This chapter turns to female characters whose roles in the plays are more marginal. It uncovers a pattern of interactions that recur in minor female roles across almost all of Shakespeare’s history plays. These efforts take the form of resistance to marriages and efforts to forestall political events, often wars, frequently pointing to flaws in the male leaders’ plans. It highlights such inconclusive interventions as moments that demand engagement and interpretation by the audience, inviting spectators to unbalance the supposed didactic and moral purpose of the plays by attaching their sympathies to the characters out of power, rather than the kings who command them. Such imaginative potential is seen particularly clearly in the marginalised figures of lower-class female characters, as well as the women whose scenes are dismissed as ‘domestic’ or ‘private’ – in truth, scenes whose interactions depict the types of events unrecorded by traditional history but which are essential to the history play as a theatrical genre. The presence of these curtailed or unrecorded incidents, and their thematic importance to the plays in which they appear, suggests that the relationship of the plays to their chronicle sources is less one of direct adaptation than of querying and contestation.

The third chapter explores how female characters narrate history within the plays themselves, particularly when they appear to transgress the boundaries of historical possibility through curses, prophecy, or describing events they have not seen – extra-historical powers enabled by their marginalisation from political power. It proposes the concept at the heart of Shakespeare’s historical dramaturgy: that marginalisation from political power gives way to other types of insight enabled by the medium of the theatre, a specifically feminine relationship to historical narrative that I call Shakespeare’s feminine historiography. Beginning with an analysis of the connection between mourning and cursing, the chapter explores the ‘genealogies of loss’ that permit female characters to articulate their own versions of dynastic history. I then turn to other ways that female characters are marginalised from the centres of historical power, and the clarity of historical vision that their outsider position grants them, rendering them simultaneously suppressed and empowered by their exclusion. Finally, this chapter considers how genre itself operates as a force for this exclusion, exploring scenes which seem to defy the tonal and generic boundaries of their plays, suggesting Shakespeare’s awareness of the limitations of the history play genre for containing certain types of female stories.

The concluding chapter takes a brief case study of performers’ experiences in various roles in the history play cycle performed at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2019. These performers’ voices both enrich and complicate the arguments made in the previous chapters and offer perspective on how the view of Shakespeare’s history plays put forward by this monograph might have practical use for artists but also point to areas of future study.

The introduction explores how a popular sense of ‘Shakespearean’ history continues to influence historical drama today, looking to the Broadway play and subsequent HBO drama All the Way as an example. I then introduce the key concepts I will use to interrogate standing assumptions about ‘Shakespearean’ history, including the framework for feminist Shakespearean analysis first proposed by Lisa Jardine (1989), who argued for drawing upon archival materials to combat misleading assumptions about the role of women in both the plays and the early modern period itself; Henry S. Turner’s ‘New Theatricality’ (2012), though I instead suggest the term ‘dramaturgy’, borrowed from the theatre to reflect the inextricability of literary analysis and staging practise; and Pascale Aebischer’s concept of ‘negotiated reading’, which ‘deliberately seek[s] out opaque signs, empty spaces, silences, marginalised sign-clusters and characters’ and proposes the utility of reading early modern texts alongside contemporary performance. Finally, I introduce my own key concept: historical dramaturgy, the process of adapting historical sources into dramatic form. Female characters, I argue, can provide the key for understanding how Shakespeare’s historical dramaturgy works, and thus how he as a dramatist understood the form and purpose of history.

Pater published three essays on Shakespeare, and probably considered a longer series, possibly to culminate in a book. His attention in the completed essays is directed towards plays that were relatively unpopular in his own day, and in the case of two of these he can be said to occupy an important position in the history of their reception. Modern critics of Richard II and Love’s Labour’s Lost still regularly, if cursorily, cite Pater as a milestone. But Pater’s contribution to Shakespearean criticism more generally is rarely remembered or appraised. This chapter attempts to estimate and characterise the influence Pater has had on subsequent criticism of Shakespeare, sometimes in unexpected places, and also to draw out some of the insights of which later criticism takes less notice. Each of Pater’s Shakespeare studies attempts to formulate relations between ethics and aesthetics, and many of their central terms – fineness, justice, grace, etc. – are used with both moral and aesthetic significance. By examining these essays in the context of other Shakespearean criticism and of Pater’s wider work, it is possible to arrive at some idea of what Shakespeare meant to him.

This conclusion summarises the findings of the previous chapters and takes a global view on the relationships among early modern drama, religious dissimulation, and toleration. Rather than linking the theatre as an institution to one particular religio-political position on the issue of religious dissimulation, this conclusion emphasises the flexibility of the medium and the genuine religious diversity that it could express even on the commercial stage. In contrast to earlier research on toleration in early modern drama, however, this conclusion further argues that the theatre’s complicity in ideologies of persecution was in many cases more pronounced than has been previously recognised, for example by questioning whether comedy and its inclusive impetus imply per se a tolerant stance. Nonetheless, the stage could arguably also exploit the theatrical potential of religious dissimulation for the purpose of entertainment, as is evident, for instance, in the hypocrisy of the stage Puritan, and thereby trivialise the spectre of the secret dissenter and defuse religious tensions to some extent.

