Listening for Theatrical Form in Early Modern England

ISBN-13: 9781474411264 / Angielski / Twarda / 2016 / 256 str.

Allison Deutermann

Opis

Early modern drama was in fundamental ways an aural art form. How plays should sound and how they should be heard were questions vital to the formal development of early modern drama, and particularly to two of its most popular genres: revenge tragedy and city comedy. Simply put, theatregoers were taught to hear these plays differently. Revenge tragedies by William Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd imagine sound stabbing, piercing and slicing into listeners' bodies on and off the stage; while comedies by Ben Jonson and John Marston imagine it being sampled selectively and according to taste. Listening for Theatrical Form in Early Modern England traces the interconnected development of these two genres and auditory modes over six decades of commercial theatre history, combining surveys of the theatrical marketplace with focused attention to specific plays and to the non-dramatic literature that gives this interest in audition texture: anatomy texts, sermons, music treatises and manuals on rhetoric and poetics.

Spis treści

1. Introduction: Audiences to this Act; 2. Sound in Mind and Body: Hearing Early Modern Revenge Tragedy; 3. ‘Sprinkled among your ears’: Ben Jonson, John Marston, and the Cultivation of the Listening Connoisseur; 4. ‘Caviare to the general’?: Taste, Hearing, and Genre in Hamlet; 5. Listening for Form at the Cockpit Theater; 6. Epilogue; Bibliography.