Imagining the Audience in Early Modern Drama, 1558-1642 [Hardcover]

This essay collection builds on the latest research on the topic of theatre audiences in early modern England. In broad terms, the project answers the question, 'How do we define the relationships between performance and audience?'.Introduction: Audience and Audiences - Nova Myhill and Jennifer A. Low * Crowd Control - Paul Menzer * Taking the Stage: Spectators as Spectacle in the Caroline Private Theaters - Nova Myhill * The Curious Case of the Two Audiences: Thomas Dekker's Match Me in London - Mark Bayer * Door Number Three: Time, Space, and Audience Experience in The Menaechmi and The Comedy of Errors - Jennifer A. Low * Audience as Witness in Edward II - Meg F. Pearson * 'Lord of thy presence': Bodies, Performance, and Audience Interpretation in Shakespeare's King John - Erika T. Lin * Charismatic Audience: A 1559 Pageant - David M. Bergeron * Audience, Actors, and 'Taking Part' in the Revels - Emma K. Rhatigan * Bleared Vision in The Taming of the Shrew - James Wells * Fitzgrave's Jewel: Audience and Anticlimax in Middleton and Shakespeare - Jeremy Lopez

The spectator speaks up, at last. As Low and Myhill point out in their brilliant introduction, research on Renaissance spectatorship has long been polarized between opposing conceptions of the audience as a collective entity or as a gathering of separate individuals, with few attempts to bridge the two approaches. This excellent collection redresses the balance not only by placing the audience (collective) and audiences (individual) at the center of its inquiries, but by setting up for the first time a fruitful dialogue between theatre history and new historicists' cultural poetics. The overall result is, in my view, the best study of theatrical reception to have emerged in recent years. - Keir Elam, Professor of English Literature, University of Bologna

'Audience' is a complex and paradoxical term, even more difficult to comprehend when we encounter it in the flesh, as a living, blæ