- Department of English Language and Literature
College of Arts and Humanities
Keir Hardie Building
Swansea University
Singleton Park
Swansea SA2 8PP
Eoin Price
Swansea University, English Language and Literature, Faculty Member
- Renaissance Studies, Shakespeare, Theatre History, Privacy, Early Modern England, Public Sphere, and 19 moreRenaissance drama, Renaissance Literature (Renaissance Studies), Reformation History, Early Modern Political Thought, Intellectual History of the Renaissance, Early Modern print culture, Publicness of Public Space, Lesser-known Authors, Early Modern Publics and Counterpublics, Early Modern English Literature and Drama, Shakespeare in Performance, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Early Modern English drama, Shakespearean Drama, Book History, Renaissance literature, Theatre Studies, and Early Modern Literatureedit
At the start of the seventeenth century a distinction emerged between ‘public’, outdoor, amphitheatre playhouses and ‘private’, indoor, hall venues. This book is the first sustained attempt to ask: why? Theatre historians have long... more
At the start of the seventeenth century a distinction emerged between ‘public’, outdoor, amphitheatre playhouses and ‘private’, indoor, hall venues. This book is the first sustained attempt to ask: why? Theatre historians have long acknowledged these terms, but have failed to attest to their variety and complexity. Assessing a range of evidence, from the start of the Elizabethan period to the beginning of the Restoration, the book overturns received scholarly wisdom to reach new insights into the politics of theatre culture and playbook publication.
Standard accounts of the ‘public’ and ‘private’ theatres have either ignored the terms, or offered insubstantial explanations for their use. This book opens up the rich range of meanings made available by these vitally important terms and offers a fresh perspective on the way dramatists, theatre owners, booksellers, and legislators, conceived the playhouses of Renaissance London.
Standard accounts of the ‘public’ and ‘private’ theatres have either ignored the terms, or offered insubstantial explanations for their use. This book opens up the rich range of meanings made available by these vitally important terms and offers a fresh perspective on the way dramatists, theatre owners, booksellers, and legislators, conceived the playhouses of Renaissance London.
Research Interests: Theatre Studies, Theatre History, Book History, Shakespeare, Renaissance, and 12 moreEarly Modern England, Civil Society and the Public Sphere, Public Sphere, Renaissance drama, Shakespearean Drama, Early Modern English drama, Book History (History), Early Modern Political Thought, Theatre, William Shakespeare, Restoration drama, and Early Modern English Literature and Drama
Early modern drama studies tends to privilege first performances and publications, but reprints and revivals are essential to how we understand plays by Shakespeare and other dramatists as theatre historians and literary critics. Reprints... more
Early modern drama studies tends to privilege first performances and publications, but reprints and revivals are essential to how we understand plays by Shakespeare and other dramatists as theatre historians and literary critics. Reprints and revivals might include new material, sometimes by new authors, which can vastly alter the way a play works, such as the painter scene in The Spanish Tragedy. The cultural climate of reprints and revivals might affect the way in which a play was received and understood. What might it have meant, for example, to see a performance of Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta in the 1620s, Marston’s The Malcontent in the 1630s, or even to read the 1655 edition of Beaumont and Fletcher’s A King and No King during the Interregnum? Revivals might involve a change of playhouse, theatre company, and repertory, and reprints a change of printing-house, publisher and printer, all of which were targeting new audiences and new readers. When Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle was first performed at Blackfriars by the Children of the Queen’s Revels, it was reputed to be a failure. In the 1613 first Quarto the publisher, Walter Burre, famously quipped that the audience failed to grasp its ‘priuy marke of Ironie’. However, when the play was next printed in 1635 by a different publisher, it bore the mark of an ostensibly successful revival by Queen Henrietta’s Men at the Phoenix on Drury Lane. What had changed?
