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Abstract

This introduction expounds the historical and theoretical overlaps between games and theatre by analyzing how playing crucially links these phenomena. The early modern English stage is an ideal locus for exploring that intersection, given its cultural significance as ludic entertainment and its ongoing impact on gaming today. We contextualize these issues by examining scholarship on play, from Huizinga and Caillois to more recent work; by centering aspects of drama beyond mimesis and situating these within theatre and performance studies; and by articulating how theatre challenges games as rule-bound systems. We conclude with an overview of the volume’s three sections, respectively on the history of early modern games, the incorporation of games into stageplays, and Shakespearean drama’s legacy in contemporary videogames.

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Tom Bishop:

Bio :

Tom Bishop is Professor and former Head of English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, where he teaches Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, and drama. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder (Cambridge, 1996), the translator of Ovid’s Amores (Carcanet, 2003), a co-editor of Pericles, Prince of Tyre (Internet Shakespeare Editions), and a continuing general editor of The Shakespearean International Yearbook (Routledge). He has published work on Elizabethan music, Shakespeare, Jonson, court masques, Australian literature, the Renaissance Bible, early modern religion, and other topics. He is currently editing As You Like It for the Arden Shakespeare (4th series) and working on a book on Shakespeare’s theatre games.

Gina Bloom:

Bio :

Gina Bloom is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. Her book Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007) was named best book of the year by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. Her second book, Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater (University of Michigan Press, 2018), was runner up for the Outstanding Book Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. She co-edited, with Susan Bennett, a special issue on “Shakespeare and Performance Studies” for the Shakespeare Bulletin and has published articles in edited collections and journals, including Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Studies, and Theatre Survey. Bloom co-created the mixed-reality Shakespeare game Play the Knave, exhibiting it in theatres, cultural institutions, libraries, and classrooms around the world. She is a former Trustee for the Shakespeare Association of America.

Erika T. Lin:

Bio :

Erika T. Lin is Associate Professor in the PhD Program in Theatre and Performance at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance, which received the 2013 David Bevington Award for Best New Book in Early Drama Studies. Her prize-winning essays have appeared in Theatre Journal, New Theatre Quarterly, and many edited collections. She is currently writing a book on seasonal festivities and early modern commercial theatre, a project recognized by various honors and grants including an Andrew W. Mellon Long-Term Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She recently served as the book review editor for Theatre Survey and as a member of the Board of Trustees for the Shakespeare Association of America.

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Publication date (Print): October 05 2021

Pages: 11-38

Affiliations

[1 ] University of Auckland

[2 ] University of California

[3 ] Graduate Center, CUNY

DOI: 10.5117/9789463723251_intro

SO-VID: 13ea2005-c69b-4bb1-815c-716978a44230

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