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Editorial

Erin E. Kelly and Melinda Gough

Correction to: “The Dangers of Idealized Femininity in Early Modern Sophonisba Tragedies”

Laura DeLuca

“Whych in Aragon was doon”: Re-evaluating the Setting of the Croxton Play of the Sacrament

Alexandra Atiya
Scholars have analyzed the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, a medieval English host desecration play, primarily from an English perspective, even though the play is set in Aragon and its banns and colophon claim Mediterranean origins. This paper argues these paratexts present the play as a product of interregional travel and create parallels between literary and commercial exchange. Exploration of a manuscript note that erroneously attributes the play to a Spanish playwright reinforces this point. English and Iberian sources reveal how the Croxton play’s dual setting shapes its central themes of trade, conversion, and inter-religious conflict.

The Play of the Weather, Merry Report, and Henrician Court Culture

Thomas Betteridge
This essay examines John Heywood’s Henrician court drama The Play of the Weather to argue that in this play Heywood articulates a specifically courtly dramaturgy and politics focused on the vice figure, Merry Report. The first part of the essay discusses the nature of Henry’s court, while the second part discusses in detail Merry Report’s performance as a court officer. Overall, my focus in this this essay is on Heywood’s construction in Play of the Weather of the court as a privileged theatrical space for the debate and reconciliation of even such contentious matters as the English weather.

John Marston’s "Poules-worke": Smellscapes and Scent Effects in Antonio and Mellida, Antonio’s Revenge, Jack Drum’s Entertainment, and What You Will

Chloe Kathleen Preedy
Olfactory effects in John Marston’s late Elizabethan plays for the Children of Paul’s – Antonio and Mellida, Antonio’s Revenge, Jack Drum’s Entertainment, and What You Will – demonstrate how his children’s company drama works with its specific production site. By including tobacco, perfume, torch fumes, and incense, odours familiar to residents of and visitors to the Paul’s area, Marston prompts his audiences to reconceptualize one of London’s most important sites through scrutiny of its multi-layered smellscape. In the process, he develops an olfactory profile for the new Paul’s that associates his theatre with refined luxury, fashion, and sometimes risqué sensuality.

Master Merrythought's Balladeering: A Memetic Approach to Ballad Singing in The Knight of the Burning Pestle

Noah Gene Peterson
This paper argues that we can understand the many ballad and song references within The Knight of the Burning Pestle as memes, cultural referents which allow for several layers of meaning to be added onto the play. The paper discusses the ballads and songs as memes operating individually within the play and as “memeplexes” created by the complex and overlapping interactions of songs as they appear in multiple plays or other types of literature.

Thinking “We” in Brome’s Antipodes

Raphael Lyne
This essay investigates the first person plural perspective, “we,” in Richard Brome’s Antipodes (ca 1636). The discovered intimacy, cooperative action, ingenious improvisation, and occasional chaos seen in the play generate acute representations of emergent common purpose and experience. Comparing Brome’s treatments and attitudes with those in other works, especially Francis Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), the essay places these elements of the Antipodes in their theatrical environment, reveals how they are challenged by modern scholarship contesting assumptions about mutuality, and illuminates them with reference to philosophical and psychological attempts to pin down the place of “we”-experience in the individual.

Tim Keenan, ed. The Shakespeare North Playhouse: Replica Theatres and Their Uses. Routledge, 2024

Peter Kirwan

Daniel Swift. The Dream Factory: London’s First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare. Yale University Press, 2025

William David Green

Stephanie Hovland and Sally-Beth MacLean, eds. Bear Gardens/Hope Playhouse. Records of Early English Drama. REED Online, 2024

Callan Davies

Kate Ellis, ed. Dick of Devonshire, by Thomas Heywood. Manchester: Manchester University Press, The Revels Plays, 2024

Brett Greatley-Hirsch

Michael Kidd, ed. and trans. Black Protagonists of Early Modern Spain: Three Key Plays in Translation. Hackett Publishing Company, 2023

Kathryn Vomero Santos

Scott Oldenburg and Matteo Pangallo, eds. None a Stranger There: England and/in Europe on the Early Modern Stage. University of Alabama Press, 2025

Philip Goldfarb Styrt

Serena Laiena. The Theatre Couple in Early Modern Italy: Self-Fashioning and Mutual Marketing. University of Delaware Press, 2023

Rosalind Kerr

Christopher Swift. Ritual, Spectacle, and Theatre in Late Medieval Seville: Performing Empire. ARC Humanities Press, 2023

Bruce R. Burningham

Leslie Thomson. From Playtext to Performance on the Early Modern Stage: How Did They Do It? Routledge, 2023

Janelle Jenstad

William David Green, Anna L. Hegland, and Sam Jermy, eds. The Theatrical Legacy of Thomas Middleton, 1624-2024. Routledge, 2024

Eric Dunnum

Darren Freebury-Jones. Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers: How Early Modern Playwrights Shaped the World’s Greatest Writer. Manchester University Press, 2024

Dustin Meyer

Daniel Blank. Shakespeare and University Drama in Early Modern England. Oxford University Press, 2023

Elisabeth Dutton

Nora J. Williams. Canonical Misogyny: Shakespeare and Dramaturgies of Sexual Violence. Edinburgh University Press, 2025

Pascale Aebischer

Gillian Knoll and Joseph Gamble, eds. The Kinky Renaissance. Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Press, 2024

David L. Orvis

John Kuhn. Making Pagans: Theatrical Practice and Comparative Religion in Early Modern England. University of Pennsylvania Press with the Folger Shakespeare Library, 2025

Dennis Austin Britton