"Shakespeare / Play asks: what is (a) play? How do Shakespeare's plays engage with, and represent, early modern modes of play - from jests, games, and toys, to music, spectacle, movement, animal-baiting and dance? How do contemporary 'replays' in performance engage with other modes of play? And how does the structure of the plays experienced in the early modern playhouse shape our understanding of the form of a Shakespeare play today? Ranging across Shakespeare's dramatic oeuvre, prose works from the period and contemporary theatre and film, it provides a fascinating study of 'play' with approaches from a host of disciplines"--
What is (a) play? How do Shakespeare's plays engage with and represent early modern modes of play – from jests and games to music, spectacle, movement, animal-baiting and dance? How have we played with Shakespeare in the centuries since? And how does the structure of the plays experienced in the early modern playhouse shape our understanding of Shakespeare plays today?
Shakespeare / Play brings together established and emerging scholars to respond to these questions, using approaches spanning theatre and dance history, cultural history, critical race studies, performance studies, disability studies, archaeology, affect studies, music history, material history and literary and dramaturgical analysis. Ranging across Shakespeare's dramatic oeuvre as well as early modern lost plays, dance notation, conduct books, jest books and contemporary theatre and film, it includes consideration of Measure for Measure, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, Titus Andronicus, Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear and The Merry Wives of Windsor, among others.
The subject of this volume is reflected in its structure: Shakespeare / Play features substantial new essays across 5 'acts', interwoven with 7 shorter, playful pieces (a 'prologue', 4 'act breaks', a 'jig' and a 'curtain call'), to offer new directions for research on Shakespearean playing, playmaking and performance. In so doing, this volume interrogates the conceptions of playing of/in Shakespeare that shape how we perform, read, teach and analyze Shakespeare today.
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Shakespeare / Play explores how early modern modes of play interact with Shakespearean playtexts, playhouse performance culture and contemporary productions, opening up new directions for researching and teaching Shakespeare
List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Series Preface
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Text
Playbill: Introduction or, What is (a) Play?, Emma Whipday (Newcastle
University, UK)
Prologue, Callan Davies (University of Southampton, UK)
Act 1: Playing with Parts
1. Playing the Second Part, Laurie Maguire (University of Oxford, UK)
2. Sex Work and Silence in Measure for Measure: The Absent Part of Kate
Keepdown, Emma Whipday (Newcastle University, UK)
3. What is a Great Shakespearean?, Emer McHugh (Queen's University Belfast,
UK)
Act Break 1: Lost, but Once Played: Enlarging the Performative Possibilities
of Shakespeares Theatre, David McInnis (University of Melbourne, Australia)
Act 2: Playing (with) Women
4. Fairy Toys and Womens Work in A Midsummer Nights Dream and The Merry
Wives of Windsor, Chloe Preedy (University of Exeter, UK)
5. Women Walking in Shakespeare: Playing with Gendered Space, Eleanor Rycroft
(University of Bristol, UK)
6 The listening figure: Women performers playing with Shakespeare in
Victorian tableaux vivants, Sally Barnden (Kings College London, UK)
Act Break 2: Playing in Private? Household and Courtly Performance in Mary
Wroths Loves Victory, Alison Findlay (Lancaster University, UK)
Act 3: Playing with Bodies and Minds
7. The fit is momentary: Playing with Norms in Shakespeare, Susan Anderson
(Sheffield Hallam University, UK)
8. Notorious Abuse: Madness, Race and the Cruelty of Play in Twelfth Night
and A Midsummer Nights Dream, Urvashi Chakravarty (University of Toronto,
Canada)
9. happy nights to happy days: Minoritarian Mercutios, Affect, and the
Bury Your Gays Trope in Adaptations of Romeo and Juliet, Vanessa I. Corredera
(Andrews University, USA)
Act Break 3: Play/Dance, Barbara Ravelhofer (Durham University, UK)
Act 4: Playing with Stagecraft
10. Staging a Moment of Song, Elisabeth Lutteman (Uppsala University,
Sweden)
11. Shakespeare and Puppet Play: Performing Objects in Early Modern and
Contemporary Staging, Nicole Sheriko (Yale University, US)
12. Become a Christian and thy Loving Wife: Conversion Play in The Merchant
of Venice, Hailey Bachrach (University of Roehampton, UK)
Act Break 4: The Bear Stage, Callan Davies (University of Southampton, UK)
with Sophy Charlton (University of York, UK), Andy Kesson (University of
Roehampton, UK), Liam Lewis (University of Nottingham, UK), Hannah ORegan
(University of Nottingham, UK), and Elizabeth Wright (University of York,
UK)
Act 5: Games and Jests
13. [ C]ooling Cards: Early Modern Playing Cards and Images of Kingship in
Shakespeares Henry VI Plays, Louise Fang (Université Sorbonne Paris Nord,
France)
14. Heres a fellow frights English out of his wits: Playing with Humour
in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Lieke Stelling (Utrecht University, the
Netherlands)
15. Word Games, Affect and Play in in Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, Anne
Sophie Refskou (Aarhus University, Denmark)
Jig: Classroom Play: Strategies for Teaching Shakespeare with Games, Gina
Bloom (University of California, Davis, USA)
Afterword: Taking a Bow, Tiffany Stern (University of Birmingham, UK)
Selected Bibliography
Index
Emma Whipday is Senior Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at Newcastle University, UK. Her first book, Shakespeares Domestic Tragedies: Violence in the Early Modern Home (2019), is co-winner of the Shakespeares Globe Book Award 2020. Other publications include Teaching Shakespeare and His Sisters: An Embodied Approach (2023) and Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England: Actor, Audience and Performance (co-edited with Simon Smith, 2022). She is also a playwright; her play Shakespeares Sister (2016) won the Theatre Royal Haymarkets Masterclass Pitch Your Play award, and her play The Defamation of Cicely Lee won the American Shakespeare Centers 2019 Shakespeares New Contemporaries prize.
