Transnational Mobilities in Early Modern Theater

Robert Henke is Professor of Drama and Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis, USA, and the author of Pastoral Transformations: Italian Tragicomedy and Shakespeare's Late Plays (1997) and Performance and Literature in the Commedia dell'Arte (2002). With M.A. Katritzky, he is the editor of European Theatre Performance Practice, 1580-1750 (Ashgate, 2014). Eric Nicholson is a Lecturer at Syracuse University in Florence, Italy, where he teaches courses on comedy and theater. In Florence and elsewhere he has directed numerous full-scale productions of plays by Shakespeare, Molière, Flaminio Scala, and others. Their previous Ashgate collection is Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater (2008).

'The need for this book, for both scholars and students of early modern Europe, cannot be overstated. For many years research has productively aspired to global inclusivity in its understanding of the period’s theater and culture. The distinguished contributors to this book rise to the challenge brilliantly as they open the way for future work. Transnational Mobilities in Early Modern Theater is arguably the most groundbreaking and timely intervention that the field has seen since the cultural materialism of the 1980s.' Bryan Reynolds, Chancellor’s Professor of Drama, University of California, Irvine, USA 'The highly successful research collective Theatre Without Borders has done it again: this remarkable range of essays on early modern theatre demonstrates that research into the drama of Shakespeare, his British as well as his European contemporaries must be interdisciplinary and comparative if it wishes to develop a proper sense of the theatre’s participation in a distinctive mode of cultural mobility.' Ton Hoenselaars, Professor of Early Modern English Literature and Culture, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

• 1: Introduction; 1: Systems and Theatergrams; 2: The Taming of the Shrew, Italian Intertexts, and Cultural Mobility; 3: Resources in Common: Shakespeare and Flaminio Scala; 4: “Are You a Comedian?”: The Trunk in Twelfth Night and the Intertheatrical Construction of Character; 2: The Pastoral Zone; 5: Hymen and the Gods on Stage in Shakespeare's As You Like It and Italian Pastoral; 6: Et in Arcadia the Dirty Brides 1; 3: Performance Texts and Costumes; 7: Dido, Boy Diva of Carthage: Marlowe's Dido Tragedy and the Renaissance Actress 1; 8: Forms of Fashion: Material Fabrics, National Characteristics, and the Dramaturgy of Difference on the Early Modern English Stage; 4: Northern and Central European Mobilities; 9: Shakespeare's “portrait of a blinking idiot”: Transnational Reflections 1; 10: English Comedy and Central European Marionette Drama: A Study in Theater Etymology 1; 5: Translation Theory and Practice; 11: Trade in Exile; 12: Found and Lost in Translation; 13: Shakespeare's Untranslatability; 14: Lebedeff, Kendal, Dutt: Three Travelers on the Indian Stage; Epilogue; 15: Early Modern Theater in Motion: The Example of Orpheus