A collection of essays which show how early drama traditions were transformed, recycled, re-used and reformed across time to form new relationships with their audiences. Medieval afterlives brings new insight to the ways in which peoples in the sixteenth century understood, manipulated and responded to the history of their performance spaces, stage technologies, characterisation and popular dramatic tropes. In doing so, this volume advocates for a new understanding of sixteenth-seventeenth century theatre makers as highly aware of the medieval traditions that formed their performance practices, and audiences who recognised and appreciated the recycling of these practices between plays.

Introduction - Daisy Black and Katharine Goodland

Prolegomena

1 'Where the peaze is, shee shalbe Queene': REED and the continuing life of medieval dramatic traditions - Peter H. Greenfield

Part I: Transforming space

2 The Lathom screen and the Magian plays of the Derby companies - Lawrence Manley
3 Promising a storm: anticipation, spectacle, and the ship in the Digby Mary Magdalene and
Shakespeare and Wilkins' Pericles, Prince of Tyre - Daisy Black
4 'Ay, these were spectacles to please my soul': satirising schadenfreude in Thomas Kyd's
The Spanish Tragedy - Katharine Goodland

Part II: Transforming character

5 Shakespeare's priests - Jay Zysk
6 Transforming Saint Dunstan on the Elizabethan stage - Gina M. Di Salvo
7 'Fals conjecture': how costume transformed 'player' to 'disguiser' in late medieval and Renaissance drama - Katie Normington

Part III: Transforming tropes

8 Transforming recognition: The Winter's Tale, Pericles, and the Elevation of the Host - Matthew J. Smith
9 Under the castle, inside the counting house: shelter and exposure on the deathbed in The Castle of Perseverance and The Jew of Malta - Devin Byker
10 The forest palimpsest in As You Like It and the medieval imaginary - Victoria Bladen

Afterword - Theresa Coletti

Index

Editors

Daisy Black is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Wolverhampton

Katharine Goodland is a Professor of English at the College of Staten Island, CUNY