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The emergence of a newly ambitious drama, first called “new drama” and then “modern drama” endowed theater with a new sense of intellectual ambition, and this is described in this chapter. Modern drama is usually characterized as non-Aristotelian and it is in this account that the chapter argues it to be seen more as Platonic. Though the ideas of Plato are often dismissed as a resource on how to look on modern drama, the most significant features of it can be found in Plato's own dramatic practice. In addition, modern drama could be called Platonic due to the persistence of the idea that theater should be an intellectually serious undertaking—a theater of ideas. The chapter also discusses the extent to which modern drama is a Platonic drama by examining the relation between two authors of modern Socratic plays that have had a particular influence on modern drama.

This chapter identifies the Taishō era and Henrik Ibsen with the birth of modern drama in Japan. It was also the birth of the shingeki movement, a fact that was borne out by another Ibsen production, that of A Doll House, by Tsubouchi Shōyō's Literary Society in 1911. But it was not only “young men” who were affected by Ibsen's plays. Almost singlehandedly, the plays were responsible for the “new woman” (atarashii onna) phenomenon. This was a time when modern theatre and drama became major players in the rising bourgeois culture. In short, Taishō was an era when theatre became a key forum for the exchange of artistic, social, and political ideas in Japan and drama came into its own as a literary form.

This introduction describes the structure of the book and the arguments of each contributor. It also outlines the main questions around the lost play Cardenio: was it really by Shakespeare and Fletcher? Was Theobald’s Double Falsehood really based on Cardenio? If so, how much did Theobald adapt it, and how much is original? Or was it his own forgery passed off as Shakespeare, as Theobald’s enemies claimed? How closely did the original Cardenio follow its source material in Cervantes’s Don Quixote? What can we learn from close scrutiny of the available documents? Can computer-aided stylometric tests establish convincing proof of Shakespeare and Fletcher authorship lying behind Theobald’s eighteenth-century adaptation? Can close critical analysis reveal what Theobald probably cut? Can modern stage adaptations of Double Falsehood recreate something akin to the lost original? All these questions are central to one of the great current debates about Shakespeare and early modern drama.

This chapter focuses on Jayshankar Prasad of Banaras who led the Hindi literary drama into its maturation and sophistication. Prasad was largely known as a short story writer and a dramatist but his enduring reputation was to be found in poetry. He came to occupy a position in the forefront of Chhayavad, the new romantic movement in modern Hindi poetry. In this chapter, the concepts which underpinned Prasad’s understanding of Chhayavad poetry are discussed briefly as they are instrumental in understanding the poetic and historical sensibilities prevalent in Prasad’s drama. His aesthetics of the Hindi theatre are examined together with his assessment of the modern Hindi drama and the evolution of the stage since Bharatendu Harishchandra. The chapter concludes with a discussion on Prasad’s most compact and mature drama, the Dhruvasvamini in order to evaluate the dramaturgical principles he developed.

The Introduction lays out the argument of the book, in part through discussion of critical responses to the geography of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Situating the book’s critical approach within the several scholarly fields it engages, including theatre history, theories of genre, Mediterranean studies, and theories of intertextuality, it then outlines the contribution Dramatic Geography makes to existing discussions of early modern Mediterranean plays. The Introduction goes on to offer an overview and analysis of how early modern drama stages space and location, working through episodes from plays including Henry V, Hamlet, and Antony and Cleopatra. Finally, it differentiates early modern ways of staging space from those employed in the Restoration theatres, stressing the greater flexibility and complexity of early modern methods, and makes a case for the importance of understanding dramatic geography if we are better to comprehend the ways in which drama creates meaning.

This chapter provides an overview of Alexander the Great in early modern English drama, as a popular but ambiguous emissary of the ancient near east. Alexander’s appeal and notoriety both in Europe and the across the Bosphorus meant that he became a voluble figure of global empire, representing both prevailing European imperial ambitions and their limitations. Drama proves a particularly rich place for exploration of these ambiguities. Highlighting a recurring fascination with imagining a dead Alexander (rather than the humanist exemplary model in life), early modern English drama regularly isolates the figure of Alexander for scrutiny through versions of the mise-en-abyme device, as a way of exploring the unreconciled tensions between the sometime humanist hero and the imperial villain.

While the plays of J. M. Synge are normally seen in the context of the ‘Irish dramatic revival,’ or the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, this chapter relates them to a wider spectrum of theatrical entertainments in Paris and particularly London. It follows a recent trend in theatre history to consider plays in their original performance contexts, rather than as dramas on the page, or primarily in relation to other writings by the same author. ‘Thick descriptions’ are provided of the activities of the writers and founders of the Irish dramatic revival in London in April 1897 and in February 1900, and their efforts to create an alternative ‘business model’ for a literary theatre to the large London entertainment factories. Attention is also given to how Synge’s plays were subsequently received as items in a menu of entertainments by London audiences and critics.