This seminar will explore the ways in which playwrights, acting companies and stationers renewed plays in early modern England, inviting papers on reprints, revivals and/or the relationship between them. The seminar will address a variety of questions. How do printed paratexts (e.g. commendatory verses, prefatory epistles, dedications) and theatrical paratexts (e.g. inductions, prologues, epilogues) represent and conceptualise new publications and new performances? How do we know when a play is revived? Do reprints and revivals of certain plays coincide, and if so, how is this significant? How do revivals complicate our understanding of repertory? How is the relationship between first and later performances/publications influenced by cultural and social shifts?
This seminar will explore the ways in which playwrights, acting companies and stationers renewed plays in early modern England, inviting papers on reprints, revivals and/or the relationship between them. The seminar will address a variety of questions. How do printed paratexts (e.g. commendatory verses, prefatory epistles, dedications) and theatrical paratexts (e.g. inductions, prologues, epilogues) represent and conceptualise new publications and new performances? How do we know when a play is revived? Do reprints and revivals of certain plays coincide, and if so, how is this significant? How do revivals complicate our understanding of repertory? How is the relationship between first and later performances/publications influenced by cultural and social shifts?
Research Interests: Print Culture, Theatre Studies, Early Modern History, Performance Studies, Book History, and 12 moreHistory of the Book, Renaissance Studies, Shakespeare, Renaissance drama, Shakespearean Drama, Early Modern English drama, Theatre, Early Modern print culture, Paratexts, Theater and Performance Studies, Early Modern English Literature and Drama, and History of the Theater
This article examines the politics of privacy and the public drama of the English Renaissance commercial stage. It surveys some recent critical approaches towards the study of privacy and politics including analyses of a supposed early... more
This article examines the politics of privacy and the public drama of the English Renaissance commercial stage. It surveys some recent critical approaches towards the study of privacy and politics including analyses of a supposed early modern public sphere. The article then attends to studies focusing on Renaissance drama and urges that the study of political privacy be extended beyond domesticity. The essay contends that a wider examination of the corpus of public drama in the English Renaissance is necessary. Shakespeare's plays often take centre stage in critical discussions, but complex concepts like privacy and publicity ought to be explored in reference to the diverse range of plays written for the Renaissance theatres. To illustrate the benefits of exploring the wider Renaissance corpus, the article ends by discussing politics and privacy in the neglected tragedy Soliman and Perseda.
Research Interests:
This piece for The Map of Early Modern London offers a brief history of the Cockpit, or Phoenix playhouse, focusing on its construction, appearance and reputation, and detailing the companies that played there and the plays they performed.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This paper will consider the way in which Philip Massinger – often described (and derided) as derivative – responds to the conventions of the disguised ruler play. Kevin Quarmby has traced the development of the genre in Elizabethan and... more
This paper will consider the way in which Philip Massinger – often described (and derided) as derivative – responds to the conventions of the disguised ruler play. Kevin Quarmby has traced the development of the genre in Elizabethan and Jacobean England but this paper explores the densely referential Caroline theatre in greater detail. I will focus on Believe As You List (1631) and The City Madam (1632) two plays which, in different ways, reshape the disguised ruler form. In the first, Massinger gestures towards plays like Marston’s The Malcontent and Sharpham’s The Fleer by dramatizing a deposed ruler’s attempt to regain power: the difference is that, unlike Altofront, Antifront, and numerous other deposed rulers, Massinger’s Antiochus does not return to power. In The City Madam, Massinger uses the disguised ruler structure familiar to plays like Middleton’s The Phoenix and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure but the decision to set his play in a household, rather than a dukedom, has important political implications. On the one hand, Massinger looks back towards earlier examples of the genre (by Shakespeare and others), on the other, he takes the form into exciting new territory.
