Staging Failure

Midway through The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Rafe mistakes the Bell Inn for an ancient castle. This chapter draws upon that episode to show how failures of ecological thinking can disrupt the assumptions that are embedded within a particular place. Contrasting Rafe’s misreading of the Bell with similar episodes in Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, the chapter establishes both the particular cognitive ecology that sustains Rafe’s error and its implications for early modern theater. It argues that Rafe’s disorientation satirizes the way that early modern playgoers reimagined the stage as a dramatic setting, helping to illuminate the multiple mistakes that George and Nell make as they interrupt the performance of The London Merchant. Borrowing insights from queer theory and disability studies, the chapter concludes by suggesting that George and Nell’s disorientation reveals the normative conventions that are embedded within the physical and social environment of the early modern playhouse. In this way, madness, confusion, and other forms of cognitive failure allow The Knight of the Burning Pestle to stage the incommensurability of the two dominant ways of thinking through the Blackfriars.

Review: Robert Henke, Poverty and Charity in Early Modern Theater and Performance.

This review considers Robert Henke's Poverty and Charity in Early Modern Theater and Performance (2015).

Book Reviews

Matthew Heins, The Globalization of American Infrastructure: The Shipping Container and Freight Transportation (New York: Routledge, 2016), 222 pp., $145 (hardback)Lesley Murray and Susan Robertson, eds., Intergenerational Mobilities: Relationality, Age and Lifecourse (London: Routledge, 2017), 194 pp., 14 illustrations, $145 (hardback)Sebastián Ureta, Assembling Policy: Transantiago, Human Devices, and the Dream of a World-Class Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 224 pp., 22 illustrations, $39 (hardback)Yuk Wah Chan, David Haines, and Jonathan H. X. Lee, eds., The Age of Asian Migration: Continuity, Diversity, and Susceptibility, vol. 1 (Newcastle on Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 450 pp., £54.99Robert Henke and Eric Nicholson, eds., Transnational Mobilities in Early Modern Theater (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014) 320 pp., 22 illustrations, $117 (hardback)Ruth Oldenziel and Helmuth Trischler, eds., Cycling and Recycling: Histories of Sustainable Practices (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2016), 256 pp., 18 illustrations, £67 (hardback)Margo T. Oge, Driving the Future: Combating Climate Change with Cleaner, Smarter Cars (New York: Arcade, 2015), xv + 351 pp., $25.99 (hardback)Thomas Birtchnell, Satya Savitzky, and John Urry, eds., Cargomobilities: Moving Materials in a Global Age (New York: Routledge, 2015), 236 pp., 16 illustrations, $148 (hardback)Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette, Snowpiercer 1: The Escape, trans. Virginie Sélavy (London: Titan Comics, 2014), 110 pp., $19 (hardback)