Stage Matters

Annalisa Castaldo is associate professor of English at Widener University.Rhonda Knight is professor of English at Coker College.

The collection, edited by Annalisa Castaldo and Rhonda Knight, features essays by scholars interested in exploring how the material culture of sixteenth and early seventeenth English theatrical culture influenced the creation and presentation of drama and how understanding this culture can enrich scholars' current interactions with these plays as well as offer insights to actors and directors. The essays include discussions of plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Middleton as well as lesser known works and playwrights. This collection is unique in that it includes the body of the actor as a material object that is encountered and manipulated by other actors on the stage. These essays demonstrate how props, bodies and the architectural dimensions of early modern stages have both practical and symbolic registers.

AcknowledgmentsPreface: An Introduction and Primer to the American Shakespeare Center by Sarah EnloeIntroduction by Annalisa Castaldo and Rhonda KnightChapter 1: Whose Experiment is it Anyway?: Some Models for Practice-as-Research in Shakespeare Studies by Stephen PurcellChapter 2: Shakespeare's Spirits: Staging the Supernatural on the Early Modern Stage by Jim CaseyChapter 3: Staging Epilepsy in Othello by Sid RayChapter 4: 'Sore hurt and bruised': Visual Damage in Othello" by Catherine LoomisChapter 5: 'Heave Up!': The 'Wicked Weight' of Shakespeare's Antony and York's Christ" by R. W. JonesChapter 6: Hiding in Plain Sight: Eavesdropping and the Physicality of the Stage by Annalisa Castaldo and Rhonda KnightChapter 6: The 'Dead Body Problem': The Dramaturgy of Coffins on the Renaissance Stage by Sarah NevilleChapter 7: 'Cushion come forth': Materializing Pregnancy on the Stuart Stage" by Sara B. T. ThielChapter 8: Maternal Revision in Middleton's More Dissemblers Besides Women by Amanda ZochAfterword: The Actors SpeakAbout the ContributorsIndex