Location: Newcastle University Game Studies Network Seminar Series, Newcastle University This paper demonstrates the potential intersections between, on one hand, performance and theatre studies and, on the other, game studies. It does so by pairing concepts from each field and using them together to analyse a few moments in which games are performed to an…

Location: Seminario permanente di studi Shakespeariani, Sapienza University, Rome In his Elements of Criticism (1762) Henry Home, Lord Kames, worried that it was possible to have too much passion on the stage. When a theatregoer’s ‘spirits are exhausted by close attention and by the agitation of passion’ an ‘uneasiness ensues’, which ‘never fails’ to break…

Location: BSECS 2026, Pembroke College, Oxford When he updated Nahum Tate’s Restoration of King Lear in the mid-1750s, David Garrick repositioned the breaks between its acts. The curtain would now fall straight after the king spoke of how ‘sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child’; later, it would rise…

Location: Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforsschung, Berlin This was a repeat of my paper at ASECS 2025.

Location: ASECS 2025 (online) Twenty-five years ago, Mary Crane used a sixteenth-century document recording payment to a carpenter for ‘performing a door’ to remind us all that ‘early modern conceptions of performance embraced a wider range of possibilities’ than are present to us now. This paper attempts to map the range of possibilities offered by…

Location: BSECS 2025, Pembroke College, Oxford Susanna Centlivre’s The Gamester (1704-5) and The Basset Table (1705) are both adaptations of earlier, French works about gambling games. In both her plays, however, Centlivre chooses to do two things differently: she brings the gameplay onto the stage in a pair of unusually long game-within-a-play scenes; and she…

Location: Early Modern French Seminar, Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge In both Centlivre’s play and Préchac’s novel a game of cards called basset is rigged in order to become a vehicle for operating on the affections of a character. In such a game, every gamble is shaped to have a specific emotional impact. In other words, the…

Location: TaPRA 2024, Northumbria University Three hundred years ago, in response to a theatrical culture shaped by the 1737 Licencing Act, literary nationalism, mass media, a star culture, and more, writing about acting in English exploded. For the last five years, in professional and amateur setting around the UK, I have been seeking ways to…

Location: Assembly Rooms, Bath; and Zoom This was not so much a paper as a two-part event, across two days. On the first day, I taught workshop participants how to play the games of Faro and Cassino. I also discussed some of the cultural aspects of card-playing. We then all attended a fancy-dress ball together…

Location: BSECS 2024, St Hugh’s College, Oxford In the eighteenth century it was common to a call a poem, a statue, or a painting a ‘performance’. One of the things that the word meant, for Samuel Johnson, was ‘composition’ or ‘work’. Nowadays this meaning of ‘performance’ has faded, marked as rare in the second edition…