Staged Normality in Shakespeare's England

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

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2. Introduction: Stages of Normality

   • Rory Loughnane

   Pages 1-29

3. Discourses of Normality

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 31-31

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   2. Circling the Square: Geometry, Masculinity, and the Norms of Antony and Cleopatra

      • Carla Mazzio

      Pages 33-67

   3. Normal School: Merry Wives and the Future of a Feeling

      • Elizabeth Hanson

      Pages 69-87

   4. Regulating Time and the Self in Shakespearean Drama

      • Kristine Johanson

      Pages 89-108

   5. Under the Skin: A Neighbourhood Ethnography of Leather and Early Modern Drama

      • Julie Sanders

      Pages 109-126

4. Negotiating Normality in Performance

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 127-127

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   2. Shakespeare’s Strange Conventionality

      • Brett Gamboa

      Pages 129-150

   3. Transgressive Normality and Normal Transgression in Sir Thomas More

      • Edel Semple

      Pages 151-171

   4. ‘So like an old tale’: Staging Inheritance and the Lost Child in Shakespeare’s Romances

      • Michelle M. Dowd

      Pages 173-192

   5. ‘Proper’ Men and ‘Tricksy’ Spirits: The Eunuch in Disguise in Twelfth Night and The Tempest

      • Brinda Charry

      Pages 193-211

5. Staged Normality and the Domestic Space

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 213-213

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   2. Everyday Murder and Household Work in Shakespeare’s Domestic Tragedies

      • Emma Whipday

      Pages 215-236

   3. Children, Normality, and Domestic Tragedy

      • Emily O’Brien

      Pages 237-258

   4. Feminine Transgression and Normal Domesticity

      • Stephen Guy-Bray

      Pages 259-276

   5. Afterword

      • Frances E. Dolan

      Pages 277-286

6. Back Matter

   Pages 287-299

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This book looks at the staging and performance of normality in early modern drama. Analysing conventions and rules, habitual practices, common things and objects, and mundane sights and experiences, this volume foregrounds a staged normality that has been heretofore unseen, ignored, or taken for granted. It draws together leading and emerging scholars of early modern theatre and culture to debate the meaning of normality in an early modern context and to discuss how it might transfer to the stage. In doing so, these original critical essays unsettle and challenge scholarly assumptions about how normality is represented in the performance space. The volume, which responds to studies of the everyday and the material turn in cultural history, as well as to broader philosophical engagements with the idea of normality and its opposites, brings to light the essential role that normality plays in the composition and performance of early modern drama.



This book was preceded by a companion collection, Staged Transgression in Shakespeare's England, published in 2013: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9781137349354

• Renaissance
• Drama
• Theatre History
• Early Modern
• Performance
• British and Irish Literature

“The present volume succeeds in assembling insightful, instructive and eminently readable essays that offer different perspectives on the complex cultural constellations and media … . Together, the essays compiled in this volume offer a rich introduction to early modern drama and the cultural work that it performs in its explorations of the normal and ordinary as objects of dramatic interest.” (Anne Enderwitz, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, Vol. 157, 2021)

• School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

  Rory Loughnane

• School of English, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland

  Edel Semple

Rory Loughnane is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Studies at the University of Kent, UK. He is an Associate Editor of the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016-), for which he edited more than ten plays. He has co-edited four essay collections, as well as the anthology, The Memory Arts in Renaissance England (2016).

Edel Semple is Lecturer in Shakespeare Studies at University College Cork, Ireland. She is co-editor of Staged Transgression in Shakespeare’s England (2013), and of a special issue of Early Modern Literary Studies on European women (2017). She has recently published on gender in Shakespeare on film, prostitution in early modern literature, and the critical history of early modern drama.

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