This volume focuses on the everyday, the habitual, and the mundane as staged in early modern drama. It is a companion to the earlier volume Staged Transgression in Shakespeare's England (2013). The central argument is articulated in the introduction: “It is that which does not grab and retain our attention, but that which is assumed, understated, unremarkable, overlooked, or, in essence, deemed to be normal, that merits and rewards improved understanding” (3). The volume is arranged in three sections. In the first, Carla Mazzio, showing that the square has been historically associated with masculine attributes, reads Antony's failure in Antony and Cleopatra to “ke[ep] [his] square” as a challenge to the norms of Roman masculinity (35). Elizabeth Hanson reads the early modern grammar school as a “norming” institution, concluding that The Merry Wives of Windsor challenges the authority of institutions to shape social experience. The norms associated with managing time are the focus of Kristine Johanson's essay, which examines Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew, 3 Henry VI, and Richard II. Finally, Julie Sanders focuses on the experience of playgoers passing by tanneries and other leather-making sites on their way to the theater, thus making visible the material practices that formed the contexts of the drama.

The essays in the second section focus on the way the early modern stage produced normality. Brett Gamboa explores conventions involving ghosts, stage deaths, and genre, foregrounding the sense of tension between what the audience sees and what the scene invites them to see. Edel Semple argues that The Book of Sir Thomas More represents normality as potentially transgressive and transgression as possibly normal. Next, Michelle M. Dowd draws attention to the legal norm of primogeniture and specifically to the not-uncommon situation of families having daughters and no sons. Demonstrating that The Winter's Tale makes use of the classical device of the lost child, Dowd argues that Shakespeare invites his audience to interrogate early modern legal norms. Brinda Charry, examining Twelfth Night and The Tempest, draws attention to the figure of the eunuch as both a familiar, normal figure—akin to the ubiquitous domestic servants employed by nearly all save the most impoverished of homes—and alien.

The final section turns to the staging of normality within the domestic space. Emma Whipday examines the way transgression disrupts normality in Arden of Faversham, A Woman Killed with Kindness, and Macbeth. Emily O'Brien focuses on child figures on the early modern stage, arguing that their very presence in A Yorkshire Tragedy “summon[s] a sense of domestic normality” (239). Stephen Guy-Bray argues that both Arden of Faversham and The Duchess of Malfi stage the association between female transgression and the domestic as “especially troubling” (260). In an afterword, Frances E. Dolan identifies some of the limitations of the volume. The domestic, she writes, was not always synonymous with peace and safety. “Violence,” she notes, “as long as it falls short of murder, might be part of the fabric of [the domestic] world, rather than a rent in it” (278). Dolan also draws attention to the norm-policing role played by the church in this period and wonders about its near absence from the volume. She also questions the association between the normal and the domestic that the third section in particular seems to espouse, arguing that the early modern home was never the isolated, private sphere that this approach suggests. Instead, she draws attention to the way it “was a node in networks of global trade, experimental science, and knowledge transmission” (280).

To Dolan's observations, I would like to add that what audience members might have experienced and identified as normal would have been very much a question of individual circumstances. This is not simply in the sense of normal being a subjective experience. An audience member's gender, status, education, sexuality, calling, and religious affiliation must have all played at least some part in how they experienced a play's representation of normality. For example, how did men in the audience experience the scene in A Yorkshire Tragedy that shows a nurse singing a lullaby to a baby while his mother sleeps nearby? Would it have signaled the sense of peace and safety that we associate with it today, or did it, on the contrary, evoke anxieties about women's shared space away from male supervision, which were pervasive in early modern England and got represented most famously in Othello in the form of Desdemona and Emilia discussing “proper men” and the double standards of their society? Similarly, how did servants’ view of props on stage that looked like objects they cleaned, handled, and guarded in their masters and mistresses’ homes differ from their employers’ view of those objects as similar to ones they owned, displayed, and used as status markers? Consideration of these questions would have enriched the volume. Despite these shortcomings, the collection is an excellent addition to the existing scholarly literature on early modern drama and will, no doubt, open avenues for fresh interpretations of plays not examined here from similar and complementary perspectives.