This volume explores the transnationality and interculturality of early modern performance in multiple languages, cultures, countries and genres. Its twelve essays compose a complex image of theatre connections as a socially, economically, politically and culturally rich tissue of networks and influences. With particular attention to itinerant performers, court festival, and the Black, Muslim and Jewish impact, they combine disciplines and methods to place Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the wider context of performance culture in English, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Czech and Italian speaking Europe. The authors examine transnational connections by offering multidisciplinary perspectives on the theatrical significance of concrete historical facts: archaeological findings, archival records, visual artefacts, and textual evidence.

Reviews

'What emerges in this volume, the third from the Theater without Borders collective, is a dynamic image
of performance traditions spilling into one another in constant dislocation, reorienting early modern performance toward its contact zones.'
SEL review

List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction - Pavel Drábek and M. A. Katritzky

Part I: West
1 If the shoe fits, or the truth in pinking - Natasha Korda
2 Freedom and constraint in transnational comedy: The 'jest unseen' of love letters in Two Gentlemen of Verona and El perro del hortelano - Susanne L. Wofford
3 'La voluntad jamás permite señor': Transnational versions of cross-class desire in Cardenio and Mujeres y criados - Barbara Fuchs
4 The African ambassador's travels: Playing black in late seventeenth-century France and Spain - Noémie Ndiaye

Part II: North
5 Migration and drama: Amsterdam 1617 - Nigel Smith
6 London and The Hague, 1638: Performing quacks at court - M. A. Katritzky
7 'Why, sir, are there other heauens in other countries?': The English Comedy as a transnational style - Pavel Drábek
8 The Re-Inspired and Revived Bernardon: Metamorphoses of early modern comedy in eighteenth-century bourgeois theatre - Friedemann Kreuder

Part III: South
9 Northern lights and shadows: Transcultural encounters in early modern Italian theatre Eric Nicholson
10 Representations of female power: Musical spectacle at the Paris court of Maria de' Medici, the Italian Minerva of France - Janie Cole
11 Ebrei and Turchi performing in early modern Venice and Mantua - Erith Jaffe-Berg
12 Ragozine's beheading: Dramatic and civil logics of the European state-form - Jacques Lezra

Afterword - Robert Henke
Bibliography
Index

Editors

M. A. Katritzky is Barbara Wilkes Research Fellow in Theatre Studies and Director, The Centre for Research into Gender and Otherness in the Humanities, at The Open University

Pavel Drábek is Professor of Drama and Theatre Practice in the School of the Arts at the University of Hull