The Book in the Age of Theater, 1550-1750

After the construction of the first permanent theater buildings since Antiquity in mid sixteenth-century Italy, drama triumphed throughout Europe, especially in seventeenth-century France, Golden Age Spain, and Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Restoration England. How did the growth of the book industry interact with the evolution of the theater? The Book in the Age of Theater answers this question by exploring the relationship between performance and printing, viewing Renaissance and baroque theater as a unique intersection of social spectacle and literary activity.