European Theatre Performance Practice, 1580-1750

Robert Henke is Professor of Drama and Comparative Literature at Washington University, USA and M. A. Katritzky is the Barbara Wilkes Research Fellow in Theatre Studies in the English Department of the Open University, UK.

Contents: Introduction. Part I Playing Spaces: The changing scene: plays and playhouses in the Italian Renaissance, Michael Anderson; The theatres, John Orrell; Staging and performance, Jonathan Thacker; The material conditions of Molière’s stage, Jan Clarke. Part II Staging: Shakespeare’s stage, J.L. Styan; Shakespeare’s theater: tradition and experiment, Robert Weimann; Women at the windows: commedia dell’ arte and theatrical practice in early modern Italy, Jane Tylus; The circulation of clothes and the making of the English theater, Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass; Absorbing interests: Kyd’s bloody handkerchief as palimpsest, Andrew Sofer; Insubstantial pageants: women’s work and the (im)material culture of the early modern stage, Natasha Korda. Part III Acting: Ruzante and the evolution of acting practice in Renaissance Italy, Ronnie Ferguson; Arte dialogue structures in the comedies of Molière, Richard Andrews; Rogues and rhetoricians: acting styles in early English drama, Peter Thomson; Rehearsal, performance and plays, Tiffany Stern; Comic stage routines in Guarinonius’ medical treatise of 1610, M.A. Katritzky; ’La virtu et la volupté’: models for the actress in early modern Italy and France, Virginia Scott; Acting, Gerry McCarthy. Part IV Audiences: The audiences, Andrew Gurr; Theaters and audiences, Stephen Orgel; Women as spectators, spectacles, and paying customers, Jean E. Howard; Toward reconstructing the audiences of the commedia dell’ arte, Robert Henke; The audience, W.L. Wiley; The actors and their audience, N.D. Shergold. Name index.