Romanticism Bewitched concludes with a discussion of Joanna Baillie’s Gothic tragedy, Witchcraft, written as a response to what she believed to be a missed opportunity by Scott in his novel, The Bride of Lammermoor, to explore the psychological and social dimensions of the rise of witchcraft. The first section outlines the similarities between Scott’s novel and Macbeth. Both Scott’s novel and Shakespeare’s tragedy take place in Scotland in a politically precarious moment with squabbling factions and dwindling confidence in the central authority of the government. In the second section, Baillie argues that the decidedly unsympathetic treatment of the female supernatural by Scott and others perpetuates damaging stereotypes and diverts our attention from the real problem – a social structure founded on inequity. Baillie’s tragedy explores the outbreak of accusations of witchcraft as the consequence of a diseased patriarchy and the abdication of the responsibilities of fathers, literally within the family unit and figuratively as the representatives of the authority of church and state.

When the King’s Men took over the residency of the Blackfriars indoor theatre in 1609, they embarked upon a period of conscious reinvention of company identity, combining their existing resources and reputation with a new playing space, audience, financial approach, and performative sensibility. The company made music a key part of this reinvention, drawing on its new assets to increase the presence and variety of original music in its plays. By 1642 they still held a reputation for musical innovation, performing newly written music for both new and older plays in the repertory; their musical settings were still newly circulated in manuscript and print into the 1650s. This chapter explores these musical reinventions, examining dramatic impacts of altered lyrics, melody, harmony, accompaniment, and performance style.

Mongolia hovers on the edge of early English drama: While no playtexts survive from the Elizabethan period featuring their history, there are consistent allusion to the peoples of the Tatary tribes unified under Chinggis Khan in English theatrical documents from 1536 onward. This chapter takes as a key case one of the eight surviving backstage-plots of the period to consider the stage life of Chinggis Khan inaugurated by the lost “Tamar Cham” plays. The two plays proved highly successful in the Elizabethan era and continued to haunt the paratextual record of early English performance into the late eighteenth century. The chapter explicates the financial data of the “Tamar Cham” plays in a repertorial context invested in Mediterranean tyrants to situate two newly discovered medieval source documents that together suggest a particular nostalgia in a fantasy if global unity.

The Introduction explains the collection’s argument, structure, and its interventions in the field. We challenge the fetishization of firsts in early modern drama studies, first performances, and first editions and highlight problems with privileging “maiden” performances and print “inceptions” of Renaissance plays over their ghost-like “afterlives” on the stage and page. Engaging with recent work in theatre and book history and editorial studies, the Introduction explores the idea that plays are indelibly marked and transformed by their transhistorical movement through different cultural sites of production and reception. We argue, in short, that the social, political, and aesthetic meanings of Renaissance drama were shaped by processes of renewal.

This chapter explores the political implications of reprinting Othello in republican England. Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the publication of early modern drama during the mid seventeenth century, examining how the ban on theatrical performance and the circumstances of civil war and revolution shaped the production and reception of pre-Civil War plays. The chapter builds on these studies by situating Othello within the ideological currents of English republicanism, focusing on the ways in which Venice, the play’s setting, took on new and pressing significance during the 1650s as a model of kingless governance. Renowned both for its elitist, rather than populist, tendencies as well as for its institutional stability, Venice exemplified an aristocratic form of republicanism that promised to secure traditional social hierarchies. By reprinting Othello in 1655, the bookseller William Leake capitalized on the topicality and political associations of the play’s Venetian milieu.

My aim, in this response to Peters’ timely and powerful work, is both to acknowledge its transformative force for legal studies and at the same time to introduce distinctions that may be of value in distinguishing discussions of the ‘theatricality’ of law from the emergence of a modern understanding of ‘theatre’ as the production of coherent and powerful fictions enacted by characters. The early modern period (1500–1650) is described, in chapter 5 of Peters’ study, as ‘the age of theatre’. If Peters shows how judicial proceedings draw on the performative aspects of rhetoric and theatre, my response aims to show how, in the ‘age of theatre’, theatre’s distinctive fictionality drew on the fiction-generating power of probable argument and inferential reasoning, as taught in legal rhetoric.

Comics provide an essential, alternative visual space to expand hip-hop style and narratives – and even have a claim as the essential vehicle for the visual representation of hip-hop today. The visual and lyrical comic art of Ronald Wimberly is exemplary of the productive and critical relationship between comics and hip-hop. This chapter puts his collaboration with M. F. Grimm (on 2007’s Sentences) into conversation with his largest solo work, Prince of Cats (2012; rereleased 2016), to demonstrate how Wimberly’s stylistic renderings and linguistic experimentations with the sounds of hip-hop create a parallel – if absurd and satirical – historical perception and critique of the visual registers of Black life in American politics and popular culture, even as (and because) the comic form depends on the visual and the lyrical.

