Draft of pre-publication review of Courtyard Theatre’s 2016 production of Missouri Williams’ King Lear with Sheep. For the published and corrected version, please see: https://shakespearequarterly.folger.edu/web_exclusive/shakespeare-performed-courtyard-theatres-king-lear-with-sheep/

his article examines recent critical approaches to Shakespeare and the senses. Historicizing the senses has posed certain methodological challenges: what is the relationship between subjective sensory perceptions and broader cultural understandings of sensation? Does the sensate have a history? Recent work on each of the five senses demonstrates…[Read more]

Who or what played the baboon on early modern London’s stages? Such a question may seem as obscure as its answer obvious; I ask it, however, to foreground the long history of trained animal performers and their relationship to canonical English drama. The surprising presence of performing baboons in early modern London has been mostly forgotten or…[Read more]