Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance [Paperback]

Winner of the MRDS 2013 David Bevington Award for Best New Book in Early Drama Studies! Drawing on a wide variety of primary sources, Lin reconstructs playgoers' typical ways of thinking and feeling and demonstrates how these culturally-trained habits of mind shaped dramatic narratives and the presentational dynamics of onstage action.PART I: PERFORMANCE EFFECTS Introduction: Materializing the Immaterial Theorizing Theatrical Privilege: Rethinking Weimann's Concepts of Locus and Platea PART II: THEATRICAL WAYS OF KNOWING Staging Sight: Visual Paradigms and Perceptual Strategies in Love's Labor's Lost Imaginary Forces: Allegory, Mimesis, and Audience Interpretation in The Spanish Tragedy PART III: EXPERIENCING EMBODIED SPECTACLE Dancing and Other Delights: Spectacle and Participation in Doctor Faustus and Macbeth Artful Sport: Violence, Dismemberment, and Games in Titus Andronicus , Cymbeline , and Doctor Faustus

Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance powerfully redirects our attention as scholars of early modern drama to the fact that the plays we discuss were performed before audiences carrying specific cultural assumptions about what it meant to engage in watching and listening to theatrical spectacle. This book is of value to scholars interested in performance theory more broadly but will also be useful to historicist scholars seeking to understand the nuances of bodies, actors, and representational drama converging in particular moments upon the early modern stage . . . Lin's analyses are sharp, provocative, and helpful for scholars seeking to approximate early modern ideological and social conditions of interpretative strategies in theater. - Journal of the Northern Renaissance

Lin's close-readings of the play are often penetrating . . . [Lin] does not overstate the claims she makes; she is cautious with numbers in particular. She is precise with her examples. - Shakespeare Jarhbuch

Lin's reading of earlló–