​Robert Henke

​Robert Henke

​Professor of Drama and Comparative Literature
PhD, University of California, Berkeley
research interests:
  • Ancient and Renaissance Theater and Performance
  • Comparative Literature
  • Dramatic Theory

contact info:

office hours:

  • ​By appointment

mailing address:

  • Washington University
    MSC-1108-193-312
    One Brookings Drive
    St. Louis, MO 63130-4899

Professor Henke is presently working on three projects: a study of Shakespeare and Italian plays, scenarios and novellas; an examination of international early modern theatrical networks; and a performance-centered source book of commedia dell’arte and related popular piazza literature.

Professor Henke is presently completing a book on the interplay between the Italian novella, Italian scripted comedy, and the commedia dell’arte in fourteen plays of Shakespeare.

He considers the novellas of Boccaccio, Cinthio, and Bandello; the scripted plays of Ariosto, Gli Intronati and others; and the improvisation-based Italian early modern professional theater to be part of one “theatrical system” whose resonance in Shakespeare’s plays he argues to be much more important than previously considered. He is less interested in tracking the one-to-one transmission of Italian “source” to a given Shakespeare play than in considering how an entire network of narrative and theatrical moving parts (“theatergrams”) is absorbed into Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, and late plays.

Relative to this major project, he is helping to translate Italian novellas used by Shakespeare (either directly or via translation) into English versions that can be viewed side-by-side with the Italian originals. For this, he is working with a research team, based in Verona, Italy: SENS: Shakespeare’s Narrative Sources: Italian Novella and their European Dissemination.

For the Anglo-Italian Renaissance Studies Reprint Series, Edizioni ETS in Pisa, Italy is publishing in 2026 a collection of eighteen articles or book chapters that he has published on early modern theater and performance, including essays on Dario Fo and Edward Bond.

Finally, he is preparing a volume, for both scholars and actors, of forty of the extant eighty scenarios of Dominico Biancolelli, the great Italo-French Harlequin actor contemporary with Molière. English Translation: Nicholas Henke; Introduction and Notes: Robert Henke.

Robert Henke has published three single-authored books: Pastoral Transformations: Italian Tragicomedy and Shakespeare’s Late Plays (University of Delaware Press, 1997); Performance and Literature in the Commedia dell’Arte (Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Poverty and Charity in Early Modern Theater and Performance (University of Iowa Press, 2015).  

With Eric Nicholson, he has coedited two essay collections published by Ashgate and issuing from the “Theater Without Borders” research collective, of which he is a founding member: Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater (2008) and Transnational Mobilities in Early Modern Theater (2014). He has edited, with M.A. Katritzky, European Theatrical Performance Practice, 1580-1750 (Ashgate, 2014).  Most recently he has edited A Cultural History of Western Theatre (Bloomsbury Academic). 

Professor Henke has written one play: The COVID Mysteries, a contemporary adaptation of the medieval “mystery” play that was performed by the Washington University Performing Arts Department in April, 2021.

From our podcast:

Hold That Thought Podcast

in the news:

Commedia dell'Arte & the Tragicomedy: Shakespeare's Italian Influences

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Transnational Mobilities in Early Modern Theater

Edited By ​Robert Henke

The essays in this volume investigate English, Italian, Spanish, German, and Czech early modern theater, placing Shakespeare and his English contemporaries in the theatrical contexts of both western and central Europe. Contributors explore the mobility of theatrical units, genres, performance practices, iconographic images, and dramatic texts across geo-linguistic borders in early modern Europe. Combining "distant" and "close" reading, a systemic and structural approach identifies common theatrical units, or "theatergrams" as departure points for specifying the particular translations of theatrical cultures across national boundaries. The essays engage both "dramatic" approaches (e.g. genre, plot, action, and the dramatic text) and "theatrical" perspectives (e.g. costume, the body and gender of the actor). Following recent work in "mobility studies," mobility is examined from both material and symbolic angles, revealing a tension between transnational movement and resistance to border-crossing. Four final essays attend to the practical and theoretical dimensions of theatrical translation and adaptation, and contribute to the book's overall inquiry into the ways in which values, properties, and identities are lost, transformed, or gained in movement across geo-linguistic borders.

Poverty and Charity in Early Modern Theater and Performance

By ​Robert Henke

Whereas previous studies of poverty and early modern theatre have concentrated on England and the criminal rogue, Poverty and Charity in Early Modern Theater and Performance takes a transnational approach, which reveals a greater range of attitudes and charitable practices regarding the poor than state poor laws and rogue books suggest. Close study of German and Latin beggar catalogues, popular songs performed in Italian piazzas, the Paduan actor-playwright Ruzante, the commedia dell’arte in both Italy and France, and Shakespeare demonstrate how early modern theatre and performance could reveal the gap between official policy and actual practices regarding the poor. The actor-based theatre and performance traditions examined in this study, which persistently explore felt connections between the itinerant actor and the vagabond beggar, evoke the poor through complex and variegated forms of imagination, thought, and feeling. Early modern theatre does not simply reflect the social ills of hunger, poverty, and degradation, but works them through the forms of poverty, involving displacement, condensation, exaggeration, projection, fictionalization, and marginalization. As the critical mass of medieval charity was put into question, the beggar-almsgiver encounter became more like a performance. But it was not a performance whose script was prewritten as the inevitable exposure of the dissembling beggar. Just as people’s attitudes toward the poor could rapidly change from skepticism to sympathy during famines and times of acute need, fictions of performance such as Edgar’s dazzling impersonation of a mad beggar in Shakespeare’s King Lear could prompt responses of sympathy and even radical calls for economic redistribution.