Imagining the Audience in Early Modern Drama, 1558-1642 - by J Low & N Myhill Hardcover

About the Book

"The role of the audience takes on new importance when performance is reconceived as a dialectical activity. The essays in this collection examine the relationship between dramatic performance and audience in the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. That relationship is complicated by multiple conceptions of the audience: playwrights imagine their audiences; actors address them; the audience actually attending the play is yet another entity. The authors combine theatre history and cultural analysis with examinations of plays and productions to explore how those involved in early modern productions conceived of their audience, how audiences shaped the dramas they watched, and even how the roles of actor and audience member sometimes merged"--

Book Synopsis

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?'.

Review Quotes

"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, breathing entity. This is an exemplary collection of essays, offering complex and multi-faceted views of early modern audiences - as producers and not only consumers of theatrical meaning; necessary participants in, and active witnesses to, the play in performance." - Steven Mullaney, Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies, University of Michigan

"Audiences appear under various guises throughout this collection: as witnesses, as civic spectators, as institutional revellers, as public and private theatregoers, as individual and collective interpretiveagents, as both imagined and actual consumers and producers of culture. The real power of this volume derives from its multiplicities." - Jessica Slights, Associate Professor of English and Theatre, Acadia University

About the Author

Jennifer A. Low is an Associate Professor of English at Florida Atlantic University and Nova Myhill is an Associate Professor of English at New College of Florida.