Q&A
Why did you originally decide to edit a volume on this topic? As editors, were there any “aha!” moments once you read all of the contributions and began writing the introduction?
AMRITA: Well, the pandemic had started and the collection on civic pageantry that I co-edited had just come out. At that time I was also reading Jennifer Wood’s amazing book Sounding Otherness. It struck me that maybe we could do a volume on court masques perhaps? When Souvik Mukherjee heard this, and he was in the middle of his own lockdown writing projects, he asked me if there was nothing outside civic pageantry and court masques. What he said really made me think. I think this was an early and unintended “aha” moment. I had an idea, and the person I wanted to share it with and ask if she wanted to be part of this madness was Jennifer Wood. Thankfully, she said yes! The plan was to bring together essays that looked at performance genres that had absolutely nothing to do with the public stage. Jennifer helped steer the collection in new exciting directions given her vast knowledge on performance, but also of the different archives. I am not sure that this was the effect that Souvik expected when he made that comment, but there it was, our idea for the book! Incidentally Souvik later contributed an essay on chess as performance to our collection. So, it all worked out. While reading the essays we learnt so many new things – about performing monkeys from Teresa Simone, and puppets as props from Nicole Sheriko!
JENNIFER: This collection came out of a very bleak time in human history: the COVID-2019 pandemic. I believe it was after a few months of lock-down, when nobody was certain when this interminable period of isolation would end, that Amrita Sen kindly shared her brilliant idea with me—why don’t we make good use of these difficult times and circumstances, and instead focus our efforts to put something meaningful and productive out into the world? For me, Amrita’s idea and plan for this collection was a lifesaver across so many different dimensions—of course, it was wonderful to have a project that piqued our intellectual curiosity and that we could use as a distraction from our current circumstances, but it was even more vital to embark on this collaborative venture together with contributors from around the globe that oriented us all toward a future and meaningful goal. It was also deeply important to us that this project included contributions from scholars representing a wide range of voices and backgrounds who were themselves researching a diverse array of topics.
That leads me to one of my “aha!” moments in the preparation of this collection: while Amrita and I cast a wide net as to what qualified as “performance” in our CFP, what the contributors were able to teach us about the dazzling array of performances in the early modern period was astonishing—and we are hopeful that will be true for our readers as well! Maria Shmygol’s chapter on firework shows, for example, was itself scintillating in tracing the use of pyrotechnics-as-performance, particularly in royal entertainments on the River Thames. I had never heard of “rope dancing” until I had read Emma Rose Kraus’s abstract, and her discussion of these tightrope performances during the Interregnum at the Red Bull Theatre offers evidence of performances continuing in the theaters even after their closures due to the Civil Wars. Olivia Robinson’s chapter on convent drama, likewise, invites us to the perhaps overlooked performative space of the medieval convent and the nuns’ participation in Biblical drama as a form of recreation they enjoyed among themselves. And, Sarah Williams’s chapter about the “Raree Shows” educates us about multimodal street performances that encompassed singing, citation, and miniature traveling theater boxes. While Amrita and I certainly theorized that Shakespeare’s Jacques’s statement “all the world’s a stage” absolutely should be taken at its word, the contributors—with their expertise in so many different areas of performance—were the ones whose revelatory work on the wide ambit of medieval and Renaissance performances truly developed our theory.
What sort of primary source materials did your contributors consult?
JENNIFER: The expansive nature of topics covered in this collection is also apparent in the vast array of source materials to which our contributors turned while researching their chapters: medieval manuscripts, actors’ scrolls, hand-corrected/hand-edited copies of dramatic works (particularly Edward Dering’s manuscript of King Henry the Fourth), manuscript plays, early printed drama from England and the continent, ballads (including lyrics and musical notation), convent records and reports, Chapel Royal and other ecclesiastical records, the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, psalters, Star Chamber documents, Minstrel Court records, early prints (including from Hogarth), London Metropolitan Archives Corporation of London Records, printed Stuart court masques, travel narratives, Mary Rowlandson’s diary, REED (Records of Early English Drama), seventeenth-century newspapers, records of civic drama, conduct manuals, collections of nursery rhymes, images and plans for fireworks shows, and printed epistolary collections.
AMRITA: I will add that Philip Butterworth and Daniel Yabut’s chapters look extensively at theatrical records, marginalia and actor’s notes. Effie Botonaki turns to records of court performances. Among digital archives, many of our wonderful contributors, including Natália Pikli, Olivia Robinson, Csilla Virág, Siobhan Keenan, and Abbie Weinberg, consulted REED. Siobhan Keenan and Anne Heminger also use LMA (London Metropolitan Archives); and the good old Calendar of State Papers are referenced by Gabriel Lonsberry. Importantly Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan shed light on performance in the colonial archives, including the Records of the Colony of New Plymouth.
How did Folger collections specifically inform some of the essays?
JENNIFER: This collection was largely written during the COVID-19 pandemic, in addition to the closure of the Folger’s building due to its exciting renovation, so the authors were working under unusual circumstances when it came to accessing primary source documents. However, the digital collections at the Folger and other institutions made the research process possible, and Meaghan Brown’s chapter on Edward Dering’s King Henry the Fourth features an extensive discussion of this manuscript playbook and the hand-corrections made to the text to explain some of the choices made, and difficulties encountered and overcome, in amateur productions of the period. Murat Öğütcü includes an image from the Folger’s collections, “Hortus Penbrochianus,” to give readers a visual representation of the pleasure gardens, like that at Wilton House, which he discusses was a setting for a King’s Men production of As You Like I in 1603. Additionally, Sarah Williams includes a “Rare Show” plate dating from the early eighteenth century to illustrate the performance as sung and enacted before a group of children in this image.
