Project MUSE®: Early Theatre: A Journal associated with the Records of Early English Drama - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/687
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Early Theatre: A Journal associated with the Records of Early English Drama.daily12026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 19 (2016) through current issueLatest Articles: Early Theatre: A Journal associated with the Records of Early English DramaTWOProject MUSE®Early Theatre: A Journal associated with the Records of Early English Drama2293-76091206-9078Latest articles in Early Theatre: A Journal associated with the Records of Early English Drama. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Editorial
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977527
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Early Theatre is pleased to report continued growth in visibility, readership, and scholarly impact. Since 2023, the number of users accessing journal content has increased substantially — thanks, in part, to our participation in Project Muse’s Subscribe to Open (S2O) initiative. At the same time, the journal’s geographic reach has also expanded: while Canada, the US, and the UK remain our largest audiences, usage from India, China, and Ireland combined has grown by over 50% during the past two years alone. Such metrics reflect Early Theatre’s rising national and international profile and sustained relevance in early and medieval performance studies.Outstanding submissions from contributors make the journal’s work
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/687/image/coversmallEditorial2025-12-17text/htmlen-USEditorial2025-12-172025TWOProject MUSE®56332026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-12-17‘My Cloudy Melancholy’: Productions of Whiteness in Titus Andronicus (1594)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977528
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In act 2, scene 3 of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (1594), Aaron implores Tamora to consider his mood:Though describing himself as melancholic, Aaron’s expression of this ‘cloudy’ humour offers a curious departure from the typical image of the Shakespearean melancholic figure. He is neither indecisive and sad, like Hamlet in Hamlet (1599–1601), nor especially contemplative, like Jaques in As You Like It (1599). Aaron offers one explanation for what his melancholy means by suggesting that it fuels his desire for revenge: ‘Blood and revenge are hammering in my head’ (39). Aaron’s revenge is shown to have devastating consequences for the other characters, with Emily C. Bartels labelling Aaron as the ‘consummate
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/687/image/coversmall‘My Cloudy Melancholy’: Productions of Whiteness in Titus Andronicus (1594)2025-12-17text/htmlen-US‘My Cloudy Melancholy’: Productions of Whiteness in Titus Andronicus (1594)2025-12-172025TWOProject MUSE®1155992026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-12-17The Dangers of Idealized Femininity in Early Modern Sophonisba Tragedies
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977529
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The burst of plays written about Carthaginian noblewoman Sophonisba during the early modern period reflect contemporary ideas surrounding idealized femininity, which is marked by white women possessing fair, chaste bodies. This series of plays includes John Marston’s The Wonder of Women (ca 1606), Thomas Nabbes’s Hannibal and Scipio (1637), and Nathaniel Lee’s Sophonisba, or Hannibal’s Overthrow (1704). These texts are each preoccupied with exemplary sexuality, reflecting a broader contemporary interest in using classical retellings to simultaneously articulate and reinstate social norms.2 In these plays, women embodying a chaste, fair form of sexual power are not as obedient, submissive, and harmless as one might
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/687/image/coversmallThe Dangers of Idealized Femininity in Early Modern Sophonisba Tragedies2025-12-17text/htmlen-USThe Dangers of Idealized Femininity in Early Modern Sophonisba Tragedies2025-12-172025TWOProject MUSE®790732026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-12-17Acousmatic Warfare: Staging Sound in the Play(game)house of A Midsummer Night’s Dream
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977530
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How is acousmatic1 warfare, the use of sound without a visible source as means of force, staged in Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Inspired by Steve Goodman’s conceptualization of sonic warfare as the use of acoustic machines to affect the dynamics of bodies, populations, and crowds,2 I demonstrate how Shakespeare’s play advances a type of invisible drone-like acousmatic warfare amongst the players and audience alike. I argue that the play produces uncanny acousmatic sonic effects, effects meant to be heard and felt by the actors and audience,3 yet whose sonic sources remain unseen.Sound is not merely an aural phenomenon. Nina Sun Eidsheim underscores sound’s vibrational energy as transferring
