Shakespeare / Play

Emma Whipday is Senior Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at Newcastle University, UK. Her first book, Shakespeare’s Domestic Tragedies: Violence in the Early Modern Home (2019), is co-winner of the Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award 2020. Other publications include Teaching Shakespeare and His Sisters: An Embodied Approach (2023) and Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England: Actor, Audience and Performance (co-edited with Simon Smith, 2022). She is also a playwright; her play Shakespeare’s Sister (2016) won the Theatre Royal Haymarket’s Masterclass ‘Pitch Your Play’ award, and her play The Defamation of Cicely Lee won the American Shakespeare Center’s 2019 ‘Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries’ prize.

This truly robust, multidisciplinary collection, written by 27 collaborators whose diverse research backgrounds range from zoology to dance to climate studies to puppetry, offers a type and genre of ‘play’ for everyone—not simply those interested in performance.

• List of IllustrationsNotes on ContributorsSeries PrefaceAcknowledgementsA Note on the TextPlaybill: Introduction or, What is (a) Play?, Emma Whipday (Newcastle University, UK)Prologue, Callan Davies (University of Southampton, UK)Act 1: Playing with Parts1. Playing the Second Part, Laurie Maguire (University of Oxford, UK)2. Sex Work and Silence in Measure for Measure: The Absent Part of Kate Keepdown, Emma Whipday (Newcastle University, UK)3. What is a Great Shakespearean?, Emer McHugh (Queen's University Belfast, UK)Act Break 1: Lost, but Once Played: Enlarging the Performative Possibilities of Shakespeare’s Theatre, David McInnis (University of Melbourne, Australia)Act 2: Playing (with) Women4. Fairy Toys and ‘Women’s Work’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merry Wives of Windsor, Chloe Preedy (University of Exeter, UK)5. Women Walking in Shakespeare: Playing with Gendered Space, Eleanor Rycroft (University of Bristol, UK)6 ‘The listening figure’: Women performers playing with Shakespeare in Victorian tableaux vivants, Sally Barnden (King’s College London, UK)Act Break 2: Playing in Private? Household and Courtly Performance in Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory, Alison Findlay (Lancaster University, UK)Act 3: Playing with Bodies and Minds7. ‘The fit is momentary’: Playing with Norms in Shakespeare, Susan Anderson (Sheffield Hallam University, UK)8. Notorious Abuse: Madness, Race and the Cruelty of Play in Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Urvashi Chakravarty (University of Toronto, Canada)9. ‘happy nights to happy days’: Minoritarian Mercutios, Affect, and the Bury Your Gays Trope in Adaptations of Romeo and Juliet, Vanessa I. Corredera (Andrews University, USA)Act Break 3: Play/Dance, Barbara Ravelhofer (Durham University, UK) Act 4: Playing with Stagecraft10. Staging a Moment of Song, Elisabeth Lutteman (Uppsala University, Sweden)11. Shakespeare and Puppet Play: Performing Objects in Early Modern and Contemporary Staging, Nicole Sheriko (Yale University, US)12. ‘Become a Christian and thy Loving Wife’: Conversion Play in The Merchant of Venice, Hailey Bachrach (University of Roehampton, UK)Act Break 4: The Bear Stage, Callan Davies (University of Southampton, UK) with Sophy Charlton (University of York, UK), Andy Kesson (University of Roehampton, UK), Liam Lewis (University of Nottingham, UK), Hannah O’Regan (University of Nottingham, UK), and Elizabeth Wright (University of York, UK)Act 5: Games and Jests13. ‘[C]ooling Cards’: Early Modern Playing Cards and Images of Kingship in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Plays, Louise Fang (Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, France)14. ‘Here’s a fellow frights English out of his wits’: Playing with Humour in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Lieke Stelling (Utrecht University, the Netherlands)15. Word Games, Affect and Play in in Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, Anne Sophie Refskou (Aarhus University, Denmark)Jig: Classroom Play: Strategies for Teaching Shakespeare with Games, Gina Bloom (University of California, Davis, USA) Afterword: Taking a Bow, Tiffany Stern (University of Birmingham, UK)Selected BibliographyIndex