Predramatic Theatre

Eleanor Rycroft is Associate Professor in Early Modern Performance at the University of Bristol, UK, and author of Facial Hair and the Performance of Early Modern Masculinity (2019). Her work centres on embodiment and gender in premodern performance. She has written articles for journals such as Shakespeare, Shakespeare Bulletin, and English Literary Renaissance, and is currently writing a British Academy-funded monograph on the early modern staging of walking. Greg Walker is Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He has published widely in the fields of late medieval and early-modern literature and theatre history. He has also been involved, with Thomas Betteridge and Eleanor Rycroft, in performance-as-research productions of Heywood’s Play of the Weather (Hampton Court Palace), Lyndsay’s Satire of the Three Estates (Linlithgow Palace and Stirling Castle) and Jonson’s Masque of Augurs (Banqueting House, Westminster).

• Chapter 01: Introduction: Predramatic Theatre: a new category for theatre history.- Chapter 02: Postdramatic Theatre and Pre-theatrical Drama, What’s in a Name?.- Chapter 03: Byholdes myn heede, myn handis, and my feete’: Embodiment and Presence in Predramatic Theatre.- Chapter 04: ‘The play began never till now!’: Process and Time in Predramatic Theatre.- Chapter 05: Conclusion: Predramatic and Postdramatic Theatres.