This course asks: how was the early modern English theater theorized by detractors, defenders, playwrights, actors, and audiences? What does early modern drama teach us about how the theater works? And, how can examples from the early modern theatre inform or complicate key paradigms of performance theory in the present? This course will serve as an introduction to the broad sweep of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English drama and a sustained investigation into how the early modern theatre develops and refines its formal protocols, concepts that continue to animate theater today. Our inquiry in this course will take shape around three sets of texts: early modern polemical writing about the theater that aims to take stock of its efficacy and perilous possibility (such as anti-theatrical writing by Philip Stubbes, Stephen Gosson, William Prynne, and others); early modern plays that seem especially interested in interrogating how the theater works (including The Spanish Tragedy, Mucedorus, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, The Alchemist, The Silver Age, A Game At Chess, and The Roman Actor); and contemporary theoretical work on performance that accounts for the theater's formal operations (likely including work by Tavia Nyong'o, Peggy Phelan, Joseph Roach, Rebecca Schneider, Bert States, Diana Taylor, and others).