Epilogue: Field of Play : Gamifying Early Modern Theatre and Performance Studies

Abstract

If the study of early modern theatre and performance takes as its object the study of “play,” this epilogue asks: What are the rules of the game? How does conceptualizing early modern theatre and performance as gamelike shift the field in which we work and the turf upon which we play? Where are the parameters that delimit the field drawn, and how do they determine what is considered to be in or out of bounds? Surveying how these essays variously work with and play upon disciplinary rules and boundaries, I suggest how other models and modalities of early modern play might open the field to new modes of inquiry.