Chapter 3 describes the influence of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and The Tempest on Plath’s poetry and prose, focusing on the gendered concepts of witchcraft and magic. The chapter contextualises Plath’s depiction of maternal malice and paternal control in the framework of twentieth-century interpretations of Macbeth’s witches and Prospero from The Tempest. It addresses the mythological origins of the female trio as metaphysical beings with divinatory powers who, for Plath, embody the inescapable maternal presence. The chapter outlines the similarities between Prospero’s magical power and the beekeeping of Plath’s father figure as a magical-scholarly power. In her writings, likewise seeks inspiration from her childhood, reimagining her Atlantic seascape as the magic island from The Tempest in which Prosperoean father emerges as an idealised and dominant figure. The chapter concludes that Plath’s allusions to the early modern supernatural figures were shaped and paralleled by post-war interpretations and poetic retellings. They reflect on the gendered understanding of magical power as a sinister and benevolent controlling force.

The first part investigates whether the young Shakespeare started his writing career as a ballad writer and explores the notion that he wrote some now-lost Armada ballads. The second part addresses Shakespeare’s reputation, in his time, for being a writer of ballads, and considers his involvement with ‘[Come] Live with Me’ as well as the ballad implications of The Sonnets and ‘A Lover’s Complaint’. The third part looks at plays for which Shakespeare adopts or perhaps writes ballads, Hamlet, Othello, and A Winter’s Tale, asking whether he published or allowed publication of these texts as paper songs. The suggestion made by this chapter is that Shakespeare, who so readily ‘product placed’ ballads in his dramas, was throughout his life a balladmaker (ballad writer) as well as a playmaker.

This chapter reveals that there are potentially many more ballads about Shakespeare plays than have previously been acknowledged. It considers ballads, lost and extant, for the plays of Richard III, Titus Andronicus, Edward III, The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, King John, The Merchant of Venice, Henry V, Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, and Anthony and Cleopatra. Its suggestion is that Shakespeare’s company may have been receptive to play ballads as part of a wider marketing strategy, and that Shakespeare himself, the company’s resident poet, was fond of the form and knowing enough to let its benefits be exploited.

This Chapter begins by considering the vocal disguises Kent and Edgar put on to obscure their identities in King Lear. It then widens its scope to consider other ways voices are altered and speech is falsified, eventuating in an expressive crisis. Over the course of the play, speech is pushed to its breaking point, and characters are reduced to traumatized, repetitive inarticulacy. Yet even when words cannot wield the matter, the sound of the voice remains meaningful. The most powerful statements in the play are verbally spare but emotionally and ethically full. This bears out Levinas’s belief that the act of saying is more important than the content of the said. Contesting the idea that logos is the primary source of meaning, King Lear demonstrates that it is through phone that we undertake the most meaningful of actions: namely, disclosing and delivering ourselves to the other.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre has a great deal to say about listening, especially in contrast to looking. This Chapter demonstrates that in Pericles visual modes of perception are imbricated in regimes of power and exploitation, while audition is presented as a way out. When characters in the play lend their ears to sounds and voices that are all-too-often silenced, ignored, or drowned out – especially those belonging to women and the natural world – they are miraculously redeemed and regenerated. Marina’s voice, in particular, drives the drama toward its happy conclusion. To account for the power of her voice, I turn to Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and David Kleinberg-Levin, each of whom takes aim at the oppressiveness of logocentrism, celebrating instead the enlivening energies of the pre-semantic and extra-verbal. As do these authors, Pericles associates the plenipotent voice of the play with the feminine, the more-than-human, and the beyond-meaning, indicating that these can usher us into productive and ethical relationships with others and our world.

This Chapter emphasizes the centrality of voice and ear in the oral cultures and theatrical enterprises of early modern England. It further demonstrates that the sound of the voice and the act of listening are especially important in the works of William Shakespeare. To prepare the reader for an in-depth exploration of the significance of voice and vocality in five of Shakespeare’s late plays, the Chapter reviews important work in the fields of sound studies and ethical criticism. It then provides an introduction to the philosophical thought of Emmanuel Levinas and Adriana Cavarero, whose work provides the theoretical basis for the analysis that follows.

This Chapter considers the significance of voice in Coriolanus, especially the way voices are located within bodies. It shows how the patricians situate their voices in the “worthier” parts of the body and the citizens’ voices in the “worser,” leveraging anti-corporeal and anti-materialist ideologies to authorize their own speech and discredit the citizens’. Nevertheless, the voices in this play are highly mobile. They repeatedly move about within bodies and between bodies, undercutting the patricians’ conservative approach and allowing us to envision radical alternatives. Invoking work by Emmanuel Levinas and Adriana Cavarero, the Chapter concludes by fleshing out these radical alternatives.

This Chapter focuses on the unruly vocality of Paulina, the woman “Of boundless tongue,” who refuses to regulate her speech (2.3.91). Unlike King Leontes’s counselors, who try to console him after the death of his wife and son, Paulina sounds a ceaseless lament that is faulted for being unreasonable and excessive. Nevertheless, this irrational, incontinent speech is precisely what is needed. Utilizing Nicole Loraux’s and Bonnie Honig’s work on mourning women in classical tragedy, this Chapter emphasizes the ethical and political efficacy of Paulina’s speech. Although phallogocentrism would dismiss female phone as empty noise, The Winter’s Tale locates it at the center of an ethical practice that can convert tragedy into comedy, saving us from our self-destructive egoism and transforming us into “precious winners all” (5.3.131).