Staged Transgression in Shakespeare's England

Innovative and international in scope, Palgrave Shakespeare Studies is a research-based series seeking to understand anew the significance of Shakespeare, his contexts, and his legacy. Staged Transgression in Shakespeare's England is a groundbreaking collection of essays that draws together leading and emerging scholars to investigate performances of transgression on the early modem English stage. Building on recent scholarship in studies of performance, politics, gender, sex, and race, this collection seeks to assess, respond to, and look beyond the last concentrated critical discussion of transgression in the 1980s. This collection explores areas of study that have been previously neglected in scholarly discussion and seeks to challenge critical orthodoxies and assumptions about the power and effect of onstage performances of illicit, deviant, and disorderly behaviour. Contributors examine a wide range of onstage activities - from drunkenness and spitting to murder and rebellion - and offer fresh insights into the cultural work of theatre in Shakespeare's England.