ABSTRACT
This conclusion points to the critical and commercial possibilities of strangeness in twenty-first-century theatre. It looks, for instance, at the way plays such as Mucedorus (c.1590s) and Knight of the Burning Pestle (c.1607) have been treated in both critical and performance afterlives. I explore how, despite relatively frequent performance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (in non-Shakespearean terms), productions, discussions, and reviews repeatedly reinscribe commercial “strangeness” on Knight of the Burning Pestle. The conclusion also gestures to the way productions such as Gregory Doran’s The Tempest (RSC 2016) use digital technologies to combine seventeenth-century and twenty-first-century ideas of “strange” spectacle while, ironically, simultaneously using such “strange” devices to claim a universal timelessness and familiarity for the play. I finally underscore the critical and historical uses of the term strange and their benefits for critics and historians of the period and beyond, gesturing to its relevance to texts beyond the scope of the book’s discussion.
