The recently built Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, VA, has renewed interest among Shakespeareans and theater historians alike in the playhouse to which Shakespeare’s company moved late in his career. Inside Shakespeare: Essays on the Blackfriars Stage represents the first scholarly collection to address questions peculiar to the Blackfriars and indoor playing: Did the Blackfriars have its own repertory? What was the place of the Blackfriars in the urban economy? What qualities did the Blackfriears share with the long tradition of great-hall performances? Featuring essays by Andrew Gurr, Tiffany Stern, Stephen Booth, Roslyn Knutson, A. R. Braunmuller, Michael Shapiro, Alan Somerset, Virginia Mason Vaughn and others, the essays span a range of approaches from performative to historical to textual. Some focus quite specifically on the Blackfriars, while others use the theater as a springboard to related concerns. Culled form the first two Blackfriars conferences in 2001 and 2003, all the essays help resituate the place of the Shakespearean stage.

Inside Shakespeare convenes in two broad categories. Part I, “The Blackfriars Playhouse and the Indoor Stage,” collectively negotiate the Blackfriars’ urban and urbane location, reading plays there as part of an entertainment circuit including great-hall performances, boy companies, prize fighting, and royal entertainments. The essays question the extent to which the King’s Men’s move indoors in 1608/9 would have presented an innovation. Several authors provocatively suggest that Shakespeare’s late career move may have been a “homecoming” of sorts by recalling the hall performances witnessed in his provincial youth. Taken together, the essays in Part I embed the Blackfriars within a complex range of affiliations. The theater may have been new to the King’s Men in 1608, but the room came haunted with specters of entertainments and associations past.

The more broadly defined Part II, “Plays and Playing,” exemplifies the range of work encouraged by a reconstructed seventeenth-century stage, for the essays scrutinize theatrical conventions, stage dynamics, textual studies, and performance history. The essays in Part II nevertheless exemplify a “poetics of indoor spaces,” as they focus close attention on the relationship between text and space. An Afterwood, “Discovery Spaces,” presents a cautionary mediation on research methodologies in theatrical reproductions. Taken altogether the essays here aim to be the foundation of a more thoroughgoing exploration of the forms and meanings of early modern drama-an exploration now facilitated by access to re-creations of both Shakespeare’s indoor and outdoor theaters. Those re-creations are themselves architectural essays in search of a greater understating of how the plays, their authors, their actors, and their audiences worked. Inside Shakespeare points us toward a more fully integrated sense of the places of playing in which William Shakespeare’s plays received first flesh.