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23 results in Cambridge Elements

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Site-Specific Shakespeare

Site-Specific Shakespeare
  • Benjamin Blyth
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2026
  • From ruined convents to rooftop gardens, parking lots to Zoom calls, theatre practitioners around the world are staging Shakespeare in a variety of unconventional and unexpected spaces. Drawing on practitioner interviews, case studies, and ten years of personal experience, this Element argues site-specific theatre-makers leverage 'tactical intelligence' in Shakespeare performance: a capacity for theatrical meaning-making through creative responses to spatial constraints, rather than strategic control. Organised around a heuristic of five types of 'site'– Revenant, Found, Shifting, Green, and Viral – with a conclusion that examines the challenges facing 'Future Sites' – the Element reveals a 'Guerrilla Shakespeare' in global site-specific performance. This is Shakespeare with a 'punk', 'pirate', 'bodega' spirit, where economic precarity is met with creative freedom and institutional barriers yield to democratic accessibility.
Performing Visible Pregnancy in Shakespeare's Plays

Performing Visible Pregnancy in Shakespeare's Plays
  • Patricia Lennox
  • Published online:
    11 November 2025
    Print publication:
    04 December 2025
  • This Element considers pregnant women and their costumes in the staging of Shakespeare's plays. It examines the connections between a character's costume and the changing social conventions of pregnancy. It questions mid twentieth century productions' reduction and elimination of well-established visible pregnancy costumes. It considers the role played by the sexual revolution in the sixties in visible pregnancy's reinstatement. The Element focusses on the varied significance of its presence to actors and directors and explores the archives to chart this previously under-examined interaction between social conventions, costumes, and the actors who wear them.
Performing Shakespeare on an Endangered Planet

Performing Shakespeare on an Endangered Planet
  • Katherine Steele Brokaw, Elizabeth Freestone
  • Published online:
    02 July 2025
    Print publication:
    24 July 2025
  • Given the many environmental crises facing the planet, we need to use all tools to address them, including Shakespearean theatre. This Element explains why Shakespeare is well-positioned to be an eco-playwright, how theatre-makers can adapt his plays to matter now, and how to make more ecological the many processes of Shakespearean theatre, from set design to performing outdoors. The co-authors are both directors, and conversations between them about their recent eco-productions of The Tempest for the Royal Shakespeare Company and A Midsummer Night's Dream for Shakespeare in Yosemite (California) give clear examples of both the why and how of eco-theatrical Shakespeare.
Shakespeare and the Restoration Repertory

Shakespeare and the Restoration Repertory
  • Stephen Watkins
  • Published online:
    10 February 2025
    Print publication:
    06 March 2025
  • This Element provides the first comprehensive study of William Davenant's Shakespeare adaptations within the broader context of the Restoration repertory. Moving beyond scholarship that tends to isolate Restoration Shakespeare from the other plays produced alongside it, this Element reveals how Davenant adapted the plays in direct response to the institutional and commercial imperatives of the newly established theatre industry of the 1660s. Prompted by recent developments in early modern repertory studies, this Element reads Restoration Shakespeare as part of an active repertory of both old and new plays through which Davenant sought to realize a distinctive 'house style' for the Duke's Company. Finally, it shows how Restoration Shakespeare was mobilized as a key weapon in the intense competition between the two patent theatres until Davenant's death in 1668.
Shakespeare and Nonhuman Intelligence

Shakespeare and Nonhuman Intelligence
  • Heather Warren-Crow
  • Published online:
    29 April 2024
    Print publication:
    02 May 2024
  • The Infinite Monkey Theorem is an idea frequently encountered in mass market science books, discourse on Intelligent Design, and debates on the merits of writing produced by chatbots. According to the Theorem, an infinite number of typing monkeys will eventually generate the works of Shakespeare. Shakespeare and Nonhuman Intelligence is a metaphysical analysis of the Bard's function in the Theorem in various contexts over the past century. Beginning with early-twentieth century astrophysics and ending with twenty-first century AI, it traces the emergence of Shakespeare as the embattled figure of writing in the age of machine learning, bioinformatics, and other alleged crimes against the human organism. In an argument that pays close attention to computer programs that instantiate the Theorem, including one by biologist Richard Dawkins, and to references in publications on Intelligent Design, it contends that Shakespeare performs as an interface between the human and our Others: animal, god, machine.
Approaching the Interval in the Early Modern Theatre

