Early Modern Theater

This course investigates the boldly experimental world of the early modern English theater. The opening of London’s commercial playhouses in the last quarter of the sixteenth century fundamentally changed the nature of popular entertainment, offering eager spectators an array of secular drama for the first time in English history. We will read a range of playwrights and dramatic genres, asking how these plays both responded to each other and intervened in the issues of class, race, gender, sexuality, and politics that defined English early modernity. We will also spend time discussing the plays in performance, attending to the ways that conditions of early modern staging influence literary meaning. Finally, we will give attention to the performance styles and techniques of those actors who, in inspiring admiration and adoration as they realized these plays onstage, became London’s very first celebrities.