Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama [Paperback]

A survey of the formal conventions of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.This book provides a detailed and comprehensive survey of the diverse, theatrically vital 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, 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.This book provides a detailed and comprehensive survey of the diverse, theatrically vital 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, 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.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.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. EpilÓ}