Introduction

This book examines early modern theater as an international phenomenon, considering in particular the exchanges that occurred across national and regional borders that demarcated political-linguistic-cultural entities. Early modern theater is remarkable, we hope to show, both in the ways that it represented transnational exchanges and in the ways that it enacted them, by means of border-crossing acting troupes; the transmission of theatrical tropes and gags between actors and playwrights; the exchanges of actors, playwrights, and theatrical culture at the aristocratic and thus “supranational” level; the representation of “foreign” identity; the transmission and translation of printed plays across national borders; and by many other vehicles. Early modern theater was capable of generating “contact zones”1 that communicated across national and regional boundaries, and allowed for both material and symbolic exchange. In this volume we are more interested in cultural relationships of exchange and reciprocity (which can obtain even in asymmetrically political alignments) rather than in one-way encounters of hegemony and domination-which, to be sure, certainly also existed between nations and regions in the early modern period.