This chapter starts from the premise that the Homeric epics are essentially products of the time in which they are conventionally supposed to have been created – very roughly sometime in the late eighth century BCE. The extent to which they might be recognizable as the Iliad and Odyssey we have inherited, having passed through processes like the Pisistratid "recension" and the hands of Alexandrian editors, is certainly debatable, but there is enough evidence of both a relatively direct and more circumstantial nature to suggest that cycles of epic song, including elements that we can associate with the specifically Homeric epics, were already in circulation in Greece in the decades around 700 BCE. The wider historical and ideological contexts in which this development took place are of particular interest for the questions of why it took place when it did and what its purpose might have been. The archaeological record of the later eighth century can shed light on other important developments in various parts of the Greek world, which together may have some bearing on these questions. At the same time, the epics themselves contain various elements which may provide clues to the ideological context which informed them.

This chapter considers concert-going audiences in mid twentieth-century England, with a focus on the conditions Maconchy faced. Structured along the phases of her career, the chapter traces the evolving socio-cultural and historical factors that shaped audience reception of her work. The account reveals how gender biases, geographical isolation, and the limited infrastructure for contemporary music hindered her visibility and accessibility. It discusses how her music was often mischaracterized as complex and inaccessible, overshadowing its emotional expressiveness. Despite obstacles, including her tuberculosis and motherhood, Maconchy established a loyal audience, particularly among women’s networks, broadcasting and small concert series, though her broader appeal remained constrained by societal biases. The chapter ultimately illustrates how the interplay of audience composition, media influence, and institutional support contributed to the reception of Maconchy’s music, emphasizing the ongoing struggle for recognition faced by women composers in a male-dominated field.

This chapter argues that to truly understand Emerson, we need to see and hear him at the lectern. It sketches Emerson’s place within the performance culture and popular lecture circuit of antebellum America and contends that we should regard his works as a form of “voiced essay.” The chapter brings to life Emerson’s dramatic, modulated style as a performer of his own work, showing how his writing simulates these spoken elements at the levels of both style and theme, and inviting readers to become active listeners. The “voiced essay” ultimately dissolves strict boundaries between orality and writing, energizing a new form of social engagement. By encouraging readers to hear Emerson as a figure with a strikingly modern grasp of media forms and the synergy between orality and textuality, the chapter underscores Emerson’s ongoing relevance to debates about performance, intellectual virality, authority, and the transmission of ideas.

Chapter 2 outlines what ultimately made it to the screen when presenting racialised people, places and themes to British audiences from 1900 to the end of World War II. It concentrates on the thinking behind the production of the popular empire feature films, documentaries about empire and home movies of blacked-up Britons in the early twentieth century by white Britons such as John Grierson at the Empire Marketing Board and GPO Film Units, and William Sellers, director of the Colonial Film Unit during World War II. The chapter further outlines the ‘counter-storytelling’ that audiences of colour offered when encountering this material in film screenings in both Europe and the colonies and their varied responses to the racism on screen, including laughter.

This chapter sets out the ‘lateral censorship process’ that shaped plays’ paths from composition to reception. It is grounded in archival evidence from the Ancien Régime to the Restoration and builds on modern theoretical approaches, including ‘New Censorship Theory’. In this model, lateral censorship occurs in four main ‘sites’: the composition process, theatres (including staff on and off the stage), audiences, and critics. Each of these sites is home to a variety of agents; the sites are related; and more than one site could exert lateral censorship on a play. However, whilst such actions could halt a play in its steps, the focus here is not wholly negative: lateral censorship recognizes that censorship can be a positive force in production too (for example, critical feedback to improve a play), echoing the dual definition of ‘censure’ at the time.

Publishing mattered to Shelley. But he knew that he was not a successful author certainly by comparison with Byron with whom he was regularly in proximity, especially in Italy. As a schoolboy and university student, Shelley arranged for the printing, advertising, and distribution of his verse and prose with boldness and ambition, sometimes putting those who printed, published, and sold it at risk on legal grounds. A significant proportion of what he published or intended to publish as a mature writer was also withdrawn or suppressed or did not appear because it was not publishable at the time. The gradual emergence of a significant amount of his writing hitherto unpublished, or not published in full, in editions curated by his widow from 1824 until her death established his reputation. However, it has taken until the early twenty-first century for his manuscript and print oeuvre to come into fuller view.

The Introduction gives an overview of the book’s most important findings and contributions. Since international relations are anarchical and international legal norms are incomplete or in tension with other norms, there is potential for contestation whenever a general norm is applied to specific situations. The reactions of others to proposed norm interpretations can alter norms and their strength. The second section describes the book’s rhetorical approach, and the third section summarizes the main theoretical contributions. First, the "alternate endings" typology shows that it matters whether dispute parties (dis)agree on the norm frame or behavioral claim. Frame agreement is an internal source of stability. Moreover, the typology can guide assessment of how contestation affects norm strength. Second, I describe the focus on audience reactions, argumentation, and speakers (including delegation to agents) when analyzing extrinsic influences on the persistence of norm interpretations, and thus of alternate endings. The fourth section discusses the main contributions to the existing literature on norm strength, the dual quality of norms, legal argumentation and interpretive communities, and delegation to courts and other relevant agents. The Introduction then discusses the research design and methodology, before concluding with an overview of the remaining chapters.

Chapter 4 turns to the watershed moment of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as the great anti-revenge play of its day, which by commenting on Kyd’s design and its diminished capacity for novelty, profoundly changed it. In the process, Shakespeare’s play became itself an ethically vacant theatrical space in the dramatic continuum of the period, which subsequent playwrights responded to viscerally. This chapter argues that Shakespeare introduces into the intra-theatrical ethics of the standard revenge plot a theatrical ethics of ‘marking’ which seeks to translate through spectacle and performance what is merely shown into that which is, in the world, finally marked and bearing the trace of a wound or a scar. In the process, the chapter reflects on Shakespeare’s wider intervention in the dramatic fortunes of Kyd’s dramatic legacy in raising the stakes for audience participation in the action to new levels of guilt and vexed ethical complicity.

