Explores the value of Shakespeare for theatrical businesspeople and audiences in nineteenth-century New York City.Theatres of Value explores the idea that buying and selling are performative acts and offers a paradigm for deeper study of these acts-"the dramaturgy of value." Modeling this multifaceted approach, the book explores six case studies to show how and why Shakespeare had value for nineteenth-century New Yorkers. In considering William Brown's Afr...

Critical University Studies and Performance explores how we contend with issues of power, race, class, and gender in higher education, specifically as they relate to the complexities of theater and performance studies programs. In what ways might the fields of theater, performance, and dance studies, as they operate in institutions of higher education, support hegemonic logics as well as model reparative practices, given their perhaps unique disciplinary relationships to staging r...

The official journal of the Mid-America Theatre ConferenceWhere past and performance converge—scholarship that moves the stage forward.Theatre History Studies (THS) is a peer-reviewed journal of theatre history and scholarship published annually since 1981 by the Mid-America Theatre Conference (MATC), a regional body devoted to theatre scholarship and practice. The conference encompasses the states of Illinois, Iowa, Nebra...

This book explores the under-theorized intersections between Shakespeare and drag in contemporary American culture and performances of and around what it terms “ShaxDrag.”From the root word “yass” comes the verb “to yassify”. On social media, to “yassify” something is to “glamify” it - generally by running it through multiple digital filters and making it queerer in the process. Yassification distorts reality, and its satire lies in its self-referential nature: the...

In April of 2021, a small theatre in Philadelphia took a big risk: The Wilma premiered a new play called Fat Ham by a then-almost-unknown playwright, James Ijames. Fat Ham reconfigures the story of Hamlet through the lens of a family barbeque in the American South. In Ijames’ play, Shakespeare’s protagonist becomes a fat, queer, Black man named Juicy. Juicy’s mother has just married his uncle in the wake of his father’s murder and Juicy himself is still dealing w...

What does it mean for early modern theatre to be 'live'? How have audiences over time experienced a sense of 'liveness'? This collection extends discussions of liveness to works from the 16th and 17th centuries, both in their initial incarnations and contemporary adaptations. Drawing on theatre and performance studies, as well as media theory, this volume uses the concept of liveness to consider how early modern theatre – including non-Western and non-traditional performance – employs embo...