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This chapter examines six areas of musical performance that were governed or influenced by ecclesiastical decrees or governmental legislation: Asian musics, vernacular‐language vocal music in sacred contexts (such as villancicos), musical practices for Marian devotions, liturgical music and the use of instruments in churches, theatrical performances, and music in processions, celebrations, and feasts. It draws on sources including manuals published by religious orders for the regulation of parochial life, religious statutes and ordinances, Papal Bulls, royal decrees, and archiepiscopal decrees. It also examines musical references found in the proceedings of the Provincial Council of Manila (1771) and the Synod of Calasiao (1773).

This chapter takes the argument out of the theatre and into the lawcourts, one of the contexts which most clearly reveals the increasingly theatrical tenor (or ‘cast’) of Athenian society at large and of its public discourses. In a survey of the corpus of legal oratory from classical Athens, it is argued that the analogy between a trial and a theatrical performance was close and multilayered. There were strong similarities between the writing of roles for a play and the composition of speeches for delivery in court; there was a considerable degree of overlap between what was expected of tragic actors and litigants in terms of vocal performance.

For much of the twentieth century, a good deal of compositional energy that might otherwise have been devoted to opera was redirected to the quest for new forms of theatrical-musical performance. Several composers who created relatively few operas, or none at all, composed numerous theatrical works of various sorts—staged works that fit neither the operatic nor balletic molds. Alternatively, the career of a composer otherwise committed to opera composition might contain a period of experimentation with new theatrical genres. A higher vantage point is required to appreciate the amount of compositional activity devoted to the theater in the twentieth century. The multitude of works that cannot easily be labeled “opera,” “play,” or “ballet” indicates the need for a broader and more flexible term, thus “music theater”.

Taking its cue from William Sly’s performance of a disoriented playgoer in the Induction to John Marston’s The Malcontent, this chapter puts theatrical performance in dialogue with two other modes of thinking through place in the early modern period: first, what Mary Carruthers has termed the “architectural” model of the arts of memory, and, second, chorography, or the practice of describing a region in terms of its topographical features and history. It argues that these modes resemble one another in depicting place as a kind of phenomenological assemblage, one that comes into being as the disparate features of an ambient environment are perceived and organized within embodied thought. This resemblance reveals the intimate relationship between environment and embodied thought within the early modern English playhouse, and it thereby suggests that theatrical performance was less a form of spatial abstraction than a means of transforming the way that playgoers perceived, experienced, and navigated their surroundings.

The ritual restatement of authority so necessary to the maintenance of kingship represents a common thread in Southeast Asian history. The phrase “theater state” effectively deployed by Clifford Geertz in relation to Bali is eminently applicable even in places where Europeans condescendingly equated the “king” to one of their own provincial mayors. Whether in these enhanced chiefdoms or in larger courts like those of Java or Burma, ceremonial life was “an assertion of spiritual power.” In this performance of power, women were indispensable, usually in supporting roles but at times as directors and lead actors. Notwithstanding regional differences in language, culture, and historical experience, “palace women” across Southeast Asia can be considered in terms of the enactment of royal status, which, by separating a ruler from his subjects, justified and maintained the rationale on which kingship rested. This chapter looks at women and the performance of power in early modern Southeast Asia. It discusses the purpose of royal polygyny, women's roles at royal courts and in the enactment of royal power, women's theatrical performances, and life cycle rituals.

This chapter examines events in the history of Soviet theater and arts from 1939 to 1945. During this period, theater at the front became a civic duty, a form of military service. Performing under the most difficult of circumstances gave rise to diverse forms, the most most elementary being the highly mobile concert brigade, capable of performing a repertoire of poems, songs, scenes from well-known plays, monologues, one-acts, sketches, and the like. From August 1939 to September 1940, some twenty-nine thousand performances of plays and concerts were given by various theatrical units before Soviet soldiers and sailors. Of this number, 3,377 concerts and plays were performed within a single ten-day period dedicated to the twenty-first anniversary of the Red Army and Navy.

Through a brief reading of Doctor Faustus, the introduction first suggests how characters think through their surroundings on the early modern English stage and how, in turn, playgoers relied upon the same process to orient themselves within the dramatic fiction. Drawing upon the concepts of situated cognition and cognitive ecology, the introduction defines this process of thinking through place as “ecological thinking.” After establishing that characters typically engage in ecological thinking to orient themselves within place, the introduction concludes by suggesting how this emphasis upon embodied and extended thought reframes our understanding of the relationship between space and place on the early modern stage.

The conclusion draws together the book’s major findings through a reading of Descartes’s Discourse on Method, focusing primarily upon the relationship between place and thought in the theorization of the cogito. Against Descartes’s fantasy of disembodied and placeless mind, the conclusion suggests that early modern English drama stages the impossibility of separating thought from its foundation in embodiment and environment, as well as the consequences—alternately tragic and comic—of attempting to do so. Not only do the plays considered in this book show thinking to be an ecological phenomenon; they also reveal that the act of thinking through place can transform the contours of a location.

This chapter addresses the thorny question of whether vocation, by its very nature, implies an agent, a “caller”; and if so, whether this agent can or should necessarily be identified as God. Is some such claim about vocational agency required by the fact that most of the language and literature of vocation is tied to various theistic religious traditions? By developing an extended analogy to the ways that the audience is addressed in a theatrical performance, this chapter argues that, even though the language of vocation requires the acknowledgement of an addressing agent, this does not mean that the agent can be perfectly described (as is also the case in drama, and in the theological doctrine of revelation). The chapter concludes by recommending a certain degree of “vocational reserve”; since the nature and character of the “caller” can never be fully known, vocational discernment is necessarily an ongoing process.