Why does Shakespearean tragedy continue to move spectators even
though Elizabethan philosophical assumptions have faded from
belief? Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double seeks answers in the
moment-by-moment dynamics of performance and response, and the
Shakespearean text signals those possibilities.
Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double investigates the poetics of
audience response. Approaching tragedy through the rhythms of
spectatorial engagement and detachment ("aesthetic distance"), Kent
Cartwright provides a performance-oriented and phenomenological
perspective. Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double analyzes the
development of the tragic audience as it oscillates between
engagement--an immersion in narrative, character, and physical
action--and detachment--a consciousness of its own comparative
judgments, its doubts, and of acting and theatricality. Cartwright
contends that the spectator emerges as a character implied and
acted upon by the play. He supports his theory with close readings
of individual plays from the perspective of a particular element of
spectatorial response: the carnivalesque qualities of Romeo and
Juliet; the rhythm of similitude, displacement, and wonder in the
audience's relationships to Hamlet; aesthetic distance as scenic
structure in Othello; the influence of secondary characters and
ensemble acting on the Quarto King Lear; and spectatorship as
action itself in Antony and Cleopatra.
Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double treats the dramatic moment
in Shakespearean tragedy as uncommonly charged, various,
indeterminate, always negotiating unpredictably between the
necessary and the spontaneous. Cartwright argues that, for the
audience, the very dynamism of tragedy confers a certain
enfranchisement, and the spectator's experience emerges as
analogous to, though different from, that of the protagonist.
Through its own engagement and detachments the audience becomes the
final performer creating the play's meaning.
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