In Made to Play House, Miriam Formanek-Brunell traces the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century dolls and explores the origins of the American toy industry's remarkably successful efforts to promote self fulfillment through maternity and materialism. She tells the fascinating story of how inventors, producers, entrepreneurs—many of whom were women—and little girls themselves created dolls which expressed various notions of female identity.

The Boar's Head Playhouse, Herbert Berry. The Boar's Head playhouse was built at virtually the same time as the famous Globe. This book traces its history, explains much of the way it operated in its heyday, and shows many of its physical characteristics. Illustrated.

This book offers an accessible introduction to England’s sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century playing industry and a fresh account of the architecture, multiple uses, communities, crowds, and proprietors of playhouses. It builds on recent scholarship and new documentary and archaeological discoveries to answer the questions: what did playhouses do, what did they look like, and how did they function? The book will accordingly introduce readers to a rich and exciting spectrum of "play" and playhouses, not only in London but also around England. The detailed but wide-ranging case studies examined here go beyond staged drama to explore early modern sport, gambling, music, drinking, and animal baiting; they recover the crucial influence of female playhouse owners and managers; and they recognise rich provincial performance cultures as well as the burgeoning of London’s theatre industry. This book will have wide appeal with readers across Shakespeare, early modern performance studies, theatre history, and social history.

Playhouse and Cosmos systematically and comprehensively describes the function of theater and role-playing as metaphors in Shakespearean drama. The author examines this metaphor's revelatory and liberating power and concludes by affirming, with Shakespeare, the creative power of theatricality in life and in art.

Since its opening in 1911, Liverpool's Playhouse has been inextricably linked to the history of the city in which it was built. The impetus to create it, Ros Merkin reveals in this chronicle of the oldest surviving repertory theater in Britain, grew out of the city's new sense of civic pride and largesse in the early twentieth century. Her book asks both how the city has shaped the theater and what the theater has brought to the city, and along the way she dispels the myth that the Playhouse is Liverpool's conservative theater, revealing that from its inception it was breaking new ground and issuing challenges.

This book re-examines early modern musical culture to suggest how music shapes meaning in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries.