Geographies of Performance in the Early Modern Midlands

Abstract

As site-specific theory is increasingly brought to bear within historicized contexts, early modern household performances and court masques as theatrical subgenres have benefited hugely from the attention to moment, event and venue that this work has enabled. However, by thinking about site-specific performances not solely in terms of hermetically sealed one-off occasional events, we can also begin to complicate the geographies of early modern performance as we currently construe them, which has tended to perpetuate a sense of London’s commercial theatres as the centre and all regional activity as necessarily secondary and referential. Through a case study of household performances in the English Midlands in the 1630s and 1640s and their interaction with a number of better known London staged plays from the Caroline period (1625–42), I aim to evidence an important cross-flow of inter-theatrical influences between professional and amateur practices and between metropolitan centre and province at this time. In turn, the work of major literary figures such as Ben Jonson, and his Caroline inheritors Richard Brome and James Shirley, as well as several less well known, sometimes anonymous, individuals operating within private household contexts becomes visible as part of this multidirectional knowledge exchange process.