About this Journal
Early Theatre is a peer-reviewed journal that publishes articles, reviews, and notes on medieval and early modern drama and theatre history, with a particular focus on records pertaining to actors, theatres, music, dance, and entertainment of all kinds. Our main emphasis is the performance history of art, entertainment, and festive occasions, primarily in England, but we also feature interpretive articles relating to the performances themselves. We also publish scholarship on subjects relating to early English drama as it impinges on or is influenced by other international practices. Overall, we aim to bring together the disciplines of history, art history, theatre history, music, politics, and economics so that these various scholarly concerns have a common forum in which to test theories about performance.
We publish full-length articles, shorter notes, and book reviews. Each year we also feature ‘Issues in Review’, a section of related, short essays that together highlight new research directions and shape the field for further work in such areas as repertory study, performance theory, or studies of neglected playwrights; our most recent ‘Issues in Review’ section, for example, focused on commedia dell’arte’s influence on seventeenth-century drama. Early Theatre also publishes occasional special volumes with sustained attention to particular topics (see, for example, volume 3 on the York Cycle in performance and volume 6 dedicated to performance, politics, and culture in southwest Britain).
Early Theatre evolved out of the REED Newsletter, a biannual newsletter published by the Records of Early English Drama (REED). This transformation reflected the growing stature of the earlier publication and the need for a scholarly journal still linked to but also independent from the REED project. Early Theatre now circulates both in print and online through Digital Commons, ITER, and Gale/Cengage. Our international readership includes individuals in North America, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and parts of Europe; our institutional subscribers include academic libraries worldwide. In recognition of the excellence of our contributors, we have recently inaugurated biennial prizes in three categories. Please visit our Announcements page for details!
Editorial Board:
Editor
Helen Ostovich, McMaster University
ostovich@mcmaster.ca
Associate and Managing Editor
Melinda Gough, McMaster University
goughm@mcmaster.ca
Associate Editor
Erin E. Kelly, University of Victoria
ekelly@uvic.ca
Book Review Editor
Roberta Barker, Dalhousie University
barkerr@dal.ca
Board Members
Gloria J. Betcher, Iowa State University
Pamela A. Brown, University of Connecticut
Richard Cave, Royal Holloway, University of London
Lawrence Clopper, Indiana University
John Craig, Simon Fraser University
JoAnna Dutka, University of Toronto
Garrett Epp, University of Alberta
Vanessa Harding, Birkbeck, University of London
Alexandra Johnston, University of Toronto
M.A. Katritzky, The Open University
Anne Lancashire, University of Toronto
Marion F O'Connor, University of Kent
Suzanne Westfall, Lafayette College
Paul Yachnin, McGill University