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. The playwrights who wrote for these theaters collaborated and competed with each other to produce the bombastic heroes of tragedy, the upstart social climbers of city comedy, and the adventurers of romance, reimagining the possibilities of stage performance in the process. We will read a range of playwrights and dramatic genres in this course, asking how these plays not only spoke to each other, but intervened in the issues of class, race, gender, sexuality, and politics that defined early modernity. We will also spend time discussing the plays in performance, attending to the ways that the conditions of early modern stagecraft influence literary meaning. Finally, we will give attention to the performance styles and techniques of those actors who, in inspiring playgoers’ admiration and adoration, became London’s very first celebrities.