AMRITA: Additionally, chapters by Chelsea McKelvey and Abbie Weinberg use Folger ‘s excellent digital resources such as Lost Plays Database and Shakespeare Documented.
What else do you want to tell us about this collection?
AMRITA: This collection was conceived in the middle of the pandemic. One of the things that we were extremely happy about was how the collection brought together a community of global scholars. The achievement of this collection is not only that it highlights plural and often overlooked performance genres but that we could facilitate a conversation among scholars from across the world during a particularly trying time in our recent history.
JENNIFER: Indeed! I remain so grateful to Amrita for inviting me on board and for being such a generous and wonderful co-editor! As you will read in our excerpt, this collection is written in response to the tendency to reduce “Renaissance performance” to chiefly Shakespeare’s plays and perhaps those of a few other white, male dramatists of the period. Shakespeare himself (perhaps ironically) in his own dramatic works, points to the myriad kinds of performances that took place within and beyond the public stages. While Shakespeare is great (usually), his was not the only show in town! Our hope is that this collection will shift the conversation to consider “performance” in more expansive and more inclusive ways, offering everyone a richer sense of what Renaissance performance—sometimes grand, sometimes quotidian, and, as Abbie Weinberg reminds us, even in failure—encompassed.
Excerpt:
From the introduction of Early Modern Performance Beyond the Public Stage: Extra-Theatrical Forms and Spaces, edited by Amrita Sen and Jennifer Linhart Wood (The Arden Shakespeare, 2025), pp 1-3. Permission to excerpt granted by Bloomsbury.
William Shakespeare’s Jacques famously proclaims that ‘All the world’s a stage’; yet, many studies of Renaissance drama are limited to the well-trod boards of public theatres and the scripted performances that took place upon them. Although stage drama constituted only a small percentage of the many entertainments available to Renaissance English audiences, it has garnered a disproportionate amount of scholarly attention, eclipsing the ‘infinite variety’ of other performances also on offer in the histrionic world of early modern England.
Enter Early Modern Performance Beyond the Public Stage: Extra-Theatrical Forms and Spaces, a collection that explores, challenges, investigates and celebrates the rich and varied landscape of these early performative practices. Seeking to recalibrate the dramatically limited, incomplete and skewed perspective of what constituted performance according to early modern English understanding, Early Modern Performance Beyond the Public Stage features essays that attend to a vast array of types and spaces of performance and performativity spanning from the medieval period to the late seventeenth century.
This volume thus takes Jacques at his word by considering the impressive variety of performances and spaces in which various dramatic entertainments occurred. It brings much-needed critical attention to a wider heterogeneous category of early modern performance, including puppetry, fireworks shows, rope dancing, minstrelsy, performing animals, games, civic drama, court masques, university drama, convent drama, congregational singing, morris dances and ceremonial rituals taking place across multiple locations. In all of these examples, not only do our contributors offer vivid accounts of the myriad and varied types and venues of performance available in early modern England, they also contextualize these accounts within broader histories of racialization, gender politics and material culture.
The inclusive approach to performance that we advance here is supported by other contemporary scholarship. Recently, especially with the rise of Performance Studies, the category of ‘performance’ has become more capacious to reflect an awareness that a wider range of activities can be productively considered ‘performances’. For instance, Richard Schechner argues that ‘performance must be construed as a “broad spectrum” or “continuum” of human actions ranging from ritual, play, sports, popular entertainments, the performing arts (theatre, dance, music), and everyday life performances to the enactment of social, professional, gender, race andclass roles, and on to healing (from shamanism to surgery)’.
This expansive definition would have been familiar to early modern audiences for whom many aspects of daily social interactions involved careful and nuanced negotiation and presentation of the self. What Stephen Greenblatt describes as ‘an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process’ that he dates to the sixteenth century is supplemented by the material realities of the ways that performance inflected everyday life, which provides a useful starting point for this collection. Examples abound, from dancing or making music at a social gathering, to the rituals and presentations related to the consumption of food, to broadside ballad sellers and other purveyors of goods advertising their wares through singing, to participation in the chanting and/or singing and pageantry of weekly church services, to boys performing orations in grammar school and workers ‘performing’ their daily tasks, to larger festival celebrations connected to the seasonal social fabric of early modern life – Lord Mayor’s Shows, royal progresses, May Day celebrations, ecclesiastical holiday dramatics, feast days, mummings, morris dancing – that necessitated performative participation from amateurs and professionals alike, and so many others besides. Sumptuary laws dictated the appropriate ‘costume’ to be worn by individuals. Conduct manuals taught human actors their parts, providing protocols for speech, gesture, activities and rank, like those codified in Baldasare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (translated by Thomas Hoby into English in 1561); dozens of conduct manuals concerning manners of deportment, speech, education and proper activities were published in England and aimed at men and women belonging to various echelons of society. Even those who attended performances at the theatres were performative themselves, as descriptions of theatregoers seated on gallant stools (and often disrupting the stage shows in their attempts to entertain others with their clothing and the supposed brilliance of their own wit) attest.
While this collection doesn’t presume to address all kinds of performances available in medieval and early modern England, Early Modern Performance Beyond the Public Stage fundamentally expands scholarly understanding of where, how and what kinds of performances took place, shedding new light on overlooked aspects of one of the most iconic periods of English drama.
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