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/687/image/coversmallAcousmatic Warfare: Staging Sound in the Play(game)house of A Midsummer Night’s Dream2025-12-17text/htmlen-USAcousmatic Warfare: Staging Sound in the Play(game)house of A Midsummer Night’s Dream2025-12-172025TWOProject MUSE®945842026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-12-17Taken Boys and Mistaken Benevolence in the Early Modern English Theatre and the Virginia Company
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977531
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In 1613, Samuel Argall, ship captain and member of the Virginia Company, lured Metoaka/Pocahontas1 onto his ship and abducted her from her father and people. While English colonists murdered her husband, Kocoum, Metoaka was imprisoned in Jamestown. After a year in captivity, Metoaka married John Rolfe, converted to Christianity, and her name was changed to Rebecca. This abduction occurred six years into the Virginia Company’s venture to colonize Powhatan land. Descriptions of this encounter, even today, minimize the violence and harm done to Metoaka by replacing the narrative of abduction and kidnapping with love and marriage.2 Western historical representations of Metoaka are layered with mistaken assumptions
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/687/image/coversmallTaken Boys and Mistaken Benevolence in the Early Modern English Theatre and the Virginia Company2025-12-17text/htmlen-USTaken Boys and Mistaken Benevolence in the Early Modern English Theatre and the Virginia Company2025-12-172025TWOProject MUSE®1908272026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-12-17White/Right Shakespeare: Whiteness in the Field of Early Modern Studies
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977532
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On 6 January 2022, rioters stormed and occupied the Capitol building of the United States of America in Washington, DC, and they caused millions in property damage to it in the process. The extremists who entered the Capitol by force proudly displayed swastikas and confederate flags while hurling antisemitic and racist slurs. As careful plans were put in place to attack the Capitol, extremists made a conscious effort to ensure the protection of the Shakespeare Folger Library that also sits on Capitol Hill and shares underground tunnels leading to the Capitol building. Moreover, the insurrectionists took the time to assuage the fears of the Folger Library staff who might think their building would also be
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/687/image/coversmallWhite/Right Shakespeare: Whiteness in the Field of Early Modern Studies2025-12-17text/htmlen-USWhite/Right Shakespeare: Whiteness in the Field of Early Modern Studies2025-12-172025TWOProject MUSE®1227582026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-12-17Introduction: Drama and Conversion
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977533
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Questions surrounding the fuzzy, slippery phenomenon of conversion were everywhere in post-Reformation England.1 What is conversion, exactly? How should it look and feel? Do immutable physical characteristics impose a natural limit on the universality purported by conversional ideals? Can conversion supplant aspects of identity that seem to be inherent in the blood? Is it possible for a Jew to convert? What about an uncivilized ‘savage’? Are women more amenable to conversion than men? Can a man convert a woman by marrying her? How do conversion narratives factor into strategies for public self-presentation? What factors constitute conversional authenticity? Is an insincere conversion still a conversion? What about
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/687/image/coversmallIntroduction: Drama and Conversion2025-12-17text/htmlen-USIntroduction: Drama and Conversion2025-12-172025TWOProject MUSE®659832026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-12-17Mediating Criminal Conversion in City Comedy and Domestic Tragedy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977534
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Early modern crime narratives offered varied attitudes toward shooting (or indeed, hanging) the messenger. In his 1567 text A Caveat for Common Cursitors, Vulgarly Called Vagabonds, Thomas Harman envisioned London’s criminal underworld as a burgeoning social sphere with a complicated taxonomy and lexicon of its own. Harman cast himself as the figurative ferryman of this underworld; infiltrating the ‘rabblement of rakehelles’, he described crime not simply as an action or profession but rather as a social milieu or communal identity that a person might be born into, achieve, or have thrust upon them.1 Of course, Harman’s alleged fieldwork and translation of ‘the leud lousey language’ of canting does not induct him
