ABSTRACT

This collection of short, accessible essays serves as a supplementary text to Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s play, Emilia.

Critically acclaimed and beloved by audiences, this innovative and ground-breaking show is a speculative history, an imaginative (re)telling of the life of English Renaissance poet Aemilia Bassano Lanyer. This book features essays by theatre practitioners, activists, and scholars and informed by intersectional feminist, critical race, queer, and postcolonial analyses will enable students and their teachers across secondary school and higher education to consider the play’s major themes from a wide variety of theoretical and interdisciplinary perspectives. This volume explores the current events and cultural contexts that informed the writing and performing of Emilia between 2017 and 2019, various aspects of the professional London productions, critical and audience responses, and best practices for teaching the play to university and secondary school students. It includes a foreword by Emilia playwright Morgan Lloyd Malcolm

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre, arts activism, feminist literature, and theory.

part Section I|64 pages

Current events and cultural contexts

chapter 2|16 pages

'Burn the whole f*cking house down!'

Black feminist lessons for joyful rage

chapter 3|10 pages

Frenzy's weaponry

The mythic dimension of Emilia

chapter 4|11 pages

“This is my gaff”

Safe spaces, cultural property, and Shakespeare

chapter 5|13 pages

Towards Emilia

Black and South Asian women in the performance of Shakespeare

part Section II|67 pages

Emilia in practice

chapter 6|9 pages

'There's a woman on the stage!'

Emilia and the politics of bodies in space at Shakespeare"s Globe

chapter 7|13 pages

Embodying Emilia

A conversation about movement creation

chapter 10|9 pages

We are Emilia

Emilia as witness, witnessing Emilia

chapter 11|9 pages

#Iamemilia

When marketing creates a movement

part Section III|45 pages

Critics and audiences respond

chapter 12|12 pages

'There's only so much work our imaginations can do'

Emiliaand London"s privileged theatre critics

chapter 13|7 pages

#EmiliaFamilia

Representation matters

chapter 14|11 pages

The #EmiliaFamilia

Feminist fandom on Twitter

chapter 15|13 pages

Feeling collectives

Emotions, feminist solidarity, and difference in Emilia

part Section IV|29 pages

Teaching Emilia

chapter 18|8 pages

'What's past is prologue'

Teaching women, race, and Emilia in the twenty-first century

chapter 19|9 pages

Opening up new worlds

Emilia at a London girls" school