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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 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 the form of a Shakespeare play 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, material history, music, and literary 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 , Much Ado About Nothing , Titus Andronicus , The Taming of the Shrew , 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 five ''acts'', interwoven with seven shorter, playful pieces (a ''prologue'', four ''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 analyse Shakespeare today.>
About the author
Emma Whipday is Senior Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at Newcastle University, UK. Her first book, Shakespeare’s Domestic Tragedies: Violence in the Early Modern Home (2019), is co-winner of the Shakespeare’s 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 Shakespeare’s Sister (2016) won the Theatre Royal Haymarket’s Masterclass ‘Pitch Your Play’ award, and her play The Defamation of Cicely Lee won the American Shakespeare Center’s 2019 ‘Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries’ prize.Farah Karim-Cooper is Head of Higher Education & Research, Shakespeare’s Globe and Professor of Shakespeare Studies, King’s College London, UK.
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Gordon McMullan is a professor of English at King's College London, UK.Lucy Munro is Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at King’s College London, UK. She is the author of Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory (2005), Archaic Style in English Literature, 1590-1674 (2013) and Shakespeare in the Theatre: The King’s Men (2020), and the editor of plays including Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed and Dekker, Ford and Rowley’s The Witch of Edmonton.Sonia Massai is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Sapienza, University of Rome, Italy, and Visiting Professor of Shakespeare Studies at King's College London, UK. With Amy Lidster, she is co-editor of Shakespeare at War: A Material History (2023) and co-curator of the Shakespeare and War exhibition at the National Army Museum (October 2023 – April 2024). Her other publications include her books on Shakespeare’s Accents: Voicing Identity in Performance (2020) and Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (2007), her collections of essays on Hamlet for the Arden Shakespeare ‘State of Play’ series (The Arden Shakespeare, 2021), on Ivo van Hove (Methuen Drama, 2018), Shakespeare and Textual Studies (2015) and on World-Wide Shakespeares (2005), and critical editions of The Paratexts in English Printed Drama to 1642 (2014) and John Ford's ’Tis Pity She's a Whore for Arden Early Modern Drama (The Arden Shakespeare, 2011).
