Chapter 4 considers dramatic plotting, exploring competing tastes and approaches, and focusing on Ben Jonson’s Volpone and Thomas Jordan’s The Walks of Islington and Hogsdon. It considers early modern debates about narrative and plot, including the decorum and necessity of adhering to classical precedents and theories; the respective merits of simplicity and conscious craft; and the need to incorporate individual narrative ‘moments’ popular with an audience. It puts various approaches emphasising structure and conscious artifice in conversation with the alternative view that a good plot is simply one that serves the set-piece moments that a playgoer desires. It argues that both Volpone and The Walks combine complex and visible structural craft with the careful provision of set-pieces designed to appeal to playgoers who judged their plots on moments rather than movements. These case studies reveal dramatists writing subtly and effectively in conscious anticipation of multiple approaches to playhouse censure.

Chapter 1 lays out the foundational claims of Experiencing Shakespeare’s Theatres, tracing how entangled understandings of pleasure and judgement framed theatrical response and exploring evidence of widespread, varied, and continuous playhouse censure. It argues that theatrical performances were often judged ‘in parts’, with features including narrative structure, verbal construction, and actorly technique engaged with individually by playgoers. This supplies the conceptual framework for the following chapters, each focusing on a specific aspect of playhouse performance that was demonstrably subject to censure by and evocative of pleasure from playgoers: spectacle; words; plot; action.

Chapter 5 considers the technical craft of theatrical performers, focusing on Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor. This final chapter tracks habitual censure of performers’ skill that took place even whilst playgoers engaged imaginatively and emotively with fictional worlds. It traces frameworks drawn from grammar school or university education such as actio and pronuntio and even demonstrates widespread familiarity with these concepts, also brought to bear by those lacking privileged educational backgrounds. Just as importantly, close engagement with the demands of play-texts reveals many other modalities of actorly skill offered for censure alongside gesture and delivery. The Jew of Malta and The Roman Actor indicate a mixed culture of censure that encompassed action and accent but was not limited to this framework. Skills as varied as interrupting, falling over, and playing the lute all contribute to the conspicuous playhouse display of technical skill, alongside actio and pronuntio.

Crusading-as-entertainment is not new. The fictionalisation of the crusades, Susan Edgington remarks, began even before the capture of Jerusalem in 1099; the medieval Chanson de geste, tales of chivalry and even the chronicles themselves, all sought to entertain audiences while informing them, recording past events and inspiring their emulation. The crusades, then, have always been (in the broadest sense) fictive events – alongside military, political and theological ones. Increasingly, the technologies of entertainment production and consumption have commodified the crusades for a broad audience; beginning with troubadour songs and epic poems and expanding their reach through the production of books and pamphlets, all the way to the twentieth century’s invention of the cinema and the twenty-first-century explosion of digital culture. They have produced, as Jerome de Groot has termed the boom in historical culture more generally, ‘historiocopia’: an almost endless abundance of historical material in (especially Western) popular culture.

The Coda draws together the preceding chapters by taking a single example from Twelfth Night that encompasses all of the ‘parts’ of a play examined separately in individual chapters: spectacle, words, plot, and action. Focusing on 4.2, when Malvolio is imprisoned in a ‘dark house’, it considers the many invitations to judge all four aspects in this single scene, as well as its potential to please playgoers with all of these elements. The Coda emphasises that the separate treatment of each ‘part’ in individual chapters is a means of making visible otherwise overlooked aspects of dramatic production and theatrical censure, rather than a suggestion that for example some plays sought engagement with their spectacle alone and others with their language. It indicates the potential for future studies to draw collectively on the topics and approaches of each chapter, rather than treating them as alternative options.

