Overview
A new account of playgoing in Elizabethan England, in which audiences participated as much as performers. What if going to a play in Elizabethan England was more like attending a football match than a Broadway show—or playing in one? In Common Understandings, Poetic Confusion, William N. West proposes a new account of the kind of participatory entertainment expected by the actors and the audience during the careers of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. West finds surprising descriptions of these theatrical experiences in the figurative language of early modern players and playgoers—including understanding, confusion, occupation, eating, and fighting. Such words and ways of speaking are still in use today, but their earlier meanings, like that of theater itself, are subtly, importantly different from our own. Playing was not confined to the actors on the stage but filled the playhouse, embracing audiences and performers in collaborative experiences that did not belong to any one alone but to the assembled, various crowd. What emerged in playing was a kind of thinking and feeling distributed across persons and times that were otherwise distinct. Thrown apples, smashed bottles of beer, and lumbering bears—these and more gave verbal shape to the physical interactions between players and playgoers, creating circuits of exchange, production, and consumption.
Full Product Details
Author: Professor William N. West
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Dimensions:
Width: 15.20cm
, Height: 2.50cm
, Length: 22.90cm
Weight: 0.594kg
ISBN: 9780226808840
ISBN 10: 022680884
Pages: 312
Publication Date: 14 December 2021
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Manufactured on demand
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.
Reviews
This exhilarating book reveals, in vivid detail, what early modern theater was like as an experience. By investigating not playing itself, but metaphors about it, West shows how theater was viewed at the time-as a place of fear or wonder, described in terms of chaos, fighting, being in a siege, eating, dancing. Common Understandings, Poetic Confusion enables us to understand, as never before, the edginess, thrill, and danger of plays and performance in the time of Shakespeare. -- Tiffany Stern, author of Documents of Performance in Early Modern England A dazzling account of how early modern playgoers experienced theater in the decades between 1575 and 1610, Common Understandings, Poetic Confusion links theatrical knowing and feeling to shared corporeal events and bodily sensations. Theoretically rich and brimming with telling examples, West's book shows how the habitus of early modern playgoing was created by collective acts as simple as eating, drinking, and remembering within the bounded space of the theater. -- Jean E. Howard, Columbia University
Author Information
William N. West is professor of English, comparative literary studies, and classics at Northwestern University. He is the author of As If: Essays in “As You Like It” and Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe. He also edits the journal Renaissance Drama.
