This volume explores the transnationality and interculturality of early modern performance in multiple languages, cultures, countries and genres. Its twelve essays compose a complex image of theatre connections as a socially, economically, politically and culturally rich tissue of networks and influences. With particular attention to itinerant performers, court festival, and the Black, Muslim and Jewish impact, they combine disciplines and methods to place Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the wider context of performance culture in English, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Czech and Italian speaking Europe. The authors examine transnational connections by offering multidisciplinary perspectives on the theatrical significance of concrete historical facts: archaeological findings, archival records, visual artefacts, and textual evidence.

Whereas previous studies of poverty and early modern theatre have concentrated on England and the criminal rogue, Poverty and Charity in Early Modern Theatre and Performance takes a transnational approach, which reveals a greater range of attitudes and charitable practices regarding the poor than state poor laws and rogue books suggest. Close study of German and Latin beggar catalogues, popular songs performed in Italian piazzas, the Paduan actor-playwright Ruzante, the commedia dell’arte in both Italy and France, and Shakespeare demonstrate how early modern theatre and performance could reveal the gap between official policy and actual practices regarding the poor. The actor-based theatre and performance traditions examined in this study, which persistently explore felt connections between the itinerant actor and the vagabond beggar, evoke the poor through complex and variegated forms of imagination, thought, and feeling. Early modern theatre does not simply reflect the social ills of hunger, poverty, and degradation, but works them through the forms of poverty, involving displacement, condensation, exaggeration, projection, fictionalization, and marginalization. As the critical mass of medieval charity was put into question, the beggar-almsgiver encounter became more like a performance. But it was not a performance whose script was prewritten as the inevitable exposure of the dissembling beggar. Just as people’s attitudes toward the poor could rapidly change from skepticism to sympathy during famines and times of acute need, fictions of performance such as Edgar’s dazzling impersonation of a mad beggar in Shakespeare’s King Lear could prompt responses of sympathy and even radical calls for economic redistribution.

This volume presents the proceedings of the international conference “Theatre Cultures within Globalising Empires: Looking at Early Modern England and Spain”, held in 2012 as part of the ERC Advanced Grant Project Early Modern European Drama and the Cultural Net (DramaNet). Implementing the concept of culture as a virtual network, it investigates Early modern European drama and its global dissemination. The 12 articles of the volume – all written by experts in the field teaching in the United Kingdom, the USA, Russia, Switzerland, India and Germany – focus on a selection of English and Spanish dramas from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Analysing and comparing motifs, formal parameters as well as plot structures, they discuss the commonalities and differences of Early modern drama in England and Spain.

Lope de Vega's Women and Servants (Mujeres y criados, c. 1613-14), newly translated by Barbara Fuchs, depicts a sophisticated urban culture of self-fashioning and social mobility, as the titular figures outsmart fathers and masters to marry those they love. Recently rediscovered in an overlooked 17th-century manuscript in Madrid's Biblioteca Nacional, the comedia emerges from its 400-year sleep with a remarkable freshness: it presents a world of suave dissimulation and accommodation, where creaky notions of honor and vengeance have virtually no place. Full protagonists of their own stories, women and servants take control of their fates despite their assigned roles in a patriarchal and hierarchical society. Set in Madrid, Women and Servants tells the story of Luciana and Violante, the two daughters of the gentleman Florencio. The young women are in love with Teodoro and Claridan, secretary and valet, respectively, to Count Prospero. As the play opens, the Count decides to pursue Luciana. At the same time, Florencio's friend Emiliano proposes that Violante should marry his eligible son, Don Pedro. Presented with favorable alliances they do not want, the two sisters must manipulate the action to favor instead the men they love. Violante uses her wit and rhetorical prowess to demolish Don Pedro's pretensions, while Luciana concocts an elaborate plot in which almost all the characters find themselves entangled. Meanwhile, a subplot follows the loves and jealousies of the servants Ines, Lope, and Mars. The play's urban setting is crucial to the action, as much of the women's freedom comes from their location in Madrid and their ability to meet their lovers in public spaces such as the park, away from parental supervision. The oscillation between scenes in the house, the park, and the street allows Lope to explore how different characters negotiate reputation and visibility, from the cowardly miles gloriosus Mars, to the noble Prospero, who is reduced to spying behind trees, to the sisters whose "exercise" takes them far from their father's solicitous eye."

This agenda-setting volume on travel and drama in early modern England provides new insights into Renaissance stage practice, performance history, and theatre's transnational exchanges. It advances our understanding of theatre history, drama's generic conventions, and what constitutes plays about travel at a time when the professional theatre was rapidly developing and England was attempting to announce its presence within a global economy. Recent critical studies have shown that the reach of early modern travel was global in scope, and its cultural consequences more important than narratives that are dominated by the Atlantic world suggest. This collection of essays by world-leading scholars redefines the field by expanding the canon of recognized plays concerned with travel. Re-assessing the parameters of the genre, the chapters offer fresh perspectives on how these plays communicated with their audiences and readers.

This is the first systematic study of networks of performance collaboration in the contemporary Chinese-speaking world and of their interactions with the artistic communities of the wider East Asian region. It investigates the aesthetics and politics of collaboration to propose a new transnational model for the analysis of Sinophone theatre cultures and to foreground the mobility and relationality of intercultural performance in East Asia. The research draws on extensive fieldwork, interviews with practitioners, and direct observation of performances, rehearsals, and festivals in Asia and Europe. It offers provocative close readings and discourse analysis of an extensive corpus of hitherto untapped sources, including unreleased video materials and unpublished scripts, production notes, and archival documentation.

This is the first book to provide a full treatment of Shakespeare's literary and theatrical engagement with the Italian novella and female agency.