Deadline for Abstracts: 15 June, 2011
Deadline for accepted essays: 15 September, 2011
Essay length: 7500 words, including notes
Deadline for accepted essays: 15 September, 2011
Essay length: 7500 words, including notes
This collection of essays, edited by James Mardock and Kathryn McPherson, will consider the role of the Reformation in making drama a dominant cultural form in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From the early Elizabethan touring companies’ use in the dissemination of doctrine, English stages were potential sites of encounter, officially sanctioned or not, with mainstream Protestant ideology. But in what ways was the early modern drama itself shaped by the religion of its producers and its audiences? Does drama revise, resist, and react against Reformation doctrine, or does it reinforce? Do particular plays or playwrights make conscious incursions into religious debates?
Papers might explore the implicit or explicit religious arguments of a playwright’s work or a company’s repertoire; the relationship of plays to sermons; the staging of fictional or historical religious conflict; the analogy between the scripted player and the predestined saint or sinner; or the psychological effects of English Calvinism as expressed in English drama.
Please send abstracts and a 200-word biography to the e-mail address above by 15 June, 2011.