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/687/image/coversmallMediating Criminal Conversion in City Comedy and Domestic Tragedy2025-12-17text/htmlen-USMediating Criminal Conversion in City Comedy and Domestic Tragedy2025-12-172025TWOProject MUSE®628182026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-12-17Virtue’s Pour: Exemplarity and Conversion in Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West, Part One
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977535
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The action of Thomas Heywood’s understudied The Fair Maid of the West, Part One very intentionally strains to sing in virtue’s key. That is the play’s one note. Heywood’s adventure-romance is unique among early modern plays for the way in which it stages the performance of virtue, its inspirations, and effects. The premise of Fair Maid is simultaneously fanciful yet delightful. Simply put, imagine stage characters showing up at a tavern only to be served by Britomart.2 Although she is new at her job, reports of her supreme beauty and steadfast virtue have spread far and wide, drawing all the town’s gallants and gentlemen to the tavern at which she works. Those drawn to her are in turn converted by her — that is
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/687/image/coversmallVirtue’s Pour: Exemplarity and Conversion in Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West, Part One2025-12-17text/htmlen-USVirtue’s Pour: Exemplarity and Conversion in Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West, Part One2025-12-172025TWOProject MUSE®706832026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-12-17Griselda Fights Back: Converting the Prodigal Husband in The London Prodigal
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977536
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Increasingly in the 1590s and the early seventeenth century, a particular trend of comedy emerged on stage in which bad husbands and good wives negotiated the transactional economy of marriage. The prodigal son had evolved into the prodigal husband,1 and his waywardness extended to his ill treatment of his wife and his refusal to respect or participate in the expected rituals of marriage. In the fifth act, this prodigal husband typically undergoes a seemingly miraculous transformation at the hands of his ever faithful wife that corrects both his behaviour and his attitude toward matrimony. Viviana Comensoli points out that this exact conversional trope is repeated in five comedies between 1600–8 alone: How a Man
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/687/image/coversmallGriselda Fights Back: Converting the Prodigal Husband in The London Prodigal2025-12-17text/htmlen-USGriselda Fights Back: Converting the Prodigal Husband in The London Prodigal2025-12-172025TWOProject MUSE®464242026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-12-17‘And art thou changed?’: Romeo’s Transformation from Renegade to Martyr
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977537
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In act 3, scene 5 of Romeo and Juliet, Lady Capulet vows her revenge on Tybalt’s murderer, Romeo, swearing, ‘I’ll send to one in Mantua, / Where that same banished renegade doth live’ (3.5.88–9).1 A ‘renegade’ or ‘runagate’ (Q2: ‘runnagate’ and F: ‘Run-agate’) can refer (generally) to a ‘fugitive’ or ‘runaway’, but its primary definition is religious: ‘a person who renounces his or her faith; an apostate’.2 The insult is perhaps even more apt than Lady Capulet realizes. In the first few acts of Shakespeare’s tragedy, Romeo must try to live down his reputation as a ‘young waverer’ (Friar Laurence’s words) after his quick change of heart regarding the object of his affections (2.2.89). When we first meet Romeo, he is
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/687/image/coversmall‘And art thou changed?’: Romeo’s Transformation from Renegade to Martyr2025-12-17text/htmlen-US‘And art thou changed?’: Romeo’s Transformation from Renegade to Martyr2025-12-172025TWOProject MUSE®552772026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-12-17Conversion as Nonperformative Speech in The Jew of Malta
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977538
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In Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Barabas convinces his daughter Abigail to falsely convert to Catholicism, with the assurance that ‘religion / Hides many mischiefs from suspicion’ (1.2.282–3)1. As many scholars have observed, Marlowe has become synonymous with early modern atheism and irreligion.2 Although his reputation for and association with atheism may be overblown and the result of posthumous rumour, he certainly favoured characters who appeared religiously skeptical. For Marlowe, conversion becomes a provocative space for overtly political theatre, and The Jew of Malta, with its Machiavels, Christians, Muslims, and Jews, presents a religiously diverse landscape in which religion is presented as a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/687/image/coversmallConversion as Nonperformative Speech in The Jew of Malta2025-12-17text/htmlen-USConversion as Nonperformative Speech in The Jew of Malta2025-12-172025TWOProject MUSE®495572026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-12-17