Entertaining Uncertainty in the Early Modern Theater
Stage Spectacle and Audience Response

Lauren Robertson shows how the commercial theater transformed early modernity's crisis of uncertainty into spectacular onstage display.

Lauren Robertson (Author)

9781009225151, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 February 2023

290 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 2 cm, 0.52 kg

'Lauren Robertson gives us an original and brilliantly compelling account of the provocations and pleasures of audience uncertainty in early modern English theatrical culture. Alert to a wide range of philosophical, historical, and performative concerns, she offers fascinating discussions of the evolving interplay between dramatic representation and spectatorial engagement within the commercial repertory from its Elizabethan beginnings with Marlowe, Kyd, and Shakespeare to its Jacobean and Caroline developments in Jonson, Middleton, Ford, and Massinger. Her readings are unfailingly perceptive – often arresting in their acuity and persuasive vigor – and the attention she devotes to the doubts and interpretive challenges faced by playgoers is exhilarating in its imaginative reach. This is a book not only for Shakespeareans and scholars of early modern drama but for all serious students and lovers of theater.' William Hamlin, Washington State University

Lauren Robertson's original study shows that the theater of Shakespeare and his contemporaries responded to the crises of knowledge that roiled through early modern England by rendering them spectacular. Revealing the radical, exciting instability of the early modern theater's representational practices, Robertson uncovers the uncertainty that went to the heart of playgoing experience in this period. Doubt was not merely the purview of Hamlet and other onstage characters, but was in fact constitutive of spectators' imaginative participation in performance. Within a culture in the midst of extreme epistemological upheaval, the commercial theater licensed spectators' suspension among opposed possibilities, transforming dubiety itself into exuberantly enjoyable, spectacular show. Robertson shows that the playhouse was a site for the entertainment of uncertainty in a double sense: its pleasures made the very trial of unknowing possible.

Part I. Dramatic Action: 1. Bodies
2. Time
Part II. Playhouse Structure: 3. Props
4. Space
Part III. Theater History: 5. Audience.

Subject Areas: Shakespeare studies & criticism [DSGS], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Literature: history & criticism [DS]