Shakespeare / Play: Contemporary Readings in Playing, Playmaking and Performance

What is (a) play? How do Shakespeare’s plays engage with and represent early modern modes of play - from jests and games 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 Shakespeare plays 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, affect studies, music history, material history and literary and dramaturgical 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, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, Titus Andronicus, Merchant of Venice, 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 5 ’acts’, interwoven with 7 shorter, playful pieces (a ’prologue’, 4 ’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 analyze Shakespeare today.

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.