The ‘beloved community’ formed in Provincetown, Massachusetts in tandem with the high period of Greenwich Village’s bohemian ‘little renaissance.’ Once a prosperous whaling port, the village of Provincetown had been undergoing economic decline and a marked ethnic shift in the decades preceding its development as an art colony. By the turn of the century, its Catholic, Portuguese population overtook its ‘native’ Yankee one; at this time, the village amplified its reputation as home to two successful summer art schools and boosted its image within a booming regional tourist economy as a quaint, Cape Cod fishing village. A coterie of moderns from Greenwich Village discovered Provincetown’s relatively underdeveloped beaches and wharves and by the teens had made it their home base, at least during the summer season. This chapter core of this coterie lived out their bohemian identities by drinking copiously, dressing wildly, bathing naked, and forming the performing group that would come to be known as the Provincetown Players. This endeavour brought together individuals with a wide range of talents (as well as those with very little talent but a desire to participate in the fun) for theatrical events that served to consolidate—physically, in the space of the theatre, as well as ideologically, through the content of their plays—a distinctly modern and modernist ‘beloved community’ of friends, lovers, and associates at a distance from the metropolis.

The introduction describes the original survey of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century playbook typography on which the book’s arguments are based. It makes a case for typography as worthy of study by showing that printed plays were considered viable and profitable reading matter in their own time. It engages with recent field-shaping scholarship in book history and theatre studies to explain why playbook typography has not yet been taken up on its own terms. The introduction contends that early modern playbook typography yields a new way of understanding the surviving corpus of early modern playbooks: as reading texts that permitted readerly access to contemporary forms of theatricality rather than foreclosing the chance to experience their effects. In other words, the idiosyncrasies of early modern playbook mise-en-page offer a wealth of untapped evidence about the active—and necessary—creativity involved in the tricky business of making plays into books and books into plays.

“Modern Values” discusses the relationship between Ibsen’s drama and Hegel’s philosophy of art. With a focus on A Doll’s House, it shows how Ibsen, along Hegelian lines, investigates the costs of ahistorical and aestheticizing mindsets. In this way, he brings out the relevance of Hegel’s critique of naïve, romanticizing attitudes. However, with his determination to develop drama beyond its late romantic instantiations, Ibsen also points beyond the limitations of Hegel’s understanding of art.

Focusing on early modern accounts of execution and murder in drama and cheap print, this chapter draws upon a group of broadside and pamphlet execution narratives from the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, including accounts of the regicide of Charles I, and upon Thomas Preston’s (1537-1598) Cambyses, King of Persia (1569) and Shakespeare’s Richard III (c.1592-3). In their representation of the rhetorical performances of the passions of the key players, these texts illustrate not only how emotion might be communicated from one character to another, but also how they might persuade and ‘infect’ audiences and readers with contagious passion by manipulating the linguistic and dramatic conventions deemed appropriate in such deadly situations. Through dramatic performances of passion, the texts communicate important (and at times subversive) political arguments about the nature of tyranny versus legitimate rule, illustrating the potency of emotional performance on the early modern page and stage.

Playwright Eugene O’Neill jumpstarted his career and had his first major successes in and from the little art colony in Provincetown; this chapter focuses on O’Neill, the Provincetown Players’ most prominent member, who lived and worked there between 1916 and 1922. The chapter shows how the compressed scale and distinctive mobility of Provincetown’s creative community was crucial to O’Neill’s success. There, O’Neill was exposed to the art colony’s distinctive amalgamation of modern and experimental theatre practices, including those dealing with writing, staging, and promotion. His own work built upon these: he was especially adept at harvesting, adapting, and exporting these practices from the rural outpost to the metropolitan hub of modernist activity in New York. This chapter argues that the formal and topical elements of O’Neill’s notorious play The Emperor Jones (conceived and written in Provincetown), along with its production and promotional strategies, were distinctive to the little art colony. There, O’Neill cultivated and marketed to a ‘special audience,’ drew topical inspiration from long-simmering racial anxieties in the region, and expanded upon the Provincetown Players’ theatrical practice of superpersonalization: a writing and staging strategy that amplifies the bleed between character and actor in order to heighten the audience’s engagement in the play. These strategies kindled his white audience’s ‘racial feelings’: a move that brought the relatively unknown O’Neill into the national and international public consciousness and created a still-resonant sensation about his work.

Using the two parts of Thomas Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West, or a Girl Worth Gold as a case study, this chapter charts the emergence of ‘girl’ into early modern English, tracing two major shifts in the development of the vocabulary of female youth in dictionaries, midwifery manuals, literature, and drama. The first shift began in the early sixteenth century and involved the proliferation of specialised terms for female children. Following this period of elaboration, a second shift took place in the mid-seventeenth century, when ‘girl’ and the other terms in its semantic network began to be defined as separate categories of female youth.

This chapter centres on the claim that John Florio's translation of the Essays lends a strongly theatrical inflection to Montaigne's original French. Not only at the level of dramatic allusion, but within the very fabric of diction, idiom, and metaphor, Florio renders Montaigne into an English sharply attuned to contemporary interest in stage-plays and spectacle. The voice of Montaigne, for Jacobean poets, playwrights, and readers, is a voice exhibiting profound affinities with a theatrical orientation toward the world.