ABSTRACT

First published in 1992. In the English Renaissance theater, the text is structured by the multiple and complex collaborations that the theater demanded between patrons and players, playwrights and printers, playhouses and playgoers. The essays in this volume attempt to register these collaborations, emphasizing the ways in which the theater is at once responsive to and constitutive of the social formations of Renaissance England. At the same time, these essays recognize that their historical grounding is not unproblematic.

part II|193 pages

The Plays

chapter 12|8 pages

The Will to Absolute Play

The Jew of Malta (1589)

chapter 13|11 pages

Subversion through Transgression

Doctor Faustus (c. 1592)

chapter 14|18 pages

Alice Arden's Crime

Arden of Faversham (c. 1590)

chapter 15|13 pages

Workshop and/as Playhouse

The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599)

chapter 16|17 pages

Ben Jonson and the Publicke Riot

Ben Jonson's Comedies

chapter 17|15 pages

City Talk: Women and Commodification

Epicoene (1609)

chapter 18|14 pages

Pastimes and the Purging of Theater

Bartholomew Fair (1614)

chapter 19|11 pages

Reading the Body and the Jacobean Theater of Consumption

The Revenger's Tragedy (1606)

chapter 20|14 pages

The Logic of the Transvestite

The Roaring Girl (1608)

chapter 21|16 pages

The Spectre of Resistance

The Tragedy of Mariam (1613)

chapter 22|12 pages

Italians and Others

The White Devil (1612)

chapter 23|12 pages

Incest and Ideology

The Duchess of Malfi (1614)

chapter 24|15 pages

Beatrice-Joanna and the Rhetoric of Love

The Changeling (1622)