Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater
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Emphasizing a performative and stage-centered approach, this book considers early modern European theater as an international phenomenon. Early modern theater was remarkable both in the ways that it represented material and symbolic exchanges across political, linguistic, and cultural borders (both "national" and "regional") but also in the ways that it enacted them. Contributors study various modalities of exchange, including the material and causal influence of one theater upon another, as in the case of actors traveling beyond their own regional boundaries; generalized and systemic influence, such as the diffused effect of Italian comedy on English drama; the transmission of theoretical and ethical ideas about the theater by humanist vehicles; the implicit dialogue and exchange generated by actors playing "foreign" roles; and polyglot linguistic resonances that evoke circum-Mediterranean "cultural geographies." In analyzing theater as a medium of dialogic communication, the volume emphasizes cultural relationships of exchange and reciprocity more than unilateral encounters of hegemony and domination.
Robert Henke is Professor of Drama and Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis, USA, the author of Pastoral Transformations: Italian Tragicomedy and Shakespeare's Late Plays (1997) and Performance and Literature in the Commedia dell'Arte (2002). Eric Nicholson is a Lecturer at Syracuse University in Florence, where he teaches courses in comedy and theater. He has directed over twenty full-scale productions of plays by Shakespeare, Molière, Flaminio Scala, and others.