This Introduction discusses why dissembling one’s faith in order to avoid religious persecution was, despite its ubiquity, such a contentious practice for the early moderns and how the controversies surrounding such dissimulation were informed by early modern views on lying. It further provides an account of the various points of contact between debates on the legitimacy of religious dissimulation and theatrical dissimulation, respectively, both of which were indebted to shared theological concerns. Plays that stage religious dissimulation as their subject matter are therefore also legible as meta-theatrical reflections on the political and religious implications of their medium. Finally, this Introduction provides an overview of scholarship on the early modern stage and its position vis-à-vis contemporary debates on conformity and nonconformity, which has frequently been thematised in the supposedly antagonistic relationship between the theatre and the Puritans. Arguably, however, the relationship between the stage and various contemporary positions on the question of religious dissimulation was more dynamic and unstable than previous scholarship has often suggested.

The introduction sets out the two key techniques by which the early modern theater entwined its spectators in uncertainty, ultimately offering a new model of this theater’s process of performance – one that encouraged its spectators’ imaginative participation by, paradoxically, frustrating it. The practitioners of this highly experimental theater regularly drew attention to the technologies of stagecraft, inviting spectators’ uncertainty about the stage’s fictional representations by calling attention to them as performances. The introduction also pushes back against the established account of a Jacobean and Caroline theater that catered to the increasingly sophisticated theatrical acuity of its spectators, arguing that practitioners’ eagerness to exploit familiar conventions into the seventeenth century regularly upended even knowing playgoers’ dramatic expectations. Finally, the introduction argues that these moments of interpretive unsettling should be considered a fundamental, even primary, element of the early modern theatrical experience.

This chapter provides a thorough revision of the status of boys and youths in the early modern period, attending to the neglected question of physical skill and training. It argues that attending to historically situated forms of physical expectation can shed light on how particular bodily skills are culturally cultivated, placing a more active emphasis on boys' bodies than scholars of early modern culture have typically tended to. The chapter draws on religious writings, conduct books, memoirs, apprenticeship manuals, and educational tracts in order to provide a wide-ranging picture of how boys' physical capacities were understood, improved, and manipulated in this period. Examining the ways in which boys and their bodies are situated in these works – often with an emphasis on physical labour and potential for activity – the chapter argues for a shared culture of expectation around the bodies of early modern boys in which physical movement and productivity is at the forefront. This culture, it moves to suggest, is everywhere discernible in contemporary attitudes to the early modern theatre, which articulated a pervasive fascination with the moving, working bodies of boy performers.

The Introduction takes as its starting point the desire expressed in James Wright's Historia Histrionica (1699) to 'guess at the action' of early modern players, arguing that the 'action' of boy performers is partially recoverable from the texts that have come down to us provided that we are willing to read with physical skill in mind. It surveys the past century's critical fascination with boy actors, suggesting that a great deal of pre-existing work has neglected the embodied stagecraft required of these young performers. It additionally makes a case for the value of practice-based research in the study of early modern drama's corporeal dynamics, and maps out the book's integration of this method into its analysis of a wide range of plays from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Introduction ends with an outline of the book's structure, which explains how the chapters cumulatively build a more physically and theatrically sensitive picture of the work of boy actors in this period.

The book's Conclusion turns to a context which is seemingly unrelated to early modern drama: twenty-first-century professional football. It suggests that present-day culture's pervasive fascination with the skilled, youthful bodies of professional football players finds a corollary in early modern playwrights' and spectators' demonstrable interest in the physical skills of the boy actors who have been the subject of this book. The Conclusion recapitulates the book's central argument for the valuable physical skills boy actors developed and showcased, suggesting that an enhanced appreciation of those skills will allow us more readily to imagine their important contribution to early modern theatrical culture.

Lording Barry’s play, Ram Alley, is a sensory mêlée, written for performance in 1608 and staged by the Children of the King’s Revels company at the Whitefriars playhouse. This chapter explores the world of ‘Ram Alley’, both the area staged in the play, and the real alleyway of that name, a short distance from the playhouse. Using recent scholarly work on the early modern senses, it connects the physical and imagined worlds through an exploration of the perception of a significant segment of the contemporary audience – the men of the Inns of Court whose rooms abutted on the real Ram Alley. Barry shifts our understanding of sensory hierarchy from the supremacy of the visual – an ocular centricity which has classical antecedents and becomes the dominant ideology emerging from the Renaissance - to the olfactory. This chapter demonstrates how the play’s challenge to dominant sensory theory reflects Ram Alley’s wider transgressive intersensoriality.

This chapter reconsiders the relationship between pleasure and judgement in the early modern playhouse. Whilst the significance of both pleasure and judgement to early modern playgoing is long established, critical studies have often followed the lead of a few particular playwrights’ most irritable paratextual pronouncements, in which rather extreme versions of judgement and of pleasure are explicitly framed as opposites: the censure of the wisest and highest of status is contrasted with an unthinking and unlearned pleasure that is itself defined as a lack of discernment.

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.