The Changeling: The State of Play

by Gordon McMullan (Editor), Kelly Stage (Editor), Ann Thompson (Editor), Lena Cowen Orlin (Editor)

Overview

This collection of original essays on Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's unsettling revenge tragedy The Changeling represents key new directions in criticism and research. The 13 chapters fall into six groups focusing on questions of space, theology, collaboration, disability both mental and physical, and performance both early modern and contemporary.

The Changeling's critical and theatrical history, and a selected bibliography for the volume helps readers easily find the most frequently cited materials in the volume as a whole, while individual essays detail the full expanse of critical sources to pursue for further analysis. With contributors ranging from highly regarded critics to emerging scholars drawn from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France and Switzerland, the collection equips readers to engage with a variety of critical approaches to the play, moving a long way beyond the last century's tendency to treat Middleton as 'the early modern Ibsen', to ignore Rowley, and to focus almost wholly on a single aspect of the play's plot.

Key themes and topics include:


· Performance
· Space and affect
· Authorial collaboration
· Gender and representation
· Violence
· Disability

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350174382
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	02/10/2022
Series:	Arden Shakespeare The State of Play
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.69(d)

About the Author

Gordon McMullan is Professor of English and Director of the London Shakespeare Centre at King's College London, UK. He is a general editor of Arden Early Modern Drama and a general textual editor of the Norton Shakespeare, 3E. His publications include The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher (1994), the Arden 3 edition of Henry VIII (2000), Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing (2007) and Antipodal Shakespeare (2018).

Kelly Stage is Associate Professor of English and Director the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA. Her recent publications include Producing Early Modern London: A Comedy of Urban Space, 1598-1616 (2018) and an edition of Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's The Roaring Girl (2019).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Preface
Series Preface
Introduction
Kelly Stage (University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA) and Gordon McMullan (King's College London, UK)

Part One Spaces and Places
1 Space, Gender and the Rules of Movement in The Changeling
Jean E. Howard (Columbia University, USA)

2 Chang(el)ing Spaces: Dramatic Forms of Worlding in Late Jacobean England
Ina Habermann (University of Basel, Switzerland)

Part Two Collaboration and the Hospital Plot
3 A Secret Within the Castle: William Rowley and The Changeling
David Nicol (Dalhousie University, Canada)

4 Isabella
Douglas Bruster (University of Texas at Austin, USA)

Part Three States of Mind
5 'The Pleasure of Your Bedlam': Mismanaging Insanity in The Changeling
Pascale Drouet (University of Poitiers, France)

6 Passions, Affections and Instinct in The Changeling
Jesse Lander (University of Notre Dame, USA)

Part Four Disabilities
7 The Changeling's Phantom Limbs
Karen Sawyer Marsalek (St Olaf College, USA)

8 Disability Representation and Theatrical Form in The Changeling and The Nice Valour
Katherine Schaap Williams (University of Toronto, Canada)

Part Five Actor and Audience in Jacobean Performance

9 The Changeling, The Boy Actor and Female Subjectivity
Lucy Munro (King's College London, UK)

10 Witnessing at the Phoenix: Early Modern Audiences at The Changeling
Jennifer A. Low (Florida Atlantic University, USA)

Part Six Rape and the Female Body in Contemporary Performance

11 'What Would a Foreign Woman Be?': Sexual Borderlands, Hospitality, and 'Forgetting Parentage' in The Changeling on Film
Courtney Lehmann (University of the Pacific, USA)

12 Feminist Staging in Brave Spirits' Changeling
Musa Gurbanis (Independent Scholar) and Charlene V. Smith (Brave Spirits Theatre, USA)

Selected Bibliography
Index