Search

The prologue of Thomas Heywood's tragicomedy The English Traveller, which was first performed around 1627 and first printed in 1633, seeks to focus the minds of its audience on what is to follow on stage: A Strange Play you are like to haue, for know, We use no Drum, nor Trumpet, nor Dumbe shew; No Combate, Marriage, not so much to day, As Song, Dance, Masque, to bumbaste out a play: [...] (The English Traveller, n.p.) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the 1620s to the 1630s, John Ford revisited Shakespeare and made him strange. 'Tis Pity She's a Whore inverts Romeo and Juliet by making its core relationship endogamous rather than exogamous. Perkin Warbeck is a sequel to Richard III, but undoes its original by telling a story fundamentally incompatible with Shakespeare's. The Lover's Melancholy echoes both Twelfth Night and King Lear, collapsing the distinction between comedy and tragedy. Above all, Ford reworks Othello, which lies behind the plots of four of his plays. The estranging effect produced by these reshapings is underlined by Perkin Warbeck's subtitle 'A Strange Truth' and the word 'strange' appears forty-nine times in his plays. Ford uses familiar Shakespearean stories to highlight the strangeness of the stories which he himself tells. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the pirate figures in The Double Marriage (1619–22) and The Unnatural Combat (1624–26) by delineating the crucial role of strangeness in the depiction of piracy on the one hand and the generic status of these plays on the other. In both texts, the main pirate figure moves from strange outsider to morally upright anti-hero. Strangeness (and with it, piracy) thus serves to question and undermine the stability of the social status quo. Strangeness and unnaturalness also inherently affect the generic status of both plays. In The Unnatural Combat, a revenge plot becomes obsolete with the death of one of the protagonists; and The Double Marriage becomes strange in its undermining of generic expectations, generating a tragicomic plot and at least three different revenge plots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I consider 'strangeness' as a performative phenomenon directly related to the experimental multiperspectivity of the early Stuart stage. As such, it is not a quality ascribed to individual characters, but the norm ruling interactions between them: all characters are strangers to each other. This constellation drives theatrical agon and suspense, turning spectators into privileged witnesses to an all-encompassing strangeness of which characters are often unaware. This theatrical take on strangeness supplements and potentially undercuts contextual and thematic explanations of the early modern stage's fascination with the odd and exotic. Thus in John Fletcher's The Island Princess (1621), the conflict between Christianity and Islam ostensibly depicted in this tragicomedy is challenged, if not superseded, by a more existential and ubiquitous notion of strangeness at the play's core. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]