Shakespeare / Play: Contemporary Readings in Playing, Playmaking and Performance

What is (a) play? How do Shakespeare's plays engage with, and represent, early modern modes of play – from jests, games and toys, to music, spectacle, movement, animal-baiting and dance? How have we played with Shakespeare in the centuries since? And how does the structure of the plays experienced in the early modern playhouse shape our understanding of the form of a Shakespeare play today? brings together established and emerging scholars to respond to these questions, using approaches spanning theatre and dance history, cultural history, critical race studies, performance studies, disability studies, archaeology, material history, music and literary analysis. Ranging across Shakespeare's dramatic oeuvre as well as early modern lost plays, dance notation, conduct books, jest books and contemporary theatre and film, it includes consideration of , and , among others. The subject of this volume is reflected in its structure: features substantial new essays across five 'acts', interwoven with seven shorter, playful pieces (a 'prologue', four 'act breaks', a 'jig' and a curtain call), to offer new directions for research on Shakespearean playing, playmaking and performance. In so doing, this volume interrogates the conceptions of playing of/in Shakespeare that shape how we perform, read, teach and analyze Shakespeare today.