This chapter will place Shakespeare’s use of the word ‘pretty’ in the dramaturgical and rhetorical context of child-acting on the early modern stage. Shakespeare’s recurring use of the word ‘pretty’, which appears in his work 130 times, turns on a cluster of gendered inflections to probe the representational trickery associated with presenting boys as girls – and sometimes just boys – before paying London audiences. Drawing on recent developments in trans theory, I will argue that Shakespeare uses ‘pretty’ and its cognates to promote a more circumspect approach to the theatrical presentation of child actors on stage, particularly in relation to the excessively ‘prettified players’ of rival companies such as the Children of Paul’s, the Children of Blackfriars, and the King’s Revels Children.

This chapter looks closely at Shakespeare’s reduplicatives, or echo words: handy-dandy, skimble-skamble, tag-rag, and other jingling compounds hinting at a sense which they seem to mock. The charm of these words lies in their cavalier attitude to meaning, the echoes and rhymes suggesting that it could be either this or that, the front or the back, or what you will. Just how stable the meaning of Shakespeare’s sundry hurly-burlies, heigh-hos, and kicky-wickies was when he put them in the mouths of his actors is the question this chapter addresses first. Would his spectators recognise these reduplicatives as established words or would they be more likely to be guided by their sounds and the gestures of actors? The chapter looks at the contexts in which these words appeared before and beyond Shakespeare’s plays in order to describe the kind of resonance they might have had in a playhouse, and considers our subsequent efforts to stabilise and interpret the form as well as the meaning of Shakespeare’s reduplicatives.

In Shakespeare’s Mediterranean comedy Twelfth Night, Feste, Olivia’s jester, continually describes ambivalence in terms of imported iridescent material, describing Orsino’s mind as an opal and iridescent silk, referencing the multi-coloured Peruvian gemstone that flashes between turquoise and orange: ‘Now, the melancholy god protect thee; and the tailor make thy doublet of changeable taffeta, for thy mind is a very opal’ (ii .vi.80). Valerie Traub has recently suggested that ambivalence may be a productive and uniquely early modern way of thinking through issues of race and gender. This chapter argues that the language of iridescence, coupled with the play’s multicultural setting, allows Shakespeare to explore not only what an ambivalent mind might look like, but also to champion and embrace ambivalence of identity, including foreignness, gender, and sexuality.

This chapter proposes to show that reading Martin Amis’s representation of women in his London Trilogy today raises a number of issues related to the elusive nature of the author’s voice and values in the text. In Money and London Fields in particular, the violence women are submitted to by the male narrators and characters, even though partaking of the satire Amis brushes upon British society in the 1980s, tends to systematically portray women as victims. However, it must not be forgotten that Amis also introduces a number of female figures of relative empowerment in his novels, whose various forms of agency (murderees, authors, femmes fatales) are worth pointing out. The question as to the reality of this agency has to be raised, however, in the context of the general economy of the simulacrum which Amis’s novels denounce and promote. If Amis’s carnivalesque satires leave nothing unscathed and celebrate the death of all great narratives, how can the feminist narrative be applied to them? It seems that Amis’s own beliefs in the powers and of language and language games provide a key to beginning to answer this question.

Chapter 9 moves the discussion from not-knowing to not-doing in the acts of everyday life. Here, the focus is on people’s willingness and purpose to stop knowing, to pause, or to put a stop to the meaning of the world by engaging in subversive acts of not-doing. This concept is derived from the work of the controversial anthropologist and ethnographic fiction writer, Carlos Castaneda. This chapter centers on various forms of deliberate immersion and transportation of subjects into the negative and enigmatic realm of not-knowing. Therefore, we perceive not-doing as purposely creative, devising practices with the intention of altering consciousness in order to introduce individuals to experiences commonly referred to as paranormal, esoteric, mystical, divine, artistic, and subjunctive.