The Introduction sets out the critical context and core arguments of Experiencing Shakespeare’s Theatres. It explains that the book offers a new account of how playwrights like Shakespeare crafted their plays for demanding and varied commercial audiences. Rediscovering the many forms of judgement practised in the early modern playhouse, it investigates influences from the classical tradition and grammar school classroom to ballad and jest culture. Where prior studies have often treated ‘the judicious’ as a self-contained subset of playgoers, it reveals the variety of careful judgements made in the theatre by a wide range of playgoers. It shows that judgement and pleasure were not mutually exclusive but could be simultaneous elements of the same response. It offers an overview of the following chapters, including one tracing the wider context of pleasure and judgement, and specific chapters devoted to parts of a play that were especially subject to judgement and generative of pleasure: spectacle, words, plot, and actorly technique.

Chapter 3 considers engagements with words in performance, focusing on John Cooke’s Greene’s Tu Quoque, or The City Gallant, and Thomas Middleton’s Women, Beware Women. Tracing the plurality of linguistic tastes associated with playgoers, it tracks key forms such as jests, conceits, and ‘fresh’ language and explores key debates between heightened and plain style, and about novelty and aptness. These tastes persisted despite shifts in linguistic fashion, resulting in plays that, despite paratextual complaints about the impossibility of pleasing all tastes, encompass a striking degree of linguistic variety into their practice. Greene’s Tu Quoque and Women, Beware Women reveal playwrights catering to a variety of linguistic tastes simultaneously, even whilst asking playgoers to reflect upon the judiciousness of their tastes, and even the trustworthiness of language itself.

Chapter 2 explores early modern playhouse engagements with stage sights, focusing on Hamlet and Dekker and Ford’s The Sun’s Darling. It argues that whilst some early modern commentators distinguished the discerning ear from the passive gaze, it was more commonly held that commercial drama is best encountered with judicious ear and censorious eye. Building upon important work by Gillian Woods, Lauren Robertson, Amy J. Rodgers, and others who have recently dismantled long-standing assumptions about passive, uncritical engagements with playhouse spectacle, the chapter recovers a culture of playhouse engagement through sight that was as censorious as it was pleasurable, reflecting dramatic craft and theatrical convention concomitantly committed to the habitual and sophisticated use of visual dramaturgy. Hamlet exemplifies the ubiquity of visual censoriousness even in the reception of plays that may not seem ripe for such engagement, whilst The Sun’s Darling’s concerted visual stagecraft demonstrates just how high playwrights’ expectations of commercial theatregoers’ visual judiciousness could be.

Chapter 3 focuses on writing about the stage in essays, periodical fiction, and “moveable” books to explore the truism that no eighteenth-century theatrical form was more hyperactive than pantomime. Harlequin’s antics are the epitome of wantonness in that they are reckless and racy and flout the narration of a causal sequence. In response to debates about Garrick’s new hyperkinetic acting style, writers such as Denis Diderot and Arthur Murphy theorized new ways to understand the complex relationships between playwrights, actors, audiences, and at-home readers. Beginning in the 1770s, Sayer’s turn-up harlequinade flipbooks offered a new way to represent Harlequin’s motions on paper. Turn-up books allow the reader to control the plot: they oversee that special sense of wantonness and play that arises from capricious and irreverent action. Harlequin’s hyperactivity becomes in the turn-up book a form of hyper-interactivity, one in which the reader is the prime mover.

Hollywood’s overseas expansion during the 1920s–1930s resulted from interwoven economic, political, and industrial changes. Although European agents rented Hollywood movies prior to 1914, World War I destroyed European film industry infrastructures, thus allowing American companies to flood markets with their products. Simultaneously, US domestic growth resulted in vertically integrated companies whose international revenues facilitated greater quality and quantity of production. This achievement fostered by Jewish immigrant studio moguls repackaged the very utopian promise that had brought them to the United States. They accomplished what the US government could not – global advertisement for an American way of life and consumerism. Even though some nations attempted building robust film industries, boycotting American theatres and products, or legislating restrictions, the rise of Nazism and World War II prevented effective national cinemas. Hollywood’s global ascendancy is not simply about American domination but about how a national cinema became a global one.

