The Staging of Witchcraft and a “Spectacle of Strangeness”

About the Book

The Staging of Witchcraft and a “Spectacle of Strangeness”: Witchcraft at Court and the Globe presents a new interest in Continental texts on witchcraft coincided with technological advances in the English stage, which made a variety of dramatic effects possible in the private playhouses, such as flying witches, and the appearance of spirits and deities in Elizabethan plays. This book also evaluates how the technology of the Blackfriars playhouse facilitated the appearance of spirits, devils, witches, magicians, deities and dragons on stage. The study investigates the visual spectacle of witchcraft scenes which intersect with the genre of the plays, and it also presents to what extent changing theatrical tastes affect the way that supernatural characters are shown on stage.

About the Author

Dr. Shokhan Rasool Ahmed earned her PhD degree in early modern English drama at the University of Leicester (2014), her MA degree in English Literature, Place, and Identity at the University of Exeter (2009), and her BA degree in English language and literature at the University of Sulaimani (2006). Her teaching and main research interests include early modern literature (especially drama), Shakespeare studies, late 18th-century novel, place, space and identity. She has recently published two books on supernatural entities on stage, the first entitled Magic and Gender in Early Modern England, and a more recent work, The Visual Spectacle of Witchcraft in Jacobean Plays: Blackfriars Theatre, and a few other articles on witchcraft plays in the International Journal of Literature and Arts. She is now teaching English drama and novel in the English Department of the University of Sulaimani.