Introduction

This introduction outlines how strangeness, while capacious, can be defined by recourse to a range of contemporary cultural expressions. It explores the history of the term in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, which provides essential contexts for its uses in Jacobean drama, focusing on four crucial categories: dictionaries and definitions, immigration, “wonder” and strange bodies, and the connections between “strange” history and drama. It sets out the historical and critical factors that make up and define a “strange play,” suggesting both the term’s critical usefulness today and its historical veracity as a way to think beyond Shakespearean genre, playwright, company, or playhouse and to move beyond conventional categorisations of the Jacobean stage.