Neighbourly Relationships in Early Modern Drama by Iman Sheeha

Neighbourly Relationships in Early Modern Drama by Iman Sheeha

The book offers the first sustained examination of neighbourly relationships in early modern English drama, situating the close analyses of the selected plays within contemporary prescriptive literature (such as sermons and conduct books), letters, diaries, pamphlets, ballads, wills, proverbs, as well as the lived realities of early modern neighbourhoods as glimpsed in the historical and legal archives. The originality of the book lies in its topic, in the plays chosen for analysis, including Gammer Gurton’s Needle, written in the 1550s and believed to be the first printed vernacular English comedy, and in the revisionist close readings on offer. The plays span the period between 1550s and 1620s, belong to different genres, and were aimed at different audiences and written for different kinds of playhouses, allowing for conclusions to be drawn about the way genre shapes the treatment of neighbourly relationships, as well as revealing continuities and changes in this treatment over the period under study.

Iman Sheeha is a senior lecturer in Shakespeare and early modern literature at Brunel University of London. She has authored Household Servants in Early Modern Domestic Tragedy (Routledge, 2020) and co-edited a special issue on liminal domestic spaces for Early Modern Literary Studies (2020). Her research has appeared or is forthcoming in Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare, Early Theatre, Cahiers Élisabéthains, Early Modern Literary Studies, and American Notes and Queries. She contributed a chapter to People and Piety: Devotional Writing in Print and Manuscript in Early Modern England (2019) and wrote the Introduction to the forthcoming Oxford World Classics The Tragedy of Master Arden of Faversham (2025).