevington is the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. His books include From “Mankind” to Marlowe (1962), Tudor Drama and ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493567">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/533/image/coversmall Notes on Contributors 2012-12-28 text/html en-US Notes on Contributors 2012-12-28 2012 TWO Project MUSE® 17997 2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00 2012-12-28