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In the opening decades of the twentieth century in Japan, practically every major author wrote plays that were published and performed. This book examines the full range of early twentieth-century Japanese drama and includes translations of representative one-act plays. The book looks at the emergence of drama as a modern literary and artistic form and chronicles the creation of modern Japanese drama as a reaction to both traditional (particularly kabuki) dramaturgy and European drama. Translations and productions of the latter became the model for the so-called New Theatre (shingeki), where the question of how to be both modern and Japanese at the same time was hotly contested. Following introductory chapters on the development of Japanese drama from the 1880s to the early 1930s, are translations of nine seminal one-act plays by nine dramatists, including two women, Okada Yachiyo and Hasegawa Shigure. The subject matter of these plays is that of modern drama everywhere: discord between men and women, between parents and children, and the resulting disintegration of marriages and families. Realism prevails as the mode of modernity, but other styles are presented: the symbolism of brittle melodrama, minimalistic lyricism, politically incisive expressionism, and a proto-absurdist work by Japan's master of prewar drama, Kishida Kunio.

In this in-depth study of Bernard Shaw's most controversial drama, Major Barbara (1905), Sidney P. Albert traces the play's profound connections with Plato's Republic and Euripides's Bacchae, providing a comprehensive reading that evokes unexplored depths of meaning and challenges prevailing conceptions. Albert reveals deeper dimensions of the work that have gone previously unexplored and demonstrates the influence these classics had on Shaw's development as an artist and philosopher. He explores the Dionysian and Platonic elements in Major Barbara to illuminate how classical themes were modernized by Shaw. While examining the interrelations of the central characters in their social settings, Shaw, Plato, and Euripides searches out the complex layers of meaning in one of Shaw's most enigmatic dramas. Albert convincingly reveals Shaw's interaction with Greek thought in a way that reconfirms ancient wisdom yet goes beyond it, adapting it to the social, political, and humanistic perspectives of the modern world. It is the only full-length book published on Shaw's important drama Major Barbara and is one of very few books demonstrating the importance of Shaw's classical influences. It provides a uniquely balanced and comprehensive close reading of Major Barbara that lays to rest numerous partial, unbalanced readings of the drama by critics.

Typographies of Performance is the first book-length study of early modern English playbook typography. It tells a new history of drama from the period by considering the page designs of plays by Shakespeare and others printed between the end of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century. It argues that typography, broadly conceived, was used creatively by printers, publishers, playwrights, and other agents of the book trade to make the effects of theatricality—from the most basic (textually articulating a change in speaker) to the more complex (registering the kinesis of bodies on stage)—intelligible on the page. The coalescence of these experiments into a uniquely dramatic typography that was constantly responsive to performance effects made it possible for “plays” to be marketed, collected, and read in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a print genre distinct from all other genres of imaginative writing. It has been said, “If a play is a book, it is not a play.” Typographies of Performance shows that “play” and “book” were, in fact, mutually constitutive: it was the very bookishness of plays printed in early modern England that allowed them to be recognized by their earliest readers as plays in the first place.

Focusing on early modern plays that stage encounters between peoples of different cultures, this book asks how a sense of geographical location was created in early modern theatres that featured minimal scenery. While previous studies have stressed these plays’ connections to a historical Mediterranean in which England was increasingly involved, this book demonstrates how their dramatic geography was shaped through a literary and theatrical heritage. Reading canonical plays including The Merchant of Venice, The Jew of Malta, and The Tempest alongside lesser-known dramas such as Soliman and Perseda, Guy of Warwick, and The Travels of the Three English Brothers, Dramatic Geography illustrates, first, how early modern dramatists staging foreign worlds drew upon a romance tradition dating back to the medieval period, and second, how they responded to one another’s plays to create an ‘intertheatrical geography’. These strategies, the book argues, shape the plays’ wider meanings in important ways, and could only have operated within the theatrical environment peculiar to early modern London: one in which playwrights worked in close proximity, in one instance perhaps even living together while composing Mediterranean dramas, and one where they could expect audiences to respond to subtle generic and intertextual negotiations. In reassessing this group of plays, the book brings into conversation scholarship on theatre history, cultural encounter, and literary geography; it also contributes to current debates in early modern studies regarding the nature of dramatic authorship, the relationship between genre and history, and the continuities that run between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries.

