Robert Weimann and Douglas Bruster draw upon theatre and performance histories to examine the crucial role that dramatic prologues took in both performance and print during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England.
Their remarkable study shows how prologues ushered audience and actors through a compelling rite of passage and how they can be seen to offer rich insight into what the early modern theatre was thought capable of achieving. Through close readings of work by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, including Marlowe, Peele and Lyly, the authors demonstrate the prologue's function in representing both the world in the play and playing in the world, providing us with a new understanding of drama in the early modern era.