Approaching the Interval in the Early Modern Theatre
  • The Significance of the 'Act-Time'
  • Mark Hutchings
  • Published online:
    12 April 2024
    Print publication:
    25 April 2024
  • In requiring artificial light, the early modern indoor theatre had to interrupt the action so that the candles could be attended to, if necessary. The origin of the five-act, four-interval play was not classical drama but candle technology. This Element explores the implications of this aspect of playmaking. Drawing on evidence in surviving texts it explores how the interval affected composition and stagecraft, how it provided opportunities for stage-sitters, and how amphitheatre plays were converted for indoor performance (and vice versa). Recovering the interval yields new insights into familiar texts and brings into the foreground interesting examples of how the interval functioned in lesser-known plays. This Element concludes with a discussion of how this aspect of theatre might feed into the debate over the King's Men's repertory management in its Globe-Blackfriars years and sets out the wider implications for both the modern theatre and the academy.
Extended Reality Shakespeare

Extended Reality Shakespeare
  • Aneta Mancewicz
  • Published online:
    26 February 2024
    Print publication:
    06 June 2024
  • This Element argues for the importance of extended reality as an innovative force that changes the understanding of theatre and Shakespeare. It shows how the inclusion of augmented and virtual realities in performance can reconfigure the senses of the experiencers, enabling them to engage with technology actively. Such engagements can, in turn, result in new forms of presence, embodiment, eventfulness, and interaction. In drawing on Shakespeare's dramas as source material, this Element recognises the growing practice of staging them in an extended reality mode, and their potential to advance the development of extended reality. Given Shakespeare's emphasis on metatheatre, his works can inspire the layering of environments and the experiences of transition between the environments both features that distinguish extended reality. The author's examination of selected works in this Element unveils creative convergences between Shakespeare's dramaturgy and digital technology.
Staging Disgust

Staging Disgust
  • Rape, Shame, and Performance in Shakespeare and Middleton
  • Jennifer Panek
  • Published online:
    05 February 2024
    Print publication:
    29 February 2024
  • This Element turns to the stage to ask a simple question about gender and affect: what causes the shame of the early modern rape victim? Beneath honour codes and problematic assumptions about consent, the answer lies in affect, disgust. It explores both the textual "performance" of affect, how literary language works to evoke emotions and the ways disgust can work in theatrical performance. Here Shakespeare's poem The Rape of Lucrece is the classic paradigm of sexual pollution and shame, where disgust's irrational logic of contamination leaves the raped wife in a permanent state of uncleanness that spreads from body to soul. Staging Disgust offers alternatives to this depressing trajectory: Middleton's Women Beware Women and Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus perform disgust with a difference, deploying the audience's revulsion to challenge the assumption that a raped woman should “naturally” feel intolerable shame.
Sleep No More and the Discourses of Shakespeare Performance

Sleep No More and the Discourses of Shakespeare Performance
  • D. J. Hopkins
  • Published online:
    24 January 2024
    Print publication:
    22 February 2024
  • This Element focuses on Sleep No More, the iconic immersive theatre production of Macbeth produced by the British company Punchdrunk. Sleep No More and the Discourses of Shakespeare Performance frames this Shakespeare adaptation as part of a system of ghostly citationality through which audiences understand the significance of the past in performance today. Moreover, despite its seemingly analog format, Sleep No More is discussed as a valuable site for media research. And the concept of 'uncanny spectatorship' is introduced to describe audience practice in Sleep No More and other performance contexts. Ultimately, this Element offers readers the opportunity to explore a set of concepts that are significant to the study of Shakespeare in performance and to consider the ways in which audiences interact with bodies, spaces, text, and media in Sleep No More and other immersive experiences.
Early Modern Media Ecology

