Amanda Bailey argues that the city comedy genre, with its investigation of homoerotic networks of financial and social obligation, is both structurally and thematically indebted to changing practices surrounding the debt bond. Her essay traces how the landmark legal decision of Slade’s Case is processed through Thomas Middleton’s use of the debt bond in Michaelmas Term—a play that dramatises for the benefit of its Inns of Court audience ‘the court’s intensified interest in the intentionality of the debtor’

The plays of Howard Barker the places of punishment become a way of addressing one of the great themes of Western drama: that of the relationship between emotion, rationality and the law. Barker's 'poetic' Theatre of Catastrophe deals compulsively with prisons. David Ian Rabey talks about the way in which 'Barker's landscapes are frequently. Dramaturgically, Barker's prisons are frequently places to escape from or to be released from in order to permit a subsequent journey, as happens in plays such as Fair Slaughter, A Wounded Knife and Ten Dilemmas: The Incarceration Text. In Brutopia Barker places a prison for heretics, literally, at the heart of More's apparently idyllic garden. One of his most moving essays is 'On Watching a Performance by Life Prisoners': this was a performance of one his own plays in Wormwood Scrubs, by a drama group formed in the prison.

The echoes of Rome appear to strike the author of Julius Caesar as both literal and figurative. In the circular world of Julius Caesar, as Theodor Adorno wrote of Richard Wagner's opera house at Bayreuth, 'every step forwards is a step back into the remote past'. Like Marat, William Shakespeare's revolutionaries intend to be authors of a 'lofty scene' that abstracts 'peace, freedom, and liberty' from the carnal matter of the dead sovereignty. In Julius Caesar Shakespeare's Roman triumph is said to reprise Elizabeth's Armada parade. The 'conscious classical parallel' with the empire structured Elizabeth's festivals because the regime projected its power as a Roman renovatio, and English poets 'thought of these shows as "triumphs"'. Of all the 'untimely matters' in Julius Caesar it is the installation of 'the public chair' or official 'pulpit' that introduces the greatest derangement of Shakespeare's playhouse yet attracts least comment.

Srigley suggests Hamlet was, in fact, revived at Greenwich in July 1606, when 'the King of Denmark would have watched a play in which the mirror was held up' to his inebriated and philandering court. William Shakespeare goes to conspicuous lengths in the Hamlet quartos to make Elsinore a vertiginous 'place of desperation'. Andrew Hadfield speaks for a current consensus when he deciphers Hamlet as 'a coded warning' of 'the problems that James might bring with him to England political instability. Far from being Shakespeare's own artistic manifesto, Hamlet's patronizing 'advice' to the players as their self-appointed Maecenas would have made for 'a disastrous failure in the Elizabethan commercial theatre'. On 23 January 2009 fresh evidence was published to confirm that Shakespeare's apprehension about the rottenness of Denmark had been acute. 'It is even suggested', one newspaper reported breathlessly, 'that Shakespeare used the alleged liaison as an inspiration for Hamlet'.

Una’s time with the satyrs represents the Church’s mission to the gentiles as described in the book of Acts. The satyrs’ idolatry of Una and her ass echoes (i) that of the gentiles in their attempt to worship Peter (as described in Acts 10), and (ii) the response of the people of Lystra and Melita to Paul (Acts 14, Acts 28). But the world of the satyrs is insistently mythological. As such, it is more representative of the gentile imagination than it is of the first-century Graeco-Roman world. Spenser implies that, although (as the mythographers emphasized) this mythology was fictional, it nevertheless contains poetic truth, even to the extent of foreshadowing—as Boccaccio allowed—Christian revelation. ust as the gospel history represented in canto iii resonates with Tudor history, so also does the subsequent history represented by canto vi. Spenser’s satyrs are suggestive of late medieval Catholics who, in the eyes of the Reformers, had reverted to paganism. Satyrane may represent those Catholic humanists who found in the forest of pagan mythology a fountain of Christian truth.

Howard Barker's plays of the seventies and mid-eighties dramatise the machinations of the state in recognisably English social and cultural institutions, environments and landscapes, such as burnt-out prisons, abandoned hospitals, bank vaults, mausoleums, battlefields and castles. In The Love of a Good Man, one particular body acts as the focus for the national trauma of the First World War. Barker places the body both literally and symbolically at the centre of the play: it is alienated, used as an icon, and invested with mystic status in order to preserve hegemony in existing power relations. The Power of the Dog moves outwards to another European battlefield, in Poland, to depict the failure of English language as control. In Women Beware Women, Barker explores the contradictory impulses offered by desire that act as a maddening spur to change, and entry into the political arena.

Howard Barker's texts are rewarding for actors, who delight in the muscularity of the language, the scale of imaginative landscape and liberty from the utilitarian. The definition of a Wrestling School acting style has been elusive; the company is fluid and comprises actors with a range of performance practices and processes. Howard Barker's characters are also Actors, experiencing and articulating an intense self-consciousness. A painful understanding of existential isolation is the origin of this self-consciousness, and a potent engine for the projection of self into the world, without meditation. The danger for the actor is therefore that they will act badly, whereas the danger of rhetoric for the Barker character is the experience of isolation engendered by a lack of response. The quality of anxiety in Barker's work is peculiarly delicate, producing a fineness of perception that separates it from more conventional experiences of that state.

New Historicist critics liked to believe that in King Lear, William Shakespeare 'insists on the iconic nature of the monarch's body'. Stephen Booth observes, in King Lear the cliche that 'All the world's a stage' has suddenly become so fraught because the play as an event in the lives of its audience. Shakespeare's revulsion from his conflicted desire 'to please you every day' may have been triggered by the sheer number of days on which the King's Men were expected to perform for King James. In the year preceding the tragedy about 'the great stage of fools' the Revels Office listed eleven court appearances by His Majesty's players. Shakespeare devised at the instant of his greatest access to the royal palace should be his retelling of Cinderella. Charles Perrault, the architect who first recorded Cendrillon, had been Colbert's aide for historians 'suggesting and supervising cultural policies to glorify the king'.

Sir Walter Ralegh's career provides us a range of texts to which we can map considerations of the actions, assumptions, and attitudes required to maintain family ties, particularly father and son bonds, paternal authority, and family estates and status. This chapter addresses such considerations with particular reference to the Discoverie of Guiana, Instructions to a Son, Ralegh's contribution to the flourishing minor genre of paternal advice, and 'Three things there bee', Ralegh's short poem of fatherly admonishment. More surprisingly, Ralegh discovers in Guiana the rich promise of patrilineal governance. Several aspects of Ralegh's adherence to patrilineal imperatives come together with particular force in his representation of exchanges with Topiawari, the very old king of Aromaia. The divergence between God's ways and Ralegh's fatherly instruction can be felt in the subtle but nonetheless real contradictions that riddle Ralegh's discussion of poverty.

This chapter presents the conversation between Howard Barker, the legendary playwright and artistic director of the Wrestling School, and Professor David Ian Rabey (University of Aberystwyth) at the Martin E Segal Theater Center at CUNY Graduate Center, New York. Discussion revolves around history, abandoning social realism, creating new definitions of political theatre, the importance of audience's silence, tragedy, working with actors, the importance of style and the ethics of directing. The text contains selectively edited and condensed audience's questions and formulations in the service of succinctness to permit their dissemination to a wider audience. This dialogue was the closing event in Howard Barker at the Segal Center, a daylong symposium on Barker's work held on 10 May 2010, co-presented by theatre minima and the CUNY Graduate Center's Martin E. Segal Theater Center.