Theatre and performance reading list

This book explores how literature, theatre and music revive the dead to explore the dynamics of grief and mourning. Combining expressive and analytical writing, it offers a critical poetics of loss to show how ghosts, scenes of mourning, memories of reading or viewing, and acoustic fragments, all reanimate the dead in different ways.

Thomas Nashe is typically regarded as an urban author and a University wit, but his writings are inflected and shaped by regional travel, 'non-literary', non-elite works, and oral culture. The essays in this collection address Nashe's use of the past, his engagement with the Elizabethan present, and his textual legacy.

This is the first fully annotated, single-volume critical edition of Fletcher, Massinger, and Field's Thierry and Theodoret, with an introduction that reassesses sources (including Shakespeare) and discusses the authorship and reception of this captivating play, pointing the way for future study, especially of a historical or gender-based nature.

The Family of Love is a rumbustious citizen comedy. Delivering farcical twists on familiar dramatic situations, it offers a glimpse of spiritual freedom in paraperopandemical times.

Eight teams share their research about live performing arts during the COVID-19 pandemic, reflecting on digital innovations and analogue adaptations in dance and theatre, accessibility and community-building, and on how the pandemic impacted on artists and companies.

A fully annotated critical edition of John Fletcher and Philip Massinger's ground-breaking comedy Love's Cure, or The Martial Maid (1615), a fascinating exploration of the journey of two transgender characters in an adverse heteronormative society. This Revels Plays edition offers a modernised text and a full critical commentary.

Hyde Park is a striking Caroline example of London city comedy. This critical edition unpicks its valuable insights into the shifting nature of the genre and early modern conceptions of London and courtship.

This book offers essential reading on a wide array of theatre and film productions of Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice. Richly contextualised analyses of individual productions by major directors help produce a nuanced picture of the performance history of the play, guiding the reader from the 1930s through the early twenty-first century.

Blending theatre history and sensory studies this book recaptures the sound of early modern drama, acknowledging its intangibility while attempting to both describe those sounds heard on the stage and to try and identify those sound's effects on the playgoers.

Working with the concept that politics is performative and performance is political, this book brings together studies of popular performance and politics across the nineteenth century, offering a fresh perspective from an archivally grounded research base.

Three sixteenth century dietaries makes a significant contribution to our understanding of early modern culture. It provides the first modern edition of three of the most important dietaries of the time - with the texts offering advice on the best ways to maintain well-being.

Examines Fletcher's Roman plays and identifies disorientation as the unifying principle of his portrayal of imperial Rome. The book sheds new light on his intellectual life by arguing that his dramatization of Rome exudes a sense of scepticism over the authority of Roman models resulting from his irreverent approach to the classics.

Drawing upon previously unseen archival material, this book brings to life the story of the Actresses' Franchise League from 1908-1958, building a picture of this diverse, exciting and innovative organisation that opens up and extends previous scholarship of the suffrage movement, and of political and feminist networks in twentieth century theatre.

This books looks at Antony and Cleopatra in performance from 1606 to 2018, examining how actors, directors and designers pick up the play's themes of desire and delinquency, exoticism and erotic politics to locate the most ambituous love story ever told in a new present. Is the play tragedy? Comedy? Farce? Rutter shows it's all three.

Victorian touring actresses provides a fresh perspective on nineteenth-century theatre and the careers of previously neglected British women who had once starred at home and abroad. Chapters explore debuts, establishing a name, working life in the UK, touring North America, long-distance colonial touring, management, offstage life and ageing.

A detailed account of the performance history of As You Like It through the modern period, focusing on landmark stage and film productions.

The second edition of Friedman's stage history of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus adds an examination of twelve major theatrical productions and one film that appeared in the years 1989-2009, identifying four lines of descent in the recent performance history of the play: the stylised, realistic, darkly comic, and political approaches.

A study of twenty stage productions, adaptations and screen versions of Shakespeare's final Roman play

Presents a performance history of a controversial play, moving from its 1599 opening all the way into the new millennium with particular emphasis on its twentieth- and twenty-first-century incarnations on stage and screen

This book presents cutting-edge historical and cultural essays in the field of women, theatre and performance. It explore women's networks of professional practice in the performance industries between 1900 and 1950, with a focus on women's sense and experience of professional agency in an industry largely controlled by men.

The book advances a new performance theory or mode, 'trauma-tragedy', that suggests much contemporary performance can generate the sensation of being present in trauma through its structural embodiment in performance, or 'presence-in-trauma effects'.

Dr. Faustus is one of the jewels of early modern English drama, and is still widely performed today. Interestingly, the play has come down to the contemporary audience in two distinct versions that...

Masques of difference' presents an annotated edition of four seventeenth-century entertainments written by Ben Jonson, which reflect the royal court's self-representation as moral and just, in contrast to stylised images of chaotically (and exotically) 'othered' groups: Africans, the Irish, witches, and the homoeroticised figure of the Gypsy.

Women Beware Women is among the most powerful and adroitly-plotted of Jacobean tragedies. Written by Thomas Middleton, a later contemporary of Shakespeare, the play deals with topics of enduring fascination such as sexual and financial greed, the sexual exploitation of women by a manipulative older woman and murderous revenge.

This is the first edition for students and general readers of a pro-woman reply to Shakespeare's 'The Tamer of the Shrew' written in Shakespeare's lifetime . Co-edited by a feminist critic and a distinguished textual scholar, it makes clear why 'The Tamer Tamed' should be restored to the theatrical repertoire and the literary canon.