Early Modern Media Ecology
  • Peter W. Marx
  • Published online:
    23 January 2024
    Print publication:
    15 February 2024
  • The early modern world was as enigmatic as it was dynamic. New epistemologies and technologies, open controversies about the world and afterworld, encounters with various cultures, and numerous forms of entertainment wetted the appetite for ever-new sensational experiences, an emerging visual language, and different social constellations. Thaumaturgy, the art of making wonder, was the historical term under which many of these forms were subsumed: encompassing everything from magic lanterns to puppets to fireworks, and deliberately mingling the spheres of commercial entertainment, art, and religion. But thaumaturgy was not just an idle pastime but a vital field of cultural and intercultural negotiation. This Element introduces this field and suggests a new form of historiography-media ecology-which focuses on connections, formations, and transformations and takes a global perspective.
Shakespeare's Visionary Women

Shakespeare's Visionary Women
  • Laura Jayne Wright
  • Published online:
    11 December 2023
    Print publication:
    21 December 2023
  • Shakespeare's visionary women, usually confined to the periphery, claim centre stage to voice their sleeping and waking dreams. These women recount their visions through acts of rhetoric, designed to persuade and, crucially, to directly intervene in political action. The visions discussed in this Element are therefore not simply moments of inspiration but of political intercession. The vision performed or recounted on stage offers a proleptic moment of female speech that forces audiences to confront questions of narrative truth and women's testimony. This Element interrogates the scepticism that Shakespeare's visionary women face and considers the ways in which they perform the truth of their experiences to a hostile onstage audience. It concludes that prophecy gives women a brief moment of access to political conversations in which they are not welcome as they wrest narrative control from male speakers and speak their truth aloud.
Shakespeare without Print

Shakespeare without Print
  • Paul Menzer
  • Published online:
    16 June 2023
    Print publication:
    13 July 2023
  • Everything we know about Shakespeare – his world, his words, his work – is preconceived by print. This knowledge extends to cultural expressions that seek to evade ink, paper, and moveable type, such as performance, such as acting. Print privileges qualities quite alien to performance, however: standardization, reproducibility, and, above all, uniformity. Thus the master tropes of print occlude rather than clarify our thinking about acting. How might we think about Shakespeare and performance without print? Examining texts both early and modern, Shakespeare without Print contends that Shakespeare and performance has long been dominated by a medium alien to its expression, print, a foreign government that forecloses alternative conceptualizations and practices. Through a series of discrete but linked excursions into the relationship between Shakespearean print and Shakespearean performance, this Element auditions alternative prepositions to enfranchise scholars and practitioners from print, which currently binds and determines our various approaches to Shakespearean performance.
This Distracted Globe

This Distracted Globe
  • Attending to Distraction in Shakespeare's Theatre
  • Jennifer J. Edwards
  • Published online:
    04 May 2023
    Print publication:
    25 May 2023
  • This Element attends to attention drawn away. That the Globe is a 'distracted' space is a sentiment common to both Hamlet's original audience and attendees at the reconstructed theatre on London's Bankside. But what role does distraction play in this modern performance space? What do attitudes to 'distraction' reveal about how this theatre space asks and invites us to pay attention? Drawing on scholarly research, artist experience, and audience behaviour, This Distracted Globe considers the disruptive, affective, phenomenological, and generative potential of distraction in contemporary performance at the Globe.
Viral Shakespeare

Viral Shakespeare
  • Performance in the Time of Pandemic
  • Pascale Aebischer
  • Published online:
    11 December 2021
    Print publication:
    20 January 2022
  • This Element offers a first-person phenomenological history of watching productions of Shakespeare during the pandemic year of 2020. The first section of the Element explores how Shakespeare 'went viral' during the first lockdown of 2020 and considers how the archival recordings of Shakespeare productions made freely available by theatres across Europe and North America impacted on modes of spectatorship and viewing practices, with a particular focus on the effect of binge-watching Hamlet in lockdown. The Element's second section documents two made-for-digital productions of Shakespeare by Oxford-based Creation Theatre and Northern Irish Big Telly, two companies who became leaders in digital theatre during the pandemic. It investigates how their productions of The Tempest and Macbeth modelled new platform-specific ways of engaging with audiences and creating communities of viewing at a time when, in the UK, government policies were excluding most non-building-based theatre companies and freelancers from pandemic relief packages.
A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance
  • From the Restoration to the Twenty-First Century
  • Richard Schoch
  • Published online:
    19 April 2021
    Print publication:
    13 May 2021
  • This short history of Shakespeare in global performance-from the re-opening of London theatres upon the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 to our present multicultural day-provides a comprehensive overview of Shakespeare's theatrical afterlife and introduces categories of analysis and understanding to make that afterlife intellectually meaningful. Written for both the advanced student and the practicing scholar, this work enables readers to situate themselves historically in the broad field of Shakespeare performance studies and equips them with analytical tools and conceptual frameworks for making their own contributions to the field.
Robert Lepage's Intercultural Encounters

