Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England
Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England
Looking for an inspection copy?
This title is not currently available for inspection. However, if you are interested in the title for your course we can consider offering an inspection copy. To register your interest please contact asiamktg@cambridge.org providing details of the course you are teaching.
$29.99
USDThis edited collection of essays brings together leading scholars of early modern drama and playhouse culture to reflect upon the study of playing and playgoing in early modern England. With a particular focus on the player-playgoer exchange as a site of dramatic meaning-making, this book offers a timely and significant critical intervention in the field of Shakespeare and early modern drama. Working with and reflecting upon approaches drawn from literary scholarship, theatre history and performance studies, it seeks to advance the critical conversation on the interactions between: players; play-texts; performance spaces; the bodily, sensory and material experiences of the playhouse; and playgoers' responses to, and engagements with, the theatre. Through alternative methodological and theoretical approaches, previously unknown or overlooked evidence, and fresh questions asked of long-familiar materials, the volume offers a new account of early modern drama and performance that seeks to set the agenda for future research and scholarship.
- Offers a new view of early modern drama through the lens of playing and playgoing that will prove invaluable for students and researchers of Shakespeare and of the theatre of this period
- Brings together literary criticism, theatre history and performance studies in its approach to early modern drama, offering rich interdisciplinary insights into dramatic texts as well as theatre and performance culture
- Provides a range of authoritative and varied perspectives and draws on alternative methodological and theoretical approaches to offer an original and compelling account of early modern drama and performance
Reviews & endorsements
'Collectively the essays assembled by Smith and Whipday are creative and energetic, gesturing towards interesting new ways to explore the relationship between playing and playgoing that builds on and extends recent trends in the field.' David McInnis, Early Theatre
Product details
March 2022Hardback
9781108489058
350 pages
235 × 158 × 23 mm
0.587kg
Not yet published - available from July 2025
Table of Contents
- Introduction: Simon Smith and Emma Whipday
- Part I. Players: Simon Smith and Emma Whipday
- 1. Shakespeare's motists Natasha Korda
- 2. 'Thou look'st pale': Narrating blanching and blushing on the early modern stage Emma Whipday
- 3. Emotions, gesture and race in the early modern playhouse Farah Karim-Cooper
- 4. The girl player, the virgin Mary and Romeo and Juliet Deanne Williams
- Part II. Playgoers: Simon Smith and Emma Whipday
- 5. Playgoing, apprenticeship and profit: Francis Quicksilver, Goldsmith and Richard Meighen, Stationer Lucy Munro
- 6. Rethinking early modern playgoing, pleasure and judgement Simon Smith
- 7. 'Art hath an enemie cal'd Ignorance': The prodigal industry of early modern playwrighting Jeremy Lopez
- 8. Early modern drama out of order: Chronology, originality and audience expectations Eoin Price
- Part III. Playhouses: Simon Smith and Emma Whipday
- 9. 'Theatre' and 'Play+House': Naming spaces in the time of Shakespeare Tiffany Stern
- 10. '[T]hough Ram Alley stinks with cooks and ale / Yet say there's many a worthy lawyer's chamber / Butts upon Ram Alley': An Innsman goes to the playhouse Jackie Watson
- 11. Playing with the audience in Othello Stephen Purcell
- 12. 'All their minds transfigured so together': The imagination at the Elizabethan playhouse Helen Hackett
- Select Bibliography
- Index.