This book challenges the narrative of Shakespeare's ‘bare’ stage by looking at the ‘ground zero’ of early modern theatrical representation: the painted body of the actor. Organised as a series of studies and considering the impact of the materiality of stage properties on live performance, the four chapters of the book examine goldface and divinity in York's Corpus Christi play; bloodiness in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, including the unexpected use of blood as a disguise device; blackface performance within seventeenth-century court masques and in popular plays performed at the public playhouses; and finally whiteface, death, and stoniness in two King's Men plays of 1611. Not only did dramatists turn to paint to sustain a variety of theatrical illusions, they also strategically manipulated the multiple significations of this technology to create stage characters with complex effects of depth; allude to past and to contemporary performances; and thrill audiences by showcasing actors’ virtuoso transformations. Addressing current debates about the relationship between pre- and early modern subjectivity and embodiment, this book challenges the persistent notion that the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries was built predominantly around a new, ‘modern’ language of interiority. As a whole, the book questions the boundaries of the period categories ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’ by demonstrating important continuities in theatrical labour and theatrical materials from medieval cycle drama through to the popular and courtly drama of the 1630s.

Chaste Value reassesses chastity’s significance in early modern drama, arguing that presentations of chastity inform the stage’s production of early capitalist subjectivity and social difference. Plays invoke chastity—itself a quasi-commodity—to interrogate the relationship between personal and economic value. The economic imagery surrounding chastity ranges from romantic evocations of treasure to more quotidian references to usury, counterfeiting, and commodity exchange. Attending to such discourse in late Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, Chaste Value argues that representations of chastity (married fidelity as well as virginity) figure centrally within the early modern theatre’s interrogation of early capitalism, particularly with regard to the incorporation of people into commercial exchange. Through chastity discourse, the stage disrupts pre-capitalist ideas of intrinsic value while also reallocating such value according to emerging hierarchies of gender, race, class, and nationality. Chastity, therefore, emerges as a central category within early articulations of humanity, determining who possesses intrinsic value and, conversely, whose bodies and labour can be incorporated into market exchange.

Asian theatre is usually studied from the perspective of the major traditions of China, Japan, India, and Indonesia. Now, looking at the contemporary theatre scene in Southeast Asia, this book shows that performance in some of the lesser known theatre traditions offers a vivid and fascinating picture of the rapidly changing societies in the region. The book examines how traditional, modern, and contemporary dramatic works are being presented for local audiences. It places performances in their historical and cultural contexts and also connects them to the social, political, linguistic, and religious movements of the last two decades. Each chapter addresses theatre in a different country and highlights performances exhibiting the unique conditions and concerns of a particular place and time. Most performances revolve in some manner around “contemporary modernity,” questioning what it means—for good or ill—to be a part of the globalized world. Chapters are grouped by three general and overlapping themes. The first is characterized by the increased participation of women in the performing arts. The second is concerned with the effects of censorship on theatre production. A third is distinguished by a focus on nationalism. The book shows the many influences of the past and how the past continues to affect cultural perceptions. It addresses major trends, and underscores how theatre continues to attract new practitioners and reflect the changing aspirations and anxieties of societies in immediate and provocative ways even as it is being marginalized by television, film, and the internet.

This book examines why early modern drama’s response to English settlement in the New World was muted, even though the so-called golden age of Shakespeare coincided with the so-called golden age of exploration: no play is set in the Americas; few plays treat colonization as central to the plot; and a handful feature Native American characters (most of whom are Europeans in disguise). However, advocates of colonialism in the seventeenth century denounced playing companies as enemies on a par with the Pope and the Devil. Instead of writing off these accusers as paranoid cranks, this book takes as its starting point the possibility that they were astute playgoers. By so doing we can begin to see the emergence of a “picture of America,” and of the Virginia colony in particular, across a number of plays performed for London audiences: Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, The Staple of News, and his collaboration with Marston and Chapman, Eastward Ho!; Robert Greene’s Orlando Furioso; Massinger’s The City Madam; Massinger and Fletcher’s The Sea Voyage; Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl; Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and Fletcher and Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. We can glean the significance of this picture, not only for the troubled Virginia Company, but also for London theater audiences. And we can see that the picture that was beginning to form was, as the anti-theatricalists surmised, often slanderous, condemnatory, and, as it were, anti-American.