Emphasizing a performative and stage-centered approach, this book considers early modern European theater as an international phenomenon. Early modern theater was remarkable both in the ways that it represented material and symbolic exchanges across borders but also in the ways that it enacted them. In analyzing theater as a medium of dialogic communication, the volume emphasizes cultural relationships of exchange and reciprocity more than unilateral encounters of hegemony and domination.

Robert Henke is Professor of Drama and Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis, USA, the author of Pastoral Transformations: Italian Tragicomedy and Shakespeare's Late Plays (1997) and Performance and Literature in the Commedia dell'Arte (2002). Eric Nicholson is a Lecturer at Syracuse University in Florence, where he teaches courses in comedy and theater. He has directed over twenty full-scale productions of plays by Shakespeare, Molière, Flaminio Scala, and others.

Contents: Introduction, Robert Henke; Part I Traveling Actors: Border crossing in the commedia dell' arte, Robert Henke; English troupes in early modern Germany: the women, M.A. Katritzky. Part II Transportable Units: A Midsummer Night's Dream and Italian pastoral, Richard Andrews; Dramatic bodies and novellesque spaces in Jacobean tragedy and tragicomedy, Melissa Walter. Part III The Question of the Actress: Moral and Theoretical Transnationalisms: Ophelia sings like a prima donna innamorata: Ophelia's mad scene and the Italian female performer, Eric Nicholson; Theorizing women's place: Nicholas Poussin, The Rape of the Sabines, and the early modern stage, Jane Tylus. Part IV Performing Alteriety: Doubled National Identity: The Dutch diaspora in English comedy: 1598 to 1618, Christian M. Billing; Foreign emotions, Susanne L. Wofford; Translated Turks on the early modern stage, Jacques Lezra. Part V Performing a Nation: Transregional Exchanges: Epicene in Edinburgh (1672): city comedy beyond the London stage, Clare McManus; Proto-nationalist performatives and trans-theatrical displacement in Henry V, David Schalkwyk; Shakespeare on the Indian stage: resistance, recalcitrance, recuperation, Shormishtha Panja. Epilogue: Reading Shakespeare, reading the masks of the Italian commedia: fixed forms and the breath of life, Mace Perlman; Select bibliography; Index.