The Humorous Magistrate' is a seventeenth-century satiric comedy extant in two highly distinctive manuscripts. This, the earliest and clearly working draft of the play is bound with three other plays (including 'The Emperor's Favourite', published by the Malone Society in 2010) in a volume in the library of the Newdigate family of Arbury Hall, Nuneaton, Warwickshire. The second version, showing yet another stage of revision not found in the Arbury manuscript and orientated towards performance, was purchased by the University of Calgary from the English antiquarian Edgar Osborne in 1972. The...

This ground-breaking collection explores the assumptions behind and practices for performance implicit in the manuscripts and playtexts of the medieval and early modern eras, focusing on work which engages with performance-oriented research.