Stages of Loss

Stages of Loss supplies an original and deeply researched account of travel and festivity in early modern Europe, complicating, revising, and sometimes entirely rewriting received accounts of the emergence and development of professional theatre. It offers a history of English actors travelling and performing abroad in early modern Europe, and Germany in particular, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These players, known as English Comedians, were among the first professional actors to perform in central and northern European courts and cities. The vital contributions made by them to the development of a European theatre institution have long been neglected owing to the pre-eminence of national theatre histories and the difficulty of researching an inherently evanescent phenomenon across large distances. These contributions are here introduced in their proper contexts for the first time.

Stages of Loss explores connections real and perceived between diminishments of national value and the material wealth transported by itinerant players; representations of loss, waste, and profligacy within the drama they performed; and the extent to which theatrical practice and the process of canonization have led to archival and interpretive losses in theatre history. Situating the English Comedians in a variety of economic, social, religious, and political contexts, it explores trends and continuities in the reception of their itinerant theatre, showing how their incorporation into modern theatre history has been shaped by derogatory assessments of travelling theatre and itinerant people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Stages of Loss reveals that the Western theatre institution took shape partly as a means of accommodating, controlling, evaluating, and concealing the work of migrant strangers.