Key to popular theatre were animal performances that provided amusement when mechanical power was eclipsing animal power and that illustrated science’s new hierarchies of human and animal bodies. Hybrid theatre-circus presentations regularly included horseback riding and display as well as dangerous animal stunts. For example, Mazeppa (1831) highlighted the lead character tied bareback to a horse that stampeded across the stage. The best-known Mazeppa (1861–1868) starred Adah Isaacs Menken who sensationalized the role by cross-dressing and carrying out the dangerous bareback ride. Menken became a star – a striking counterexample to Victorian femininity. After the Civil War, the transcontinental railroad expanded touring possibilities for these large-scale shows while Manhattan theatres built larger venues and more elaborate productions. The 1905 opening of Times Square’s Hippodrome was unparalleled for audience capacity (5,200), underground facilities for housing animals, and stage apparatus for supporting an entire circus and special effects.

Although musical theatre originally mixed theatrical and musical styles and genres – from minstrel shows and burlesque to ballet and opera – it only developed a cohesive form that told a story through speech, song, and dance in the 1920s. Musicals quickly became America’s most popular theatrical entertainment. They continued to evolve, even incorporating social topics and aesthetic elements emerging more organically as part of the story. Many recent hits have been jukebox musicals (relying on hit pop songs) and film-to-stage adaptations. There is a commercial rationale for this proliferation: whether it is name recognition of the sources or nostalgia for their original releases, they help box office success. Recently, even Disney has made repurposing its movie catalog into musicals a continuous, profitable operation. Musicals have also become a vehicle for satire and parody, resulting in memorable television and YouTube musical sketches. Broadway’s engagement with popular culture has become a symbiotic one.

This chapter examines the development of Spanish music in the seventeenth century, a period often described as one of decline following the Golden Age of Renaissance polyphony. Challenging this view, it highlights the cultural transformations that reshaped secular music, particularly its ties to poetry, theatre, and dance. The expansion of public theatres and the rise of new poetic forms, such as the romance nuevo, influenced musical composition, fostering the development of tonos humanos. Stylistic shifts included the growing prominence of the strummed guitar, the popularity of dance-songs like the zarabanda and chacona, and the widespread adoption of triple metre with hemiolas. The chapter also explores the role of music in Spanish theatre, distinguishing between public and courtly productions, and examines the emergence of mythological zarzuelas and comedias with extensive musical content. Additionally, it offers a fresh perspective on sacred music, stressing the interplay between traditional elements and new concertato conventions, as well as the enduring significance of the villancico in churches throughout the period and beyond. By drawing on both written sources and oral traditions, this study reframes seventeenth-century Spanish music as a dynamic and evolving landscape, marked by distinct and innovative characteristics, rather than a mere decline from earlier heights.

In this chapter, the lives of persons are put in dialogue with the transformation of the Vineyard region, thus highlighting complex transactions. How did changes in policies affect daily interactions in which older persons live, or the possibilities open to them when experiencing ruptures? How could they, in turn, draw on their experience to participate in daily arrangements or social transformations? And finally, what does it mean to be involved, as researchers, in some of these dynamics? This chapter reflects on the dialogical case study perspective chosen to approach ageing in the Vineyard region. It first examines how propositions, voices or perspectives emitted sociogenetically, shape or enter in dialogue at the other levels, and how ontogenetic or microgenetic dynamics are expressing or shaped by other dynamics. It then focuses on dialogues, misunderstandings, blind spots and tensions in such a complex case. Finally, it shows how, as researchers, we participated in this regional dialogue via an art-based method – theatre – that could be seen as a dialogical catalyst.

This chapter focuses on the expressive functions of tears, the face and the body on the early modern stage, to probe the deep relation between drama and the law, including their entwined but distinct investments in natural self-evidence and the rhetoric of presence. Through an interdiscursive approach, it shows how drama mines the complexities of hypokrisis through an engagement with the radical performativity at the core of law, and offers the provocation that law’s disknowledges are turned into a poetic condition of theatrical knowledge, and a forging of subjecthood and inwardness that complicates the distinction between the fiction of theatre and the reality of the law court. It ends with the suggestion that the theatre looks at, as well as beyond, the vivid invisibilities of judicial encounters to unpack the epistemic, affective and ethical impulses structuring the ‘scene’ of law.

