Staged Normality in Shakespeare's England

Rory Loughnane is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Studies at the University of Kent, UK. He is an Associate Editor of the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016-), for which he edited more than ten plays. He has co-edited four essay collections, as well as the anthology, The Memory Arts in Renaissance England (2016).Edel Semple is Lecturer in Shakespeare Studies at University College Cork, Ireland. She is co-editor of Staged Transgression in Shakespeare’s England (2013), and of a special issue of Early Modern Literary Studies on European women (2017). She has recently published on gender in Shakespeare on film, prostitution in early modern literature, and the critical history of early modern drama.

“The present volume succeeds in assembling insightful, instructive and eminently readable essays that offer different perspectives on the complex cultural constellations and media … . Together, the essays compiled in this volume offer a rich introduction to early modern drama and the cultural work that it performs in its explorations of the normal and ordinary as objects of dramatic interest.” (Anne Enderwitz, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, Vol. 157, 2021)

• 1. Introduction: Stages of Normality - Rory Loughnane.- 2. Circling the Square: Geometry, Masculinity, and Norms of Antony and Cleopatra - Carla Mazzio.- 3. Normal School: Merry Wives and the Future of a Feeling - Elizabeth Hanson.- 4. Regulating Time and the Self in Shakespearean Drama - Kristine Johansen.- 5. Under the Skin: A Neighbourhood Ethnography of Leather and Early Modern Drama - Julie Sanders.- 6. Shakespeare's Strange Conventionality - Brett Gamboa.- 7. Transgressive Normality and Normal Transgression in Sir Thomas More - Edel Semple.- 8. Staging Inheritance and the Lost Child in Shakespeare's Romances - Michelle M. Dowd.- 9. The eunuch in disguise in Twelfth Night and The Tempest.- 10. Everyday Murder and Household Work in Shakespeare's Domestic Tragedies - Emma Whipday.- 11. Children, Normality, and Domestic Tragedy - Emily O'Brien.- 12. Feminine Transgression and Normal Domesticity - Stephen Guy-Bray.- 13. Afterword - Frances E. Dolan.