Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England: Actor, Audience and Performance

This edited collection of essays brings together leading scholars of early modern drama and playhouse culture to reflect upon the study of playing and playgoing in early modern England. With a particular focus on the player-playgoer exchange as a site of dramatic meaning-making, this book offers a timely and significant critical intervention in the field of Shakespeare and early modern drama. Working with and reflecting upon approaches drawn from literary scholarship, theatre history and performance studies, it seeks to advance the critical conversation on the interactions between: players; play-texts; performance spaces; the bodily, sensory and material experiences of the playhouse; and playgoers' responses to, and engagements with, the theatre. Through alternative methodological and theoretical approaches, previously unknown or overlooked evidence, and fresh questions asked of long-familiar materials, the volume offers a new account of early modern drama and performance that seeks to set the agenda for future research and scholarship.

Simon Smith is Associate Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon and the Department of English Literature, University of Birmingham. He researches early modern drama, music and sensory culture. He is the author of Musical Response in the Early Modern Playhouse, 1603–1625 (Cambridge, 2017), for which he won the Shakespeare's Globe Book Award and the University English Book Prize. He edited Shakespeare/Sense (2020) and, with Jackie Watson and Amy Kenny, The Senses in Early Modern England, 1558–1660 (2015). He has acted as a historical music and theatre consultant to the RSC, Shakespeare's Globe, The Independent and the BBC adaptation of Wolf Hall.

Emma Whipday is Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at Newcastle University. She researches domestic violence, gender and power, familial structures, and performance in and beyond the playhouse. Her monograph Shakespeare's Domestic Tragedies: Violence in the Early Modern Home (Cambridge, 2019) won the 2020 Shakespeare's Globe Book Award. She is currently working on a Leverhulme-funded book on brother-sister relationships on the early modern stage. Emma regularly directs 'practice as research' stagings of early modern texts. She also writes plays, including Shakespeare's Sister (2016) and The Defamation of Cicely Lee (2019), winner of the American Shakespeare Center's 'Shakespeare's New Contemporaries' award.