The Edges of Early Modern English Drama

History, Performance, and the Scholarship of Lisa Hopkins

Aidan Norrie, Matthew Steggle

• Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781501521607
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501518102
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Thanks to the pioneering work of Professor Lisa Hopkins, the field of early modern English drama is now much more attuned to the various edges, spaces, and intersections that characterise the dramatic output of the period. This focus has done much to recover the rich tapestry of early modern drama, and as the chapters in this collection show, considering the edges helps to fill gaps in the centre.

This collection examines works by a range of dramatists—including Beaumont, Dekker, Fletcher, Heywood, Jonson, Lyly, Marlowe, Massinger, Middleton, Sampson, and Shakespeare—and demonstrates that paying close attention to the edges of these dramatic works reveals much about the conditions in which these texts were conceived, produced, and received.

Spanning the familiar and the unfamiliar, this collection reinforces the need to dispense with notions of canon and canonicity, and to think more holistically about early modern drama than the lens 'Shakespeare and his contemporaries' generally allows.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Frontmatter
• Contents
• Figures
• Introduction The Edges of Early Modern English Drama
• Chapter 1 Politicians, Projectors, and Parasites: Lurkers at the Margins of Inner Performance
• Chapter 2 “O Nature, place Pandora in my sphere”: Embodied (E)motion in Lyly’s The Woman in the Moon
• Chapter 3 Faustus on the Edge of the Universe
• Chapter 4 “Sooner shall the sea o’erwhelm my land”: Water in Marlowe’s Edward II and Drayton’s Mortimeriados
• Chapter 5 Chinon of England at the Edge of Reason
• Chapter 6 Playing Apprentices and Apprentice Players in Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle
• Chapter 7 On the Edge of History: Elizabeth I on the Jacobean and Caroline Stage
• Chapter 8 “Hence, and shut your gates upon’s”: The Bitter Politics of Welcome in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and Alexandre Hardy’s Coriolan
• Chapter 9 Piracy and the Edges of Gender, Nation, and Faith: Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West, Part 1 and Massinger’s The Renegado
• Chapter 10 A Witch by Any Other Name? Naming and the Edge of Meaning in Middleton’s The Witch
• Chapter 11 Competing Visions of the Classics in Jonson’s Lovers Made Men and Fletcher’s The Mad Lover
• Chapter 12 The Gothicisation of Early Modern English Drama: A Retrospective
• Afterword: The Scholarship of Lisa Hopkins
• Index