Thinking Site: An Introduction

Abstract

As the Preface outlines, this collection had its origins in our collaborative research on a seventeenth-century provincial manuscript drama — a play without a title, an author, or any history of performance. Yet the text was replete with local references, explicit and implicit, that suggested the script had been conceived about and for a particular community in a particular place. In short, it was a play that was site-specific. Traditionally, of course, scholarship about early drama has concentrated on public performances in urban environments and, thus, for the seventeenth century, it has almost always been London-centric. This is hardly surprising given the concentration of evidence from the capital city: extant playtexts; information about theatre buildings and their locations; knowledge of when and where specific dramas were staged as well as composition of audiences; along with relevant contextual materials including histories of the city, maps, and contemporary nondramatic representation in the visual arts, poetry and other media. Notwithstanding such a significant and interdisciplinary archive, material evidence still tends, typically, to inform either readings of plays or histories of the theatres in which they were staged.