Performing Early Modern Drama Today

Pascale Aebischer is Associate Professor of Early Modern Performance Studies at the University of Exeter. After a combined honours degree (English and French) at the University of Bern and a postgraduate diploma at the London Academy of Performing Arts, she moved to Lincoln College, Oxford, where she was the recipient of a Berrow Scholarship and where she completed her DPhil. From 1999 to 2002, Aebischer held a Research Fellowship, funded by the National Science Foundation (CH), at Darwin College, Cambridge. During those years, she taught in Cambridge, Oxford and for the British American Drama Academy in London. She took up a Lectureship in Renaissance Studies at the University of Leicester in 2002 and moved to the University of Exeter in 2004. She is the author of Shakespeare's Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance (Cambridge, 2004), Jacobean Drama (2010) and Screening Early Modern Drama: Beyond Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2013). In spring 2013, Pascale Aebischer became General Editor of Shakespeare Bulletin, the leading journal of early modern performance studies. Kathryn Prince is a theatre historian at the University of Ottawa. Her project 'Shakespeare and Theatrical Space', funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, will be published as a book and has generated the practice-based creative project 'Measured Space', which experiments with Measure for Measure in light of the contemporary theories and practices in disciplines ranging from architecture to zoo-keeping. Early modern plays performed out of their own period were also the focus of her first book, Shakespeare in the Victorian Periodicals (2008) as well as her second, a forthcoming performance history of Much Ado About Nothing, along with book chapters in Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (2012) and Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century (2012), The Working-Class Intellectual in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (2009) and two volumes of the Dictionary of Literary Biography.

"This is an important and long-overdue book. As the contributors make clear, performance of non-Shakespearean early modern drama has been going on steadily for more than a century, yet every production is considered new and every work 'rediscovered.' This is due in large measure to the lack of consistent archiving and scholarly response....This collection goes a long way toward addressing these problems, not only with uniformly excellent essays, which cover a wide range of approaches, but also amazingly robust appendixes listing performances.....Summing up: Essential." --Choice

• 1. Introduction Pascale Aebischer and Kathryn Prince; 2. The early modern repertory and the performance of Shakespeare's contemporaries Lucy Munro; 3. The seeds of time: student theatre and the drama of Shakespeare's contemporaries Jeremy Lopez; 4. The performance of early modern drama at Shakespeare's Globe Farah Karim-Cooper; 5. Shakespeare's contemporaries at the Royal Shakespeare Company Coen Heijes; 6. The actors' renaissance season at the Blackfriars Playhouse Jacquelyn Bessell; 7. Dido, Queen of Carthage: site-specific Marlowe Rebecca McCutcheon and Sarah Thom; 8. 'A freshly creepy reality': Jacobean tragedy and realist acting on the contemporary stage Roberta Barker; 9. Early modern drama on screen Pascale Aebischer; 10. Letting the dead come out to dance: an embodied and spatial approach to teaching early modern drama Jonathan Heron, Nicholas Monk and Paul Prescott; 11. Professional productions of early modern drama, 1960–2010 Karin Brown; 12. Performances of early modern drama at academic institutions since 1909 Jeremy Lopez; 13. Performances of early modern plays by amateur and student groups since 1887 Jeremy Lopez.