Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama

by Jeremy Lopez

Overview

This book provides a detailed and comprehensive survey of the diverse, formal conventions of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Focusing on the relationship between the repertory system and the conventions and content of the plays, Jeremy Lopez proposes that understanding the potential for theatrical failure (the way playwrights anticipated it and audiences responded to it) is crucial for understanding the way in which the drama succeeded on the stage.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521820066
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	12/05/2002
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Jeremy Lopez is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the College of William and Mary.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments; Introduction; Part I: 1. 'As it was acted to great applause': Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences and the physicality of response; 2. Meat, magic and metamorphosis: on puns and wordplay; 3. Managing the aside; 4. Exposition, redundancy, action; 5. Disorder and convention; Part II: Introduction to Part II; 6. Drama of disappointment: character and narrative in Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy; 7. Laughter and narrative in Elizabethan and Jacobean comedy; 8. Epilogue: Jonson and Shakespeare; Plays and editions cited; Works cited; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"...an energetic discussion...provides an always interesting argument about what Elizabethan and Jacobean drama "assumes of its audience and how its audience experiences it and responds to it"." Susan Bennett, University of Calgary, Theatre Journal

"Lopez gives us illuminating new readings of a number of Shakespearian and other plays. Highly recommended." Bibliotheque d'humanisme et Renaissance

"Fascinating." Studies in English Literature

"I came away enriched by having been taken through a well-conceived, carefully constructed, and clear presentation." Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England Alan Dessen

From the Publisher