This chapter asks whether we can detect signs of aesthetic or ideological design in the reviving of plays for courtly audiences. It takes as its case study the 1621–2 Christmas season at court, which is unusual in that a complete list of the plays performed has survived, with dates. The Master of the Revels, whose job it was to select plays from the commercial theatre for court performance, might have been especially cautious during this season, because it occurred at a time when King James was asserting his power over a rebellious House of Commons and restricting outspoken preachers and pamphleteers from criticizing his policies. This case study suggests that we may be justified in seeing careful design in the choice of revivals in the early modern English court.

When the King’s Men took over the residency of the Blackfriars indoor theatre in 1609, they embarked upon a period of conscious reinvention of company identity, combining their existing resources and reputation with a new playing space, audience, financial approach, and performative sensibility. The company made music a key part of this reinvention, drawing on its new assets to increase the presence and variety of original music in its plays. By 1642 they still held a reputation for musical innovation, performing newly written music for both new and older plays in the repertory; their musical settings were still newly circulated in manuscript and print into the 1650s. This chapter explores these musical reinventions, examining dramatic impacts of altered lyrics, melody, harmony, accompaniment, and performance style.

The completion of the Cockpit-in-Court at Whitehall Palace in 1630 seems to have ushered in a period of dramatic revivals at court. A simple cross-reference of extant titles shows curious similarities between plays performed between 1610 and the early 1620s, and the 1630s, in particular the autumn of 1636 through January of 1639. During these active years of spectatorship, Charles I saw dozens of revivals of “old” plays that he also watched as a prince in his father’s court. Rather than imposing a reductive biographical reading on the monarch and what appears to resemble a kind of nostalgia for his early formative years, I argue that the revivals of these plays in the 1630s represent a pattern of monarchical performativity related to Charles I’s period of Personal Rule, as well as an aesthetic preference for monumentalizing the past shared by Charles and Henrietta Maria during this decade of their rule.

By attending to a common theatrical convention – the representation of both dead and apparently dead bodies by actors – Chapter 1 offers a new history of early modern English tragicomedy. In all theatrical performance, the actor’s body is semiotically volatile, for its liveliness can never be entirely circumscribed by the onstage fiction. This chapter demonstrates that the early modern theater frequently exacerbated that necessary instability by requiring its actors to feign death. Tracking instances of apparent death from the late 1580s through the opening of the seventeenth century, the chapter shows that theater practitioners increasingly invited their spectators to apprehend the ambiguity of the lively stage corpse, entwining them in uncertainty by offering them less and less interpretive guidance about the actor’s inevitable signs of life. Audiences gradually came to expect that they could not know the fictional status of apparent corpses. The conventions that eventually coalesced around stage corpses enabled the rise of English tragicomedy, the hybrid genre that allowed for seemingly dead bodies to resurrect themselves without warning.

Brandie R. Siegfried “considers three characteristics of [Cavendish's] volume of verse,” Poems and Fancies, arguing first that the book is "thoroughly engaged with philosophers and mathematicians, both ancient and modern: understanding the import of her poems often requires setting them in dialogue with those thinkers.” Second, Siegfried investigates the prefaces of Cavendish's poetry, further contending that they demonstrate a feminist sensibility as they explain her views for an audience that pointedly included women. Finally, Cavendish’s eclectic ideas are not simply the musings of a careless author, but rather are the works of a committed philosopher who uses the form of poetry to clarify her theories, making them more accessible to readers while “enhancing aesthetic pleasure through increased complexity and wit.” Giving special attention to Cavendish’s poetic revisions in Poems and Fancies, Siegfried further emphasizes the importance of Cavendish’s poetry for understanding the natural philosophy espoused in Philosophical and Physical Opinions, Philosophical Letters, and Observations upon Experimental Philosophy.

Chapter Two focuses on imagination, the cognitive faculty allegedly residing in the front of the brain. Early moderns worried about this faculty especially, as it introduced harmful forms into girls’ minds and enabled them to produce illicit visions. But it also appears as a generative faculty in girls. The adolescents under consideration here use their imaginations to see beyond what is tangible and take on uniquely ameliorative roles in relation to dominant restrictive ideologies and damaging norms. The chapter begins with fifteen-year-old Alice Egerton and her performance as the Lady in John Milton’s Comus. Her imaginative brainwork emerges as a powerful, righteous phenomenon against her sorcerer-captor. Next, a reading of Othello’s Desdemona demonstrates how her extended imagination challenges the gender and race codes that inform the play’s basest mentalities. Desdemona also serves as a case study in how marriage binds the female mind to her husband’s fantasies, eventually limiting its cognitive reach. Finally, the chapter analyzes the teenagers of Fletcher and Shakespeare’s Two Noble Kinsmen. The “coining” brain of the Jailer’s Daughter is shown to complement and compound the brainwork of particular girls within and beyond the play — including Desdemona — and gives their previously contracted, suffocated body-minds a second life.

Chapter 8’s aim is to interrogate the relationship between the court spaces depicted onstage in Shakespeare’s plays and the mimetic undertones that those represented spaces call forth for audiences. Clifford’s chapter explores Shakespeare and Fletcher’s All is True. Whitehall’s 'old name' lingers in the play as a reminder of its previous owner’s disgrace and its current owner’s power. Like Jacobean Whitehall itself, the palace’s narrative history is embedded in its architectural presence. Taking York Place/Whitehall as its centerpiece, this chapter considers court spaces in All is True in relation to the play’s narrative structure, arguing that the play’s engagement with Tudor history is partially defined by the royal places it represents or describes onstage. This chapter unpacks the spatial points of reference available to an imagined court audience for the play. Clifford argues that the palatial commonplaces upon which it relies might have been more meaningful to a court audience than that of the public theatre, thus positioning it as a play imagined for a royal performance.