Rebuts the “fresh start” theory of Restoration drama, which regards the year 1660 as a turning point in English dramatic history. Stresses instead how and why 1660 should be seen as a moment of continuation as well as of change. Discusses the theatrical professionals (Henry Herbert, William Beeston, John Rhodes, Michael Mohun, George Jolly) who continued to suffer hardships and exclusion after the so-called restoration of the theatres, due to the exclusive theatre patents granted to Thomas Killigrew and William Davenant. Describes the legacy of the theatrical prohibition on the careers of dramatic stationers Francis Kirkman and Henry Herringman, as a respective loser and winner within the Restoration playbook trade. Argues that Restoration dramatic criticism ought to be read in the context of the 1640s and 1650s discourse analyzed in the first half of the monograph, which describes English drama’s identity centred around print publication. Notes that the modern conditions to study early modern drama, namely the existence of some kind of textual instantiation (a playtext, a fragment, allusion, or title in the historical record) were set in motion by the closure of the theatres in 1642.

The veteran classical actor Louis Butelli played Duncan in the 2018 production of Davenant’s Macbeth at the Folger Theatre, a collaboration between the Folger Shakespeare Library and the research project ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare’. In this interview with Richard Schoch, Butelli explores the challenges that Restoration Shakespeare presents to a contemporary actor, including unfamiliarity, bias toward Shakespeare’s original versions, heightened language and the interpolation of music. Drawing on his own research into Restoration theatre, Butelli also reflects on his experience of collaborating with a team of scholar in the production of Davenant’s Macbeth. In contrast to the chapter by actor Kate Eastwood Norris, this chapter investigates how actors can learn from documentary sources about Restoration theatre (e.g., Colley Cibber’s Apology) to enhance their own work today.

Robert Eisenstein, director of the Folger Consort, was musical director for the 2018 production of Davenant’s Macbeth at the Folger Theatre, a collaboration between the Folger Shakespeare Library and the research project ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare’. In this interview with Amanda Eubanks Winkler, Eisenstein explains the role of music in the Restoration theatre and the particular musical demands of Restoration Shakespeare. Based on his experience at the Folger, he also reflects on the challenges and opportunities for musicians in performing Restoration Shakespeare today with Restoration-era music (some of which had been composed for the original productions) and offers suggestions for both musical and stage directors in bringing this unique historical repertoire to life on the contemporary stage.

Apart from its singing and dancing witches, Davenant’s adaptation of Macbeth is most famous for expanding the role of Lady Macduff. Augmenting the mere nineteen lines afforded the character in Shakespeare’s text, Davenant significantly enlarges and complicates the role, giving Lady Macduff an additional four scenes, in which she demonstrates agency in both familial and political matters. This chapter puts Shakespeare’s and Davenant’s Lady Macduffs into conversation, exploring the opportunities and challenges presented by both versions of the role in performance.  Combining theatre history, textual analysis, and practice-as-research methodologies, I begin by surveying the depiction of Lady Macduff in twenty-first century stagings of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.  I argue that concepts of the feminine, the victim, and the mother define the interpretation of Lady Macduff in performance. I then contrast Shakespeare’s depiction of the character with that of Davenant, drawing on Anne Greenfield’s argument to consider how Davenant’s Lady Macduff might be considered a ‘subversive tragic heroine’. Developing this idea through practical exploration of Davenant’s Lady Macduff in performance, this chapter concludes by considering what practitioners today can learn from Davenant’s adaptation.

This chapter situates William Davenant’s adaptation of Macbeth (1664) within the broader context of his own playmaking career. It traces the connections and discrepancies between Macbeth and the heroic operas and plays Davenant himself wrote and produced during the 1650s and 1660s, and which he theorised in A Proposition for Advancement of Moralitie (1653). Employing literary and performance modes of analysis, it demonstrates how the dramaturgical alterations he made to the play align it with a distinctive Davenantian mode: just like The Siege of Rhodes – recognised by John Dryden as the first extant heroic play in English – Macbeth centres on two opposing married couples; it meditates on how best to reconcile uxorious love with public duty and personal honour; and it puts creative energy into music and spectacle to produce powerful theatrical effects. Previous scholarship has condemned Davenant as a feeble-minded adapter, who rewrote Shakespeare to eliminate the perceived infelicities that would likely offend a discerning Restoration audience: antiquated diction, cumbersome syntax, psychological inconsistency. This chapter instead contends that we have failed to meet Davenant’s text on its own terms, as an example of the heroic genre that dominated the stage during the opening decade of the Restoration.

This chapter analyses cross-dressing in Restoration Shakespeare – in the main, female characters dressed in male attire – exploring the key question of how this theatrical device was influenced by the advent of the professional actress on the English stage. The approach is twofold. Firstly, the chapter examines the use of cross-dressing in specific Restoration-era adaptations of Shakespeare. One of the earliest of these, Dryden and Davenant’s The Tempest (1667), provides additional opportunities for transvestite performance as the play’s new male role of Hippolito was performed as a travesty part by an actress (either Mary Davis or Jane Long) and the female part of Sycorax (also added to the play by the adapters) was likely played by a man. Furthermore, it explores how other adapters treated the cross-dressing already inherent in the Shakespearean texts they chose to rewrite, considering, for example, George Granville’s The Jew of Venice (1701) and Charles Burnaby’s Love Betrayed (1703), a version of Twelfth Night. Secondly, the chapter investigates the Restoration performance history of Shakespearean ‘originals’ that feature transvestism, including Twelfth Night and The Merry Wives of Windsor. The chapter nuances our understanding of gender in Restoration Shakespeare through a detailed consideration of cross-dressing.

Kate Eastwood Norris played Lady Macbeth in the Folger’s 2018 production of Davenant’s Macbeth, in collaboration with the research project ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare’. Writing from her perspective as a professional actress, Eastwood Norris explains the parameters of the Folger’s production, both logistical and creative. She then recounts and reflects on the experience, both formal and informal, of working with the team of scholars attached to the production. In contrast to the chapter by actor Louis Butelli, this chapter move beyond its immediate production-based narrative to consider in a more general way the need for scholars to explain their insights in a way that is appropriate, useful, and valuable to professional theatre artists. This chapter argues that when scholarship is treated as an idea—a possibility—rather than as a fact—a fixed certainty—the creative aspects of both scholarship and performance can form the solid basis of scholar-artist collaboration.

In 2017, as part of the research project ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare’, the editors led a research team of scholars and artists in discussing, workshopping, rehearsing, and performing scenes and songs from Thomas Shadwell’s 1674 operatic revision of Davenant and Dryden’s The Tempest at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. This chapter offers reflections on how scholar-artist collaboration in performing Restoration Shakespeare has functioned as sustained moments of what Rebecca Schneider (following Gertrude Stein) has called ‘syncopated time’ – in this instance, a collision of archival past and embodied present, in which each dimension punctured the other. Reflecting on their practice-based research, the authors propose that what can emerge through such syncopations are performance-generated insights that neither the recorded past nor the embodied present could fully apprehend on its own.