This chapter considers non-state actors. It argues that only organized, not simply aggregate, groups can have a moral duty to securitize. This chapter goes on to examine relevant sub-state actors’ duties to securitize insiders and outsiders. Sub-state actors are permitted to securitize only when the state they reside in fails in its duty to deliver security. In such cases, relevant actors have a pro tanto obligation to securitize insiders; however, in situations where a quasi-social contract is established this duty evolves into an overriding duty. Outsiders are not – unlike in all the other chapters of this book – people in other states, but rather people not represented by the sub-state actor. Here, a pro tanto obligation to securitize outsiders is largely based on capacity.

In examining how practices of theatregoing were impacted by the war this chapter provides a partner to Claire Cochrane’s examination of theatre-making in Chapter 3. It considers changing audience demographics over the war and reveals how the ‘new’ audiences were often blamed for the deterioration of theatrical quality. It pays particular attention to the two groups of audiences that received the greatest attention during the war: women (especially single women and mothers) and servicemen. Whilst recognising the value of newspaper and magazine commentaries on audience, the chapter also draws on letters, memoirs, commentaries and diary entries to understand and draw out the first-person experience of theatre-going during the war. It highlights the impact of air raids, lighting restrictions, the Amusements Tax and other wartime conditions on audiences. It also shows how changing social realities and relations in the wider world impacted on the theatre, bringing new class and gender dynamics into the auditorium.

The Introduction begins by examining the treatment of First World War theatre in academic scholarship over the last century, and identifies reasons for its neglect and the resurgence of interest in the topic over the last decade. It considers this resurgence in relation to work on popular theatre, the focus on cultural histories of the war, and the centrality of theatre and performance to centenary commemorations. In addressing how theatre contributed to the war effort it considers themes including: recruitment and enlistment, fundraising for war charities, and the value of theatre for servicemen and the wouded. It also considers challenges to theatre production created by the wartime conditions. Drawing on the work of the Great War Theatre project it highlights the large number of war-themed plays produced during the war, arguing that plays did not have to ignore the war to be entertaining or popular. The introduction emphasises the importance of looking at the diversity of theatrical production across the country and in both amateur and professional contexts. As such it provides the framework for the in-depth analyses of these and other topics examined across the volume.

Although the theatre industry developed mainly from the nineteenth century onwards, Parisian theatres in Molière’s time already had some aspects of modern commercial entertainment – developing strategies to generate additional income and revenue through private performances, for example. This chapter examines how companies competed to position themselves as leaders in the Parisian market. It assesses the seasonal programming and level of success of the plays that were performed, examining the knock-on effect of increased competition on the Hôtel de Bourgogne in the 1660s, and shows the spending and investment choices of Molière’s troupe. As a commercial enterprise, the troupe aimed to attract Parisian audiences while continuing to please the court. It paid, therefore, particular attention to its facilities and services in the capital, and travelled outside Paris to participate in court festivities. The company had to juggle its duty to the King, for whom sumptuous and expensive entertainments were a means of showing his power and influencing other European courts, and to its bourgeois Parisian clients, who provided it with a regular income and could not, therefore, be neglected. In this respect Molière proved to be a wise man, becoming a wealthy entrepreneur of spectacles.

Given that short poems were composed in the first instance for viva voce delivery to an audience (e.g. at a dinner party), the hospites of poem 4 can be located in the dining room of the poet’s home at Sirmio, and the contubernales of poem 37 on benches outside a bar on the south side of the Forum piazza. Evidence is provided of the way a poet’s friends would find ‘live audiences’ for his poems; this was the primary form of their ‘publication’, long before collection in a papyrus book. The ‘social history’ context of the poems has been unhelpfully neglected in previous scholarship.

Copyright’s test for infringement takes a uniform approach to aesthetics by treating all audiences and modalities of creative expression the same. We now know that this is not how aesthetic judgment works. The chapter describes how the law can be reformed to take differences in audiences and artistic media into account. The chapter also responds to potential objections to the use of neuroaesthetics in this legal context. A better understanding of how audiences perceive art, if implemented in the right manner, can help protect both economic and non-economic values embedded in copyright law in a more transparent way.

This chapter reconsiders the relationship between pleasure and judgement in the early modern playhouse. Whilst the significance of both pleasure and judgement to early modern playgoing is long established, critical studies have often followed the lead of a few particular playwrights’ most irritable paratextual pronouncements, in which rather extreme versions of judgement and of pleasure are explicitly framed as opposites: the censure of the wisest and highest of status is contrasted with an unthinking and unlearned pleasure that is itself defined as a lack of discernment.

Chapter 6 brings together evidence of all kinds from the whole period to create a vivid picture of popular opera and its audience in the theatre. ‘Theatre Size and Ambience’ correlates detailed historical information to produce a systematic overview of many theatre buildings, together with interior details and size of musical ensembles. Ticket admission prices at the Opéra, Comédie-Italienne and the Fair theatres are compared and assessed. Descriptions by a number of eyewitnesses (French, Italian, English, Irish and German observers) combine to give an impression of activity in popular theatre seen from the audience’s point of view. In a survey of staging, the evidence is both visual and textual: engraved and painted illustrations are analysed and ‘corrected’ so that the proportions of stage sets can be understood. Then a synopsis of stage directions suggests the material range of experience in popular opera. A survey of lighting effects is discussed in relation to stage context, showing how some comedies combined lighting effects with music.