Looking broadly at the place of Scripture in the Byzantine Church, this chapter focuses on the place and symbolism of the Gospel reading in the Divine Liturgy. The reader is provided with an overview of the various manuscripts used in the liturgical rite and the Biblical readings deployed therein, as well as an outline of the rites in the Divine Liturgy that surround the recitation of the Gospel. Using as a case study the Christmas Day reading found in an illustrated lectionary, now at the Vatican Library (Vat. gr. 1156), the chapter walks the reader through the variety of evidence preserved in Byzantine Gospel lectionaries for understanding the performance of the liturgy, the chanting of the Gospel text and the artistic and scribal practices of the manuscript tradition. Through this chapter, readers will gain a better understanding of how the Gospel was recited in the Byzantine Church, while also acquiring a sense of the various primary and secondary sources for undertaking further research in this area of study.

This chapter explores the double bill of Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci – first presented at the Metropolitan Opera in 1893 in the context of increasing Italian emigration to New York, and becoming a staple of New York’s operatic life. Mascagni’s one-act opera had been a huge success at its Roman world premiere and capitalised on widespread interest in the economically impoverished Italian South on the part of Northern and Central Italian audiences. The two operas became a focal point for wider discussions in New York about Italian identity and Italian opera’s position within the cultural hierarchies of the time: ones in which distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow were being negotiated, and Italian opera shifted between social allegiances and degrees of cultural (and racial) capital. Tracing the operas’ ongoing critical reception and performance history, I indicate how the operas fluctuated between contemporary politics and aesthetic escape and argue for the formulation of italianità as much as an expressive mode as a cultural category, during a period of emerging interest in (and monetisation of) human psychology and emotional behaviour.

This chapter positions William Burroughs within the radical tradition of avant-garde manifesto writing, arguing that his cut-up experiments, pamphlets, tape texts, and prose manifestos from the late 1950s through the early 1970s exemplify the genre’s urgency, performativity, and call to action. Drawing on the lineage of Marx, Futurism, and Dada, Jimmy Fazzino explores how Burroughs weaponized language and media to dismantle structures of “Control” through techniques of textual sabotage and sonic disruption. Works like Minutes to Go, The Exterminator, BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS, and The Revised Boy Scout Manual are read not only as aesthetic provocations but as revolutionary acts aligned with the manifesto’s historical function. Addressing Burroughs’s contradictions – including the inflammatory rhetoric of his guerrilla texts – Fazzino examines how Burroughs redefined literature as a site of resistance, merging art and life in a performative praxis designed to make things happen.

Chapter 6 outlines the ways different practitioners of peithō’s arts managed her ambiguity through expressions and performances of piety toward her divinity. The chapter examines diverse figures from ancient Greek comedy and oratory who used prayerful reverence toward Peithō to bolster their own ēthos and secure success for their rhetorical projects. The chapter surveys the persuasive work of characters from the Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and Menander’s Epitrepontes as well as historical speeches from Demosthenes and Isocrates. Each of the orator-like figures examined reveals both the advantages and pitfalls of partnering with Peithō and the degrees to which the coercive or corrupting qualities of her influence might be deflected. These performances offered the ancient audience a variety of educational models for how one might productively harness Peithō’s assistance in rhetorical speech: by cultivating respectful deference toward her divinity and reconciling oneself to a lack of complete control before her power.

The Introduction explains the collection’s argument, structure, and its interventions in the field. We challenge the fetishization of firsts in early modern drama studies, first performances, and first editions and highlight problems with privileging “maiden” performances and print “inceptions” of Renaissance plays over their ghost-like “afterlives” on the stage and page. Engaging with recent work in theatre and book history and editorial studies, the Introduction explores the idea that plays are indelibly marked and transformed by their transhistorical movement through different cultural sites of production and reception. We argue, in short, that the social, political, and aesthetic meanings of Renaissance drama were shaped by processes of renewal.

Although book historians have tended to date the beginnings of an established market for printed plays to the mid 1590s, the first year of play publication, 1584, saw four plays printed, two of them in multiple editions. More plays were printed in this year than the rest of the decade combined; it would be another sixteen years before a play went into multiple editions in a single year. This chapter asks what this strange year tells us about plays as printed, reprinted, and revived commodities. The four plays discussed are John Lyly’s Campaspe and Sappho and Phao, Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London, and George Peele’s The Arraignment of Paris. All four plays have things to say about reviving stories and performance, and three went on to be reprinted. Attending to them as a kind of corpus, this chapter investigates their place in the histories of revival, reprinting, and dramaturgy.