Spatial Representations and the Jacobean Stage: From Shakespeare to Webster

by R. West

Overview

Spatial Representations and the Jacobean Stage offers a timely alternative to theatre criticism's neglect of the intensely spatial character of theatrical performance. The book shows that early modern audiences were highly aware of the spatial aspects of the stage. West examines the ways Jacobean dramatists used stage space to explore the spatial transformations of early modern society - social mobility, wandering populations, rural enclosure, sea travel, localized empirical thought. Dramas by Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Webster are scrutinized for their treatment of these controversial themes.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780333973738
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	03/25/2002
Edition description:	2002
Pages:	276
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.03(d)

About the Author

RUSSELL WEST is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Lüneburg, Germany.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Editions Used Introduction: Staging Space Stage-Space in the Jacobean Age The Sun King: James I and the Court Masque The Dumb God: Money as an Engine for Mobility Mean Persons and Counterfeit Port: Social Mobility Masterless Men and Shifting Knavery: Demographic Mobility Travelling Thoughts: Travel on the Stage Local Thought: Intellectual and Subjective Mobility Coda: Drama and the Appropriation of Social Space Index

Editorial Reviews

'This brilliant, theoretically complex book is a welcome addition to the growing body of renaissance critical discourse on social space and its relationship to the literary and cultural environment of the early modern period...The book's final chapter is astonishingly original and will hopefully point the way ahead for other reaissance scholarship into space and literature...This section, like other approaches in the book, is given impetus by West's determination to constantly renegotiate the terms of spatial inquiry in this highly impressive work.' - Early Modern Literary Studies

'...produces genuinely fascinating insights, which only such an excellent fusion of cultural history and theatre studies as West offers us here could hope to achieve.' - Bernhard Klein, ZAA

From the Publisher