Overview

This book looks at the staging and performance of normality in early modern drama. Analysing conventions and rules, habitual practices, common things and objects, and mundane sights and experiences, this volume foregrounds a staged normality that has been heretofore unseen, ignored, or taken for granted. It draws together leading and emerging scholars of early modern theatre and culture to debate the meaning of normality in an early modern context and to discuss how it might transfer to the stage. In doing so, these original critical essays unsettle and challenge scholarly assumptions about how normality is represented in the performance space. The volume, which responds to studies of the everyday and the material turn in cultural history, as well as to broader philosophical engagements with the idea of normality and its opposites, brings to light the essential role that normality plays in the composition and performance of early modern drama. This book was preceded by a companion collection, Staged Transgression in Shakespeare's England, published in 2013: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9781137349354

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9783030008918

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Reviews

“The present volume succeeds in assembling insightful, instructive and eminently readable essays that offer different perspectives on the complex cultural constellations and media … . Together, the essays compiled in this volume offer a rich introduction to early modern drama and the cultural work that it performs in its explorations of the normal and ordinary as objects of dramatic interest.” (Anne Enderwitz, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, Vol. 157, 2021)

Author Information

Rory Loughnane is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Studies at the University of Kent, UK. He is an Associate Editor of the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016-), for which he edited more than ten plays. He has co-edited four essay collections, as well as the anthology, The Memory Arts in Renaissance England (2016). Edel Semple is Lecturer in Shakespeare Studies at University College Cork, Ireland. She is co-editor of Staged Transgression in Shakespeare’s England (2013), and of a special issue of Early Modern Literary Studies on European women (2017). She has recently published on gender in Shakespeare on film, prostitution in early modern literature, and the critical history of early modern drama.

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