Prologue

Callan Davies

Prologue

School of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review

Abstract

This “prologue” is modelled on the early modern dramatic prologue and playfully addresses the reader as though they are entering a playhouse in the moments before the drama begins. It moves out from Dekker’s satire of playgoing in The Gul’s Horn Book (1609) to a brief indication of the manifold meanings of play for early modern audiences. It then addresses the uses of the term in archival sources such as court depositions, where it was employed to describe anything from games of bowling to rounds of gambling. Throughout, the prologue is interrupted by The Taming of the Shrew’s “induction,” which points to the wider recreational possibilities of playing spaces via its alehouse milieu and a pointed exchange about the semantics of the term “play.” The multiplicity of play encompassed here in turn presages material in the wider collection, as appropriate to the edition and its chapters.

Original language	English
Title of host publication	Shakespeare/Play
Editors	Emma Whipday
Publisher	Arden: Bloomsbury
Publication status	Accepted/In press - 2023

Cite this

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title = "Prologue",

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