The pageant that ends Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor alludes in its form and themes to the country-house entertainments performed for Elizabeth on progress. It interprets this kind of pageantry as a space to negotiate communal identities and as an opportunity for women and the nonelite to intervene socially and politically. As it does so, i…[Read more]

Although scholars have overlooked the minor character Ned Poins, I argue that he is central to the construction of masculinity in Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays. I analyze Poins in two cultural moments in the context of shifting ideas about male friendship and same-sex desire: the sixteenth-century texts and two twenty-first-century productions, t…[Read more]

By comparatively reviewing two 2017 North American performances of Timon of Athens, this article assesses how the play has been made to speak to contemporary concerns about technology, wealth, and celebrity. Productions at the Folger Theatre in Washington, D.C. and the Stratford Festival in Ontario offer strikingly different commentaries on…[Read more]

This essay analyses how the morris dance in The Two Noble Kinsmen – a crucial moment in the play’s treatment of gender and class rank – intervenes in seventeenth-century debates about the cultural function of morris dancing and especially of women’s roles within it. The essay considers what morris dancing might have signified at the play’s…[Read more]