Research Interests:
This paper will attempt to take seriously the way the terms ‘public’ and ‘private’ were used in relation to theatre spaces in early modern England. Recent scholarship has suggested that the terms are simply used too erratically to be of... more
This paper will attempt to take seriously the way the terms ‘public’ and ‘private’ were used in relation to theatre spaces in early modern England. Recent scholarship has suggested that the terms are simply used too erratically to be of any use to modern critics, but this paper will argue that, in Caroline England, the distinction between ‘public’ (outdoor) and ‘private’ (indoor) playhouses was largely accepted by the people who wrote, published, and attended plays. It is from this context that the paper views curious instances in which supposedly indoor playhouses are described as public. I suggest that, while we can’t definitively know why this phenomenon occurred (or entirely rule out the possibility that the terms were of diminished meaning, as has been suggested), other, more intriguing possibilities emerge, if we are attentive to the evidence. I discuss some of these interesting examples before arguing that the title pages of three Thomas Heywood plays, published between 1633 and 1635, reconfigure the ‘private’, apparently elite Phoenix playhouse into a demotic ‘public’ theatre. Seen within the larger context of Caroline theatre, the three Heywood title pages are striking and subversive.
Research Interests:
Richard II has enjoyed major revivals in each of the last two years. In 2012, Rupert Goold directed a made-for-TV production of the play for the BBC, with Ben Whishaw in the title role. In 2013, Greg Doran directed David Tennant’s Richard... more
Richard II has enjoyed major revivals in each of the last two years. In 2012, Rupert Goold directed a made-for-TV production of the play for the BBC, with Ben Whishaw in the title role. In 2013, Greg Doran directed David Tennant’s Richard at the RST in a production which then transferred to the Barbican. In both productions, Piers Exton, specified in the quarto and folio versions of the play as the murderer of Richard, is excised, and Aumerle, one-time supporter of the deposed king, is revealed to have undertaken the assassination. This paper considers the ramifications of these changes. It begins by assessing some of the different ways in which directors and performers have handled both the role of Aumerle and the death of Richard. It then addresses the BBC and RSC productions. In particular, I am interested in how Aumerle’s actions alter the political landscapes of the play. The paper will, then, consider issues of text and power by examining the significance and political effect of textual changes, but it shall also raise questions about the nature of Shakespearean authority. These two major mainstream productions, with their high profile leads, represent, for many people across the UK, a first engagement with Richard II. It is especially interesting, therefore, that both productions excise Exton and make Aumerle the assassin.
Research Interests:
Acts of treachery and treason often depend, paradoxically, upon trust between co-conspirators. To bring down a monarchy, an insurgent may need a sophisticated plan and the support of like-minded dissidents. In order to execute such a... more
Acts of treachery and treason often depend, paradoxically, upon trust between co-conspirators. To bring down a monarchy, an insurgent may need a sophisticated plan and the support of like-minded dissidents. In order to execute such a plan, they must display trust: the slightest wrong move can betray a conspiracy and leave the plotters open to destruction. The uneasy tension between trust and treachery is a fertile area for drama to explore. Mining material ranging from classical history, English chronicle, Italian novella, and contemporary experience, the playwrights of the Renaissance commercial stage frequently presented the ambiguity of trust and treachery. This paper will consider a variety of those offerings before focusing on James Shirley’s The Traitor, a Caroline tragedy in which the comic cowardliness of Depazzi, a hapless courtier in the service of a usurping prince, sheds unexpected light on the uneasy nature of trust and treason.
Research Interests:
Rather than considering the lived reality, this paper will examine representations of careers in early modern England. In particular, it focuses on plays which represent the allure of public office as well as the concomitant benefits,... more
Rather than considering the lived reality, this paper will examine representations of careers in early modern England. In particular, it focuses on plays which represent the allure of public office as well as the concomitant benefits, responsibilities, and dangers. The paper shows how dramatists engage with important political debates about the relative value of the withdrawn life of private contemplation, and the public life of active service. Who should aspire to public office? Does power corrupt? Is it better to be a shepherd, or an emperor? These are questions asked by the plays, and considered in this paper.