Alison Findlay

“The play is ready to be acted”: women and dramatic production, 1570-1670

Abstract In this article, the authors draw on their experiences of staging plays by early modern women to refute the classification of such texts as unperformable “closet drama”. The theatrical aspects of CarysThe Tragedy of Mariam(1604/8), Cavendish and Brackleys The Concealed Fancies (c1645) and Margaret Cavendishs The Convent of Pleasure (1668) are discussed in detail with references to recent stagings. The authors argue that their practical engagement with these scripts opens up important questions about female performance and its relationship to performativity, as well as interrogating conventional definitions of theatre.

A Day to Remember: Wedding Ceremony and Cultural Change

This article considers the staging of weddings, especially that in Much Ado About Nothing, with reference to the acute consciousness of past, present and future which converge on the event. The representations of wedding in Shakespearean drama are inevitably caught up in the religious controversies of the day over how the medieval order of service for matrimony should be preserved or reformed. The article discusses the cultural history of the wedding from medieval ceremony to popularisation of the white wedding by Queen Victoria and its redefinitions in postmodern culture. The performance history of weddings in Shakespeare reveals acute attention to the bride as centrepiece of the event, to hope for the future and nostalgia for the past.

Shakespeare, Ceremony and the Public Sphere of Performance

ABSTRACT The Globe’s experiments with audience involvement have introduced novel methods of rendering spectators aware of their presence within any performance. Most of this is catered for and rehearsed, but – performance by performance – there is the opportunity for spontaneous gestures and responses. This essay focuses on this self-awareness in the Globe’s 2010 productions of Merry Wives of Windsor, The Taming of the Shrew and All is True (Henry VIII), where the ceremony of distance between on- and offstage and between spectating and participating is questioned. As a result of this, some of Habermas’ assumptions as to what a cultural “Public Sphere” might be are extended to include the theatrical potential both as a result of external factors such as expected conventions before the performance and internal nuances that bring surprise and challenge such traditions.

John Webster, the dark and violent playwright?

Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom; Department of Languages, Information, and Communication, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, United Kingdom; Department of English Literature and Creative Writing, Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom; Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, United Kingdom

Dramatizing home and memory : Lady Mary Sidney and Lady Mary Wroth

ABSTRACT The article discusses two plays by noblewomen: Lady Mary Sidney Herberts translation The Tragedy of Antony (1998[1591]) and Lady Mary Wroths pastoral tragicomedy Loves Victory (1614–16), to explore how drama, as a genre, provides unique opportunities for remaking home as a womans space. Irigarays vision of womans self-dispossession within the home and Elizabeth Groszs injunction to recover a female-centered chora, provide a framework to read the texts. Drawing on the classical idea of a memory-theater, the article analyzes how the scripts creatively manipulate relationships between domestic venues and settings in order to reshape memories and promote alternative constructions of womans place.