From performance to print in Shakespeare's England

Published in association with the Huntington Library, Redefining British Theatre History is a five-volume series under the general editorship of Peter Holland. The series brings together major practitioners in theatre history in order to establish ways in which previous assumptions need fundamental questioning and to initiate new directions for the field. The series aims to establish a new future for theatre history, not least by making theatre historians aware of their own history, current practice and future. What can the printed texts of plays from Shakespeare's time tell us about performance? How were plays marketed? How have printed plays been read and interpreted for performance? The essays in this collection freshly consider the evidence of early modern printed plays and their histories of production and reception. Bringing together a group of major scholars in the field who are concerned to rethink the nature of the evidence and the modes of interpretation for print materials in relation to theatre history, the essays examine a wide variety of cases, from the texts of Romeo and Juliet to the masque in Timon of Athens, from the ways title pages refer to early modern performance to the psychology of Hamlet, from grammar-school beatings to the London bookshops of the Renaissance.