This superb monograph examines how radical politics found expression in performance in the decade prior to the Glorious Revolution. The years from 1678 to 1688 saw the English monarchy rocked by successive crises, ranging from allegations of secret Catholic plots to murder the king (largely fabricated) to murmurings of dark dealings between Louis XIV and Charles II (largely true). The inability of Charles II to produce a legitimate heir also worried a Protestant citizenry who feared that the line of succession would devolve to James, the Catholic brother of Charles II. Arbitrary rule, strict censorship, excessive taxation, and an atmosphere of Stalinesque surveillance further inflamed the populace. As Johnson wryly notes, the problem with the Restoration was that it restored too much, especially the oppressive political attitudes that caused the Civil War in the first place. Amid this tumult, Johnson situates the patent theatres and street performance. He is certainly not the first scholar to do so, but he is, happily, the first in a long time to combine keen intelligence with common sense. That he tells this compelling story stylishly and with verve gives one all the more reason to read this first-rate study.

In 1896, Benedetto Croce donated to Naples's Biblioteca Nazionale two manuscript volumes from the late seventeenth century. These books had been prepared by Annibale Sersale, Count of Casamarciano, and contained 183 canovacci (scenarios) of the commedia dell'arte. Today, this Casamarciano zibaldone (collection) comprises the largest extant collection of commedia canovacci with nearly a quarter of the total surviving scenarios from any source. By contrast, Flaminio Scala's Il teatro delle favole rappresentative (first published in 1611, and translated into English by Henry F. Salerno in his influential 1967 edition) contains only 50. The Casamarciano scenarios have never been published in English translation, or even, astonishingly, in any complete Italian version, before now. For this reason alone, The Commedia dell'Arte in Naples is a publication of enormous significance for the dramaturgical study of commedia.

A Director Prepares presents Ann Bogart's approach to theatre training and art through a series of essays—memory, violence, eroticism, terror, stereotype, embarrassment, and resistance. Like Peter Brook's The Empty Space, the volume investigates the art of theatre and the creative process.

Bryan Reynolds's fascinating book, Becoming Criminal, contributes to the growing scholarly work that examines relations among early modern literature, theatre, and legalism. Reynolds identifies a distinct late sixteenth-century criminal culture that operated according to its own aesthetic, ideology, language, and lifestyle. This culture's proximity to state official culture was a crucial part of its own identity and also of its power to undermine and dissent from that official cultural identity. “Self-defined by the criminal conduct and dissident thought” of its members, and “officially defined by and against the dominant preconceptions of English cultural normality,” this culture “constituted a subnation that illegitimately occupied material and conceptual space within the English nation” (1). In this view, it sought not to destroy the dominant system but to feed off of it, possessing in itself a paradoxical coherence and chosen way of life that “transverses” official culture: that lies athwart of it, crosses into it, and is fetishized by it.

This book, which focuses on the manner in which four Renaissance actor-playwrights justify their practice as dramatists, is both stimulating and exasperating, since it is based on a splendid idea insufficiently realized. The central premise of Nora Johnson's study is her contention that recent scholarship has tended to overemphasize Ben Jonson's model of “sovereign” authorship to the exclusion of those early modern English dramatists who acknowledged the communal and collaborative sources of their labor.

The first complete study of the dramatic conventions that governed soliloquies in Western drama throughout history, Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies reveals a drastic and heretofore undisclosed shift in those conventions after Shakespeare's death. In theatrical history there have been three types of soliloquy: speeches that are addressed directly to the audience, speeches that are self-addressed, and interior monologues. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, one type of soliloquy occupied a place as the dominant convention during each major period of theatrical history. Hirsh argues that during Shakespeare's lifetime, soliloquies were meant to represent self-addressed speech. The implications of this argument are profound.

Scholars preparing production histories of individual Shakespeare plays have long been faced with the challenges of structuring their studies. The scholar can choose to write a straightforward one-actor-or-production-after-another monograph (Rosenberg on Othello, Ripley on Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, Bartholomeuz on Macbeth and The Winter's Tale, etc.), a transhistorical encyclopedic scene-by-scene and line-by-line collation (Rosenberg on King Lear, Macbeth, and Hamlet), a transhistorical interlineated text (Bratton and Hankey's Shakespeare in Production editions, under a variety of different series titles and publishers), or an exemplary-production snapshot album (Mulryne and Bulman's Shakespeare in Performance series).

In their “Editors' Preface” to the Cambridge University Press Shakespeare in Production series, J. S. Bratton and Julie Hankey proudly describe the “comprehensive dossier of materials,” including “eye-witness accounts, contemporary criticism, promptbook marginalia, stage business, cuts, additions and rewritings,” that make up the heart of this brilliant and exceptionally useful collection of Shakespeare editions. Conceived by Jeremy Treglown and first published by Junction Books, the series was later printed by Bristol Classical Press as Plays in Performance, though none of the original four titles remains in print. Already published in the descendant Cambridge Shakespeare in Production series are nine plays—A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, The Tempest, King Henry V, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Merchant of Venice—with Macbeth, Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, Othello, and As You Like It forthcoming.

This richly eclectic volume contains much of interest for theatre historians and academic critics of Renaissance drama as a sociocultural phenomenon. Additionally, it offers a good deal for theatre artists. The main part of the volume, dedicated to the theme of “Shakespeare and Religions,” comprises sixteen articles on topics as various as performance in Japan and the first translation of Shakespeare into Hebrew. Most of the articles are broadly new historicist in flavor, offering insights into interpretation through examination of cultural formations embedded within the text of the plays. Religion is, of course, demonstrated to be one of the most formative influences.

“One of modern theatre history's enduring shibboleths is that the Shakespearean stage was a bare one,” assert editors Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda in their introduction to this remarkable volume of essays.