Theatre Closure and the Paradoxical Rise of English Renaissance Drama in the Civil Wars

Heidi Craig demonstrates how dramatic and theatrical activity paradoxically thrived during the English theatre closures, 1642–1660.

Heidi Craig (Author)

9781009224031, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 March 2023

256 pages
23.5 x 15.5 x 1.8 cm, 0.53 kg

'While [the book]'s chief intervention is to provide a long overdue account of and explanation for the rise in drama and dramatic criticism when theatres themselves were closed, its central contribution and core intellectual work is the collection and analysis of dramatic paratexts (ie, texts around texts). Each chapter makes extensive, sophisticated use of examples drawn from dedicatory epistles, commendatory poems, publisher's prefaces, and other threshold texts. This material serves as the foundation on which Craig tells the story of drama in the absence of theatre.' Jonathan P. Lamb, Early Theatre

Focusing on the production and reception of drama during the theatre closures of 1642 to 1660, Heidi Craig shows how the 'death' of contemporary theatre in fact gave birth to English Renaissance drama as a critical field. While the prohibition on playing in many respects killed the English stage, drama thrived in print, with stationers publishing unprecedented numbers of previously unprinted professional plays, vaunting playbooks' ties to the receding theatrical past. Marketed in terms of novelty and nostalgia, plays unprinted before 1642 gained new life. Stationers also anatomized the whole corpus of English drama, printing the first anthologies and comprehensive catalogues of drama. Craig captures this crucial turning-point in English theatre history with chapters on royalist nostalgia, clandestine theatrical revivals, dramatic compendia, and the mysteriously small number of Shakespeare editions issued during the period, as well as a new incisive reading of Beaumont and Fletcher's A King and No King.

1. Dead theatre, printed relics
2. Old Shakespeare
3. Canonizing Beaumont and Fletcher
4. Chronic conditions
5. Morbid symptoms.

Subject Areas: Cultural studies [JFC], British & Irish history [HBJD1], Literary studies: plays & playwrights [DSG], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Plays, playscripts [DD]