Douglas Bruster's provocative study of English Renaissance drama explores its links with Elizabethan and Jacobean economy and society, looking at the status of playwrights such as Shakespeare and the establishment of commercial theatres. He identifies in the drama a materialist vision which has its origins in the climate of uncertainty engendered by the rapidly expanding economy of London. His examples range from the economic importance of cuckoldry to the role of stage props as commodities, and the commercial significance of the Troy story in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, and he offers new ways of reading English Renaissance drama, by returning the theatre and the plays performed there, to its basis in the material world.

Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare

Introduction 1. 'Moralize two meanings' in one play: contrariety on the Tudor stage 2. Performance, game, and representation in Richard III 3. Mingling vice and 'worthiness' in King John 4. Clowning: agencies between voice and pen 5. Clowning at the frontiers of representation 6. Cross-dressing and performance in disguise 7. Personation and playing: 'secretly open' role-playing 8. Character/actor: the deep matrix 9. Character: depth, dialogue, page 10. King Lear: representations on stage and page.

https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/eth/article/download/7476/4461

Shakespeare and the Power of Performance: Stage and Page in the Elizabethan Theatre

List of illustrations Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Introduction: games and frames 1. Performances 2. Universes 3. Signs 4. Acts 5. Figures Glossary References Index.

Shakespeare's Universe of Discourse: Language-Games in the Comedies

In Elizabethan England, play after play took confusion, disguise, or madness as
a central subject. This thematic interest in confusion followed a concern, prevalent
during the 1570s, 1580s, and early 1590s, that drama was genuinely confusing to its
audiences. Whereas plays and interludes from the middle decades of the sixteenth
century frequently expressed a desire to make their performances clear to their audiences,
performances of the later decades began to suggest that confusions are an unavoidable
part of the experience of playgoing, and even perhaps a necessary part of
theatre’s ability to inform and instruct. Accounts of early performances, like a 1594 Inns
of Court Comedy of Errors , also hint that a play’s impact could be enhanced through a
deliberate attempt to produce confusion among audiences and actors. Uncovering a
dramaturgy of confusion implicit in Gascoigne’s Supposes and Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy ,
this essay argues that during this period, a practical recognition that drama relies on
disorder to affect its audience supplemented a theory of didactic drama. By the late
1590s, though, the thematizing of confusion familiar from later plays replaced this
real confusion.

"But this will be a mere confusion": Real and Represented Confusions on the Elizabethan Stage

“There are,” says a poet as ingenious as profound, “more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in our philosophy.” This sentiment, which Genius accidentally let drop, is in the main applicable also to the philosophy of our own day; and, with a slight modification, I shall be ready to adopt it as my own. The only change that is requisite to make it available for my purpose would be the addition—“and also between heaven and earth there are many things which are not dreamt of in our philosophy.” And exactly because philosophy, for the most part, does nothing but dream—scientifically dream, it may be—therefore it is ignorant, ay, has no inkling even of much which, nevertheless, in all propriety it ought to know. —Friedrich von Schlegel

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/673910

Horatio’s Philosophy in Hamlet

ONCE SHAKESPEARE CRITICISM has come to differentiate, in terms of both reciprocity and division, between the representation of textual meaning and the circumstances of performing practice, no single fixed location of authority can reasonably be assumed in the Elizabethan theater. The dissemination of theatrical authority appears especially significant when it is not exclusively associated with either "author's pen or actor's voice"' but is seen to include the audience as final arbiter of the play's success and future. The process of reception is of course prefigured throughout the text (and the performance) of the play; but with the exception of an occasional chorus, it is in the ending of dramatic transactions that spectators are directly urged to endorse not only the work of "author's pen" but also that of "actor's voice." For the audience itself to be acknowledged as a supreme court of appeal is an authorization that goes beyond that of the representation of dramatic fiction. What is involved is an extradramatic strategy designed to help ensure the play's post-scriptural future. As I shall suggest, the underlying circulation of authority, including the authorization of spectators to recollect, discuss, and reappropriate the performed play after its theatrical transaction is over, is central to what a good many Shakespearean endings are all about. This extradramatic (though not necessarily extratheatrical) extension of authority raises a number of thorny questions. The ending in many plays cannot quite be understood without taking into account significant and partially contradictory ties between the socioeconomic institution of the theater and the more traditional elements in the storytelling culture of Elizabethan England. Although even at the turn of the century relatively viable, this culture of oral memory was already being undermined by various forces of change, among which the spread of print and literacy as well as an expanding market for cultural productions were foremost.2 As, in the words of John Lyly, "trafficke and travell"3 came to affect the provision and even the composition of cultural entertainment, the storytelling propensity of Elizabethan spectators could innovatively be appropriated in the playhouse: it could be used as a medium for dispersing information about, and interest in, further performances, with a view to keeping the play's post-scriptural

Thresholds to Memory and Commodity in Shakespeare's Endings

To give the reader who is unfamiliar with The Unfortunate Traveller some taste of Nashe's strange style, we quote a portion of the account of the slaughter of the Munster Anabaptists: That day come, flourishing entered John Leyden the botchera into the field with a scarf made of lists,b like a bow case; a cross on his breast like a thread bottom; a round, twiltedc tailor's cushion buckled like a tankard bearer's device to his shoulders for a target,d the pike whereof was a pack needle;e a tough prentice's club for his spear; a great brewer's cowf on his back for a corselet; and on his head for a helmet a huge high shoe with the bottom turned upward, embossed as full of hobnails as ever it might stick. His men were all base handicrafts, as cobblers and curriers and tinkers, whereof some had bars of iron, some hatchets, some cool staves,9 some dung forks, some spades, some mattocks, some wood knives, some adzes for their weapons.... Very devout asses they were, for all they were so dunstically set forth, and such as though they knew as much of God's mind as richer men. Why, inspiration was their ordinary familiar, and buzzed in their ears like a bee in a box every hour-what news from heaven, hell, and the land of Whipperginny?h Displease them who durst; he should have his mittimus to damnation ex tempore. They would vaunt there was not a pea's difference twixt them and the Apostles. They were as poor as they, of as base trades as they, and no more inspired than they; and with God

Fabula and Historia: The Crisis of the "Universall Consideration" in The Unfortunate Traveller

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Thresholds to Memory and Commodity in Shakespeare's Endings

Fabula and Historia: The Crisis of the "Universall Consideration" in The Unfortunate Traveller