Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama
Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama
This book provides a detailed and comprehensive survey of the diverse, formal conventions of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Focusing on the relationship between the repertory system and the conventions and content of the plays, Jeremy Lopez proposes that understanding the potential for theatrical failure (the way playwrights anticipated it and audiences responded to it) is crucial for understanding the way in which the drama succeeded on the stage.
- Comprehensive and detailed survey of formal conventions of all commercial English drama produced between 1585 and 1616
- Provides broad theatrical context within which to consider works of Shakespeare
- Considers theatrical vitality and viability of obscure early modern drama - not only as texts that were performed but as texts that can still be performed
Reviews & endorsements
"...an energetic discussion...provides an always interesting argument about what Elizabethan and Jacobean drama "assumes of its audience and how its audience experiences it and responds to it"." Susan Bennett, University of Calgary, Theatre Journal
"Lopez gives us illuminating new readings of a number of Shakespearian and other plays. Highly recommended." Bibliotheque d'humanisme et Renaissance
"Fascinating." Studies in English Literature
"I came away enriched by having been taken through a well-conceived, carefully constructed, and clear presentation." Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England Alan Dessen
Product details
February 2007Paperback
9780521032834
248 pages
228 × 151 × 17 mm
0.371kg
Available
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I:
- 1. 'As it was acted to great applause': Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences and the physicality of response
- 2. Meat, magic and metamorphosis: on puns and wordplay
- 3. Managing the aside
- 4. Exposition, redundancy, action
- 5. Disorder and convention
- Part II: Introduction to Part II
- 6. Drama of disappointment: character and narrative in Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy
- 7. Laughter and narrative in Elizabethan and Jacobean comedy
- 8. Epilogue: Jonson and Shakespeare
- Plays and editions cited
- Works cited
- Index.
