Staging Madness: Shakespeare and His Contemporaries explores how madness was depicted in performance on the early modern English playhouse stages. Moving from page to stage, the book offers a fresh perspective on studies of early modern plays and insanity by considering not only how mental illness is presented in the texts, but how it was realised in performance. What did madness look, sound and feel like? How did the playhouse stages shape these representations? And, how did engaging with and consuming these performances affect the audience?

Through addressing these questions, this study pieces together the sensory language created by theatrical depictions of insanity. This language looks beyond the individual bodies of mad characters, instead examining how all aspects of the performance - the other actors, the audience, the playhouse - were implicated in building these portrayals. This holistic approach aims to re-assert the significance of performance in studies of early modern madness, Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and offer a deeper consideration of how these representations held, isolated and transformed early modern anxieties over bodily and spiritual wellness.

Molly Ziegler is a Lecturer in Drama and Performance Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at The Open University, UK. Her research focuses on theatre and drama in early modern England, as well as how these practices contribute to popular understandings of madness and disease. She has published in journals such as the Journal of Early Modern Studies, Early Theatre and Scottish Journal of Performance, as well as with The Arden Shakespeare. She has previously taught on the theatre studies and English literature teams at the University of Glasgow and the Scottish Universities’ International Summer School.