Robert Lepage's Intercultural Encounters
  • Christie Carson
  • Published online:
    02 February 2021
    Print publication:
    25 February 2021
  • This study returns to the origins of Robert Lepage's directorial work and his first cross-cultural interaction with a Shakespearean text to provide some background for his later work. This early work is situated within the political and social context of Quebec and Canada in the 1980s. Constitutional wrangling and government policies of bilingualism, biculturalism and multiculturalism all had a profound impact on this director, helping to forge his priorities and working methods. In 2018 two of Lepage's productions were cancelled due to concerns about cultural appropriation. Lepage responded by stating his view that the artist is as above the concerns of political correctness. While this approach was deemed acceptable in the 1980s, this study looks at the dangers posed by approaching cross-cultural creation from this standpoint in the 21st century.
Shakespearean Futures

Shakespearean Futures
  • Casting the Bodies of Tomorrow on Shakespeare's Stages Today
  • Amy Cook
  • Published online:
    21 October 2020
    Print publication:
    19 November 2020
  • Casting is the process by which directors assign parts to actors, creating the idea of the character for the audience. Casting is how we rehearse change, as we come to see an expanded repertoire of the kinds of bodies that are selected to play the lead, the hero, and the villain. This Element focuses on the casting in productions of Shakespeare from 2017–2020 to demonstrate how casting functions affectively and cognitively to reimagine who can be what. The central argument is that directors are using casting as the central mode of meaning-making in productions of Shakespeare.
Performing Early Modern Drama Beyond Shakespeare

Performing Early Modern Drama Beyond Shakespeare
  • Edward's Boys
  • Harry R. McCarthy
  • Published online:
    20 October 2020
    Print publication:
    12 November 2020
  • This Element provides the first in-depth study of the present-day all-boy company, Edward's Boys, who are based at King Edward VI School ('Shakespeare's School') in Stratford-upon-Avon. Since 2005, the company has produced a wide array of early modern plays, providing the most substantial repertory of early modern drama available for examination by scholars. The Element provides a comprehensive account of the company's practices, drawing on extensive rehearsal and performance observation, evidence from the company's archive, and interviews with actors and key company personnel. The Element takes account of the company's particular educational and strongly interpersonal environment, suggesting that these factors have a distinctive shaping force on their performance practice. In the hands of Edward's Boys, the Element argues, early modern drama becomes the source of company creation, ensemble practice, and virtuosic physical play, inviting us to reimagine what it means – and takes – to perform these plays today.
Shakespeare, Blackface and Race

Shakespeare, Blackface and Race
  • Different Perspectives
  • Coen Heijes
  • Published online:
    05 October 2020
    Print publication:
    29 October 2020
  • This Element addresses the topical debate on blackface, race and Othello. With Shakespeare performance studies being rather Anglo-centric, the author explores how this debate has taken a radically different course in the Netherlands, a country historically perceived as tolerant and culturally close to the UK. Through several case studies, including the Van Hove Othello of 2003/2012 and the latest, controversial 2018/2020 Othello, the first main house production with a black actor as Othello, the author analyses the interaction between blackface and (institutional) racism in Dutch society and theatre and how Othello has become an active player in this debate.
About Shakespeare

About Shakespeare
  • Bodies, Spaces and Texts
  • Robert Shaughnessy
  • Published online:
    09 September 2020
    Print publication:
    01 October 2020
  • This Element addresses the question of what Shakespeare in contemporary performance is about, and whether it really is, as it may claim to be, about Shakespeare. Far from charting a smooth journey from page to stage, the work of making Shakespeare into performances often involves deflection, evasion and circumnavigation. Drawing upon the work of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare's Globe and the Schaubühne Berlin, About Shakespeare examines theatrical bodies, the spaces inhabited by actors and audiences, and the texts that circulate around and between them.

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