This book presents a new understanding of what ‘making’ means and argues for the centrality of crafting as a way of making sense of the world and the place of law, media, and politics within it. When Elaine Scarry recounted the great range of candidates that have been put forward for the category ‘artefacts’, she noted as possibilities that ‘nation states are fictions (in the sense of created things), the law is a created thing, a scientific fact (many argue) is a constructed thing’. Peter Goodrich writes similarly that ‘a significant part of the substantive law is comprised of fabulae, stories, plays, fabrications, images and fictions’. This book takes such possibilities seriously and considers how the notion of manufactured truth can inform our understanding of the tradition of making judgments in law and the trend of making judgments in society at large.

The introduction to Playing and Playgoing: Actor, Audience and Performance in Early Modern England argues that the study of theatrical culture is crucial to the scholarly investigation of dramatic texts: not merely of historical interest, but necessary for a full understanding of the plays themselves. Playing and Playgoing works with and reflects on approaches drawn from literary scholarship, theatre history, and performance studies, in seeking to advance the critical conversation on the interactions between: play-texts; performance spaces; the bodily, sensory and material experiences of the playhouse; and playgoers’ responses to, and engagements with, the theatre. This introduction explores three textual and archival examples that suggest the significance of the player-playgoer relationship at the heart of this book – and in so doing, it sets up the questions raised by this volume, and the shared interests that operate across the range of approaches these chapters offer.

In the present chapter, we outline some key assumptions about the development of creativity from a sociocultural perspective. This perspective emphasizes the dynamic and interdependent nature of the creativity–culture relationship, especially when considering the two developmentally. We unpack here the elements of the reciprocal relation between creativity and culture by using the 5 As framework. Within this framework, creative actors learn how creativity is defined and how to develop their creative abilities within their specific cultural context. They acquire those actions and activities that are crucial for participating creatively in their culture; appreciate why being familiar with a wide range of artifacts, created by previous generations, matters for their own creativity; consider the role of others in mediating both culture and creativity; and, last but not least, discover how material constraints foster creative expression. We end with a few reflections on why a life-course approach to creativity ultimately requires a sociocultural understanding of this phenomenon.

Adrian Lester talks us through his research in preparation for his portrayal of Othello at the National Theatre in 2013. His examination of the play’s racial politics in performance includes interviews with Iago (Rory Kinnear), Desdemona (Olivia Vinall), and the iconic James Earl Jones who has played Othello four times. In this chapter Lester argues that our reaction to the play is not based on Shakespeare’s intentions but based on Western culture’s manipulative, complex racial history and sexual politics – a history that clouds any attempt at a balanced view when looking at these subjects.

This chapter examines some of the trends that emerge in roles written for child actors in Shakespeare’s early plays. It considers some similarities in types of roles and asks how we might weigh this evidence in complementing recent research on how child actors develop in the period. In surveying the range of smaller child roles in the early plays it raises interesting possibilities for the nature of in-troup pedagogy and/or training. It further raises questions about the relationship between text and performance, and between one text and another, and between Shakespeare and the various companies that he is associated with and the collaborators that he works alongside. It argues that we can learn something about how child actors develop in the period by re-examining the roles that were written for them in this early period of Shakespeare’s career.

The Dublin-born actor, James Field Stanfield (1749–1824), spent much of his career performing in northern Britain where his improving spirit had an impact both inside and outside the playhouse. His Irish Catholic identity combined with the alterity intrinsic to travelling acting life, and this appears to have heightened his sympathy for the marginalised. At theatrical benefits he promoted his abolition writing which was based on personal experience of the transatlantic slave trade. He also helped to establish the first public library in Sunderland where he was a prominent freemason; after associating with leading Scottish intellectuals, he wrote An Essay on the Study and Composition of Biography, the first long form treatise on the subject in English. McCormack’s original archival work shows how Stanfield built on his theatrical success and forged a reputation as a public reformer with a genuine spirit of Enlightenment; he was an Irishman who brought about real change in political and intellectual circles. Taken collectively, Stanfield’s remarkable contributions to a ‘Northern Enlightenment’ are an important corrective to the London-centric tendencies of much theatre and Enlightenment scholarship. McCormack’s analysis is a timely reminder in methodological terms of the importance of regional theatre history in Britain and Ireland.

Macklin’s Henry the VII (1746) has received little critical attention. This chapter reads the play as part of a tradition of Irish history plays that were influenced by Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713). Addison’s themes of personal self-sacrifice, love of country and resistance to tyranny proved inspirational for Irish dramatists in the wake of the Declaratory Act (1720) as can be seen in William Philips’s Hibernia Freed (1722) and Henry Brooke’s Gustavus Vasa (1739). History plays then might offer an alternative genealogy of eighteenth-century Irish theatre which is often focused on comedies.