Theatre Closure and the Paradoxical Rise of English Renaissance Drama in the Civil Wars

Heidi Craig is Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University, editor of the World Shakespeare Bibliography and co-editor of Early Modern Dramatic Paratexts. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Huntington Library, Newberry Library, and Folger Shakespeare Library.

'Innovative in its adherence to subtle changes and continuations between the 1640s, 50s, 60s and 70s, Heidi Craig's brilliant study promises to reshape our thinking about early modern theatre history and the emergence of the field we now know as Renaissance drama. Drawing on detailed knowledge of book and theatre history, Craig illustrates how the apparent death of theatre in 1642, and the commercial practices of individual stationers, helped to shape both the posthumous histories of Shakespeare, Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher, and ways in which drama was conceptualised in the late seventeenth century and beyond.' Emma Depledge, Université de Neuchâtel

• 1. Dead theatre, printed relics; 2. Old Shakespeare; 3. Canonizing Beaumont and Fletcher; 4. Chronic conditions; 5. Morbid symptoms.