<i>Entertaining Uncertainty in the Early Modern Theater</i>: Stage Spectacle and Audience ResponseLauren Robertson's original study shows that the theater of Shakespeare and his contemporaries responded to the crises of knowledge that roiled through early modern England by rendering them spectacular. Revealing the radical, exciting instability of the early modern theater's representational practices, Robertson uncovers the uncertainty that went to the heart of playgoing experience in this period. Doubt was not merely the purview of Hamlet and other onstage characters, but was in fact constitutive of spectators' imaginative participation in performance. Within a culture in the midst of extreme epistemological upheaval, the commercial theater licensed spectators' suspension among opposed possibilities, transforming dubiety itself into exuberantly enjoyable, spectacular show. Robertson shows that the playhouse was a site for the entertainment of uncertainty in a double sense: its pleasures made the very trial of unknowing possible. |
Contents
Robertson_9781009225151_INTROpdf | 1 |
Robertson_9781009225151_Part Ipdf | 33 |
Robertson_9781009225151_C001pdf | 35 |
Robertson_9781009225151_C002pdf | 71 |
Robertson_9781009225151_Part IIpdf | 111 |
Robertson_9781009225151_C003pdf | 113 |
Robertson_9781009225151_C004pdf | 148 |
Robertson_9781009225151_Part IIIpdf | 183 |
Robertson_9781009225151_C005pdf | 185 |
Robertson_9781009225151_CODA FRAMEpdf | 218 |
Robertson_9781009225151_A000pdf | 226 |
| 254 | |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
action actor playing ambiguity Arden Shakespeare audience Beaumont Ben Jonson Blackfriars body Caesar Cambridge University Press Caroline characters Comedy commercial theater counterfeited Culture Cymbeline dead Dekker disguise doubt dramatic Early Modern England Early Modern English Early Modern Stage early modern theater edited Edward Elizabethan experience familiar follow William Shakespeare Francis Beaumont Gaveston genre Globe Hamlet Henry Hieronimo history plays Iachimo's imaginative Imogen's impersonation interpretive Intertheatricality inviting spectators Jacobean John Fletcher Jonson King King's line numbers follow London Love's Cure Lucio Macbeth Maria Massinger material narrative Night Walker numbers follow William offstage onstage Oxford University Press Palgrave Macmillan Pennsylvania Press performance Perkin Warbeck phenomenological play's playgoers playgoing playhouse Princeton Renaissance Drama representation revenge tragedy Richard Richard II Roman Actor Routledge scene semiotic Shakespeare Quarterly skeptical Sophia space Spanish Tragedy spatial spectacle suggests suspension theatergoers theatrical community Thomas Thomas Middleton tion tragicomedy transformed uncertainty unfolding William Shakespeare Women York