As climate awareness intensifies in the first decades of the twenty-first century, theatre and performance studies continues to reflect on and revise the depth of its engagement with ecology, understood broadly as the interrelationships between organisms and their environments. ‘From Ecology to Ecocriticism’ covers the rise of ecology first as a science then its gradual shift to the humanities and onto theatre and performance studies. The question of the relationship between humans and nature now animates much of the scholarship on ecology, theatre and performance. Hence, if ecology is the study of the interrelations between organisms and environments, then ecology in theatre studies focuses on the interrelations of the theatrical and its referents in the politics of sentence at climate change. The chapter concludes by arguing that ecocriticism in Australia expands to encompass the impact of settler colonialism and the continuing dependence on fossil fuel consumption and exports.

In 1937, Graham Greene recruited Bowen to write theatre reviews for Night and Day, his short-lived journal. Throughout her career, Bowen thought about and wrote dramas for radio and the stage. In the 1940s, she wrote several short dramatic features for BBC radio with an emphasis on dialogue: one about Frances Burney, another about Jane Austen, a short play called ‘The Confidante’??IN TEXT ’The Confidant’, and an autobiographical piece called ‘A Year I Remember – 1918’. Castle Anna, a play that Bowen co-authored with John Perry, received indifferent notices when it was staged in February 1948. She also wrote a pageant on the history of Kinsale and a ‘Nativity Play’. As much as she was drawn to theatre, Bowen’s strength lay in writing for the ear rather than the eye.

This chapter explores a genre of activist theatre that has developed in play texts written in the French language in countries of West Africa since 2000. This theatre in Benin, Burkina Faso, and Togo builds on the legacies of performance traditions and picks up the momentum of theatre from the post-independence era starting in the 1960s, and then the activist theatre of the 1990s. This theatre has transitioned from what it was in the twentieth century theatre as it reacts to new realities in Africa and to the redefining of global relations. West African theatermakers have rejected the European models in a literary decolonization effort. By maintaining connections to earlier African forms, contemporary playwrights in Francophone West Africa keep traditional means of storytelling alive and use these influences to write new theatre genres that diverge from those of European theatre. The chapter examines examples of plays from Francophone West Africa to highlight three components of activist playwriting: how it is political, how it is universal, and how it relates to other forms of African theatre. Finally, it approaches theatre as an activist artform in performance, considering who is engaged, and where and when this happens.

This chapter explores works by two contemporary London-based Black British playwrights who also direct, produce, and perform: debbie tucker green and Mojisola Adebayo. Examining plays produced and performed between 2005 and 2019, the chapter suggests that both women create distinctive work that combines singular dramaturgy with transformative politics, shifting the framing of spectatorial perspective. They are also known for making innovative, experimental, and poetical work at the intersection of aesthetics and politics. The chapter traces the Blochian utopian possibility of ‘something’s missing’ (etwas fehlt) in tucker green’s dramaturgy of refusal. In her plays, the chapter suggests, we can identify what Herbert Marcuse’s called ‘the Great Refusal’, which develops a utopian sensibility via negation. Frequently working class, Black, and female, tucker green’s belligerent characters reveal to audiences what is missing in their difficult lives, how everything should be different in Britain. In Adebayo’s work, forged in the community-led Black Mime Theatre in the 1990s, utopian possibility forms part of the affective spectatorial encounter with her theatre. Whilst Adebayo’s plays are less abrasive, they similarly highlight what is missing. The transformative energy of her dramaturgy can be seen in utopian foretastes of alternative lives, in which Black, queer, and de-colonial modes of intersubjectivity become possible.