Revived with Care

Peter Malin is an independent scholar with a particular interest in the performance of early modern drama. A retired school teacher, his educational publications include A Level study guides on The Winter’s Tale, The Merchant of Venice, The Alchemist, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil. He has contributed theatre and book reviews to Early Theatre, ROMARD, Cahiers Élisabéthains and bloggingshakespeare.com. His article ‘"Entertaining Strangers": 50 Years of Shakespeare’s Contemporaries at the RSC’ appeared in Shakespeare (2012), and he contributed a chapter on the performance history of The Spanish Tragedy to the Arden ‘Critical Reader’ on the play (2016). He also writes poetry and short fiction; his story ‘End of Days’ was the winning entry in the 2017 English Heritage ghost story competition.

Preface and acknowledgements; Notes on the text; Introduction: ‘Their care was good that did revive this play’; 1. ‘Bum-fiddled with a bastard’: misconstruing The Chances; 2. ‘You should have kept your legs close then’: misogynistic discourse in The Coxcomb and Bonduca; 3. ‘There is another way, if you could hit on’t’: sexual, social and political behaviours in The Scornful Lady and The Humorous Lieutenant; 4. ‘A poem and a play too!’: The Faithful Shepherdess and the possibility of poetic drama; 5. ‘What pretty new device is this?’: confronting the transgressive in The Maid’s Tragedy; 6. ‘Wooing and wiving? Hang it!’: performance, power and sexual politics in Rule a Wife and Have a Wife and The Wild-Goose Chase; 7. ‘Am I not your king? If ay, then am I not to be obeyed?’: Philaster, A King and No King and the depoliticizing of tragicomedy; 8. ‘You looked with my eyes when you took that man’: re-visioning The Maid’s Tragedy; 9. ‘A man of arms, and daunted with a lady?’: women in power and colonial excursions in The Island Princess, The Woman’s Prize and The Sea Voyage; 10. ‘Turn this man woman, or this woman man’: deconstructing gender in The Custom of the Country, Love’s Cure and The Woman Hater; Appendix 1: the plays in the John Fletcher canon; Appendix 2: British Fletcher productions 1885–2020; Bibliography; Index