Hannah Merlander (KCL) - 2024-25 Students
hannah.merlander@kcl.ac.uk

‘This hawthorn break our tiring house’: The Tiring House as an Alternative Site of Performance in Early Modern Drama 

The tiring house was the backstage space in the early modern theatre. It was where players were dressed and waited for their cues, where the platt (which broke down the play scene-by-scene) was pinned, and where props and costumes circulated into the playhouse. Despite the pivotal functions performed by and in this space, the tiring house has largely been overlooked by scholars of early modern drama. My project aims to address this lacuna and, in doing so, queries the conventional hierarchy of theatrical spaces in which the stage is the primary location of performance. I will examine other kinds of performance and other kinds of performers (including human and non-human agents) to suggest that the tiring house was an alternative site of performance. This project will combine archival research, close text analysis, practice-as-research experiments and practitioner interviews to produce a diachronic reappraisal of the tiring house in both the early modern theatre and contemporary reconstructed playhouses.

Principal Supervisor: Professor Lucy Munro