Draft of pre-publication review of Courtyard Theatre’s 2016 production of Missouri Williams’ King Lear with Sheep. For the published and corrected version, please see: https://shakespearequarterly.folger.edu/web_exclusive/shakespeare-performed-courtyard-theatres-king-lear-with-sheep/

his article examines recent critical approaches to Shakespeare and the senses. Historicizing the senses has posed certain methodological challenges: what is the relationship between subjective sensory perceptions and broader cultural understandings of sensation? Does the sensate have a history? Recent work on each of the five senses demonstrates…[Read more]

Who or what played the baboon on early modern London’s stages? Such a question may seem as obscure as its answer obvious; I ask it, however, to foreground the long history of trained animal performers and their relationship to canonical English drama. The surprising presence of performing baboons in early modern London has been mostly forgotten or…[Read more]

Olfaction has not figured largely in scholarly or popular understanding of early English stages; as stage properties, scents have rarely impacted the critical work on late medieval or early modern material histories of the stage, no doubt due to the assumption that olfaction lacks both a history and an archive. Nonetheless, for late medieval and…[Read more]