038 // A play without a stage: art in the time of closed theatres

Featured speaker: Heidi Craig

In September 1642, English Parliament outlawed public stage plays, a prohibition that would last 18 long years. Formerly bustling theatres stood vacant or were converted into tenements, and the celebrity actors of the day fell into penniless obscurity. The culture of dramatic performance was forced to change. Amid nostalgia for what had come before, publications of dramatic works flourished, laying the stage for what we now know as the modern canon, the editorial, and the elevation of Shakespeare’s works to lasting dominance in English language drama.

This salon will consider the nature of drama in a world without live theatre. What does artistic culture look like without high-profile performance? How does art become canonical? And what parallels can be drawn between the ban of the mid-17th century and our modern, socially distanced era?

Heidi received a PhD in English Literature from the University of Toronto and is an assistant professor of English at Texas A&M University. She is also the editor of the World Shakespeare Bibliography, and editor of Early Modern Dramatic Paratexts, which once completed will be a fully-searchable open-access database of all dramatic paratexts printed up to 1660. Heidi's research and teaching is about Shakespeare, early modern drama, gender studies, book history, and digital humanities.

This salon took place November 12, 2021.