Oxford Textual Perspectives is a new series of informative and
provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in
the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures and
communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides
fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and
challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By
engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production,
and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the
boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series
question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations
of both canonical and less well-known works. Imagining
Spectatorship offers a new discussion of how spectators witnessed
early drama in the various spaces and places in which those works
were performed. It combines broad historical and theoretical
reflection with closely analysed case studies to produce a
comprehensive account of the ways in which individuals encountered
early drama, how they were cued to respond to it, and how we might
think about those issues today. It addresses the practical matters
that conditioned spectatorship, principally those concerned with
the location and configuration of the spaces in which a performance
occurred, but also suggests how these factors intersected with
social status, gender, religious commitment and affiliation,
degrees of real or felt personal agency, and the operation of the
cognitive processes themselves. It considers both real witnesses
and those 'imagined' spectators which are seemingly figured by both
dramatic and quasi-dramatic works, and whose assumed attitudes
play-makers sought to second-guess. It also looks at the
spectatorial experience itself as a subject of representation in a
number of early texts. Finally, it examines the complex contract
entered into by audiences and players for the duration of a
performance, looking at how texts cued spectators to respond to
specific dramaturgical tropes and gambits and how audience response
was itself a cause of potential anxiety for writers. The book
resists the conventional divide between 'medieval' and
'early-modern' drama, using its focus on the spectators' experience
to point connections and continuities across a diverse range of
genres, such as processions and tourneys as well as scripted plays,
pageants, and interludes; a variety of different venues, such as
city streets, great halls, and playhouses, and a period of about
150 years to the Shakespearean stage of the 1590s and 1600s. It
seeks to offer routes by which inferences about early spectatorship
can be made despite the relative absence of personal testimony from
the period.
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