When modern scholars seek to describe human behaviour theatrical metaphors are, it seems, rarely far from their thoughts. Social anthropologists now talk comfortably of ‘social dramas’ and ‘cultural performance’, psychoanalysts of ‘the family drama’ and ‘the primal scene’, literary theorists of the ‘performativity’ of texts. Academia collectively seems to have belatedly come around to thinking, with Jacques in As You Like It, that ‘All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players’. This ‘performative turn’ in cultural criticism has created both opportunities and obstacles for those of us who study early drama as an end in itself. The opportunities lie in the wider array of critical and theoretical tools now available with which we can analyse the plays; the obstacles in the fact that we need to be careful when we talk across disciplines and historical periods about what exactly we mean when we use crucial terms such as ‘theatre’, ‘stage’, ‘actor’, or ‘performance’. Each of these words means different things to different people, and each has changed its meaning or implications in the five or six hundred years between the heyday of medieval drama and the present. Very different ideas about what constitutes a performance or by what criteria it might reasonably be assessed can be concealed beneath the apparent consensus of a common vocabulary.

In one sense the idea that all the world is a stage would have made perfect sense to a resident of fifteenth-century England. In a society without purpose-built playhouses, drama could, and often did, happen almost anywhere, turning city streets, inn-yards, churches or open fields into temporary stages for the purposes of a performance. As Meg Twycross’s chapter demonstrates, ‘theatre’ did not wait for audiences to come to it, but rather went directly to them, to villages and towns, rural manor houses and the London Inns of Court, settling readily into the public and private spaces that it temporarily inhabited and using the social and cultural meanings already encoded in them to inform and enhance its own effects.