Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage
Andrew Bozio
Abstract
Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage traces the way that characters think through their surroundings in early modern drama—not only how these characters orient themselves within unfamiliar or otherwise strange locations but also how their locations function as the scaffolding for perception, memory, and other forms of embodied thought. Such moments of thinking through place stage a process that both resembles and parallels the cognitive work that early modern playgoers undertook as they reimagined the stage as the settings of the dramatic fiction. The book traces the vexed ... More
Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage traces the way that characters think through their surroundings in early modern drama—not only how these characters orient themselves within unfamiliar or otherwise strange locations but also how their locations function as the scaffolding for perception, memory, and other forms of embodied thought. Such moments of thinking through place stage a process that both resembles and parallels the cognitive work that early modern playgoers undertook as they reimagined the stage as the settings of the dramatic fiction. The book traces the vexed relationship between these two registers of thought in works by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Jonson. In doing so, it counters a critical tradition that figures drama as a form of spatial abstraction and demonstrates, instead, that theatrical performance constituted a sophisticated and self-reflexive mode of thinking through place in the early modern period.
Keywords:
English Renaissance drama,
cognitive ecology,
affordances,
theatrical performance,
history of space and place
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2020 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198846567 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2020 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198846567.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Andrew Bozio, author
Assistant Professor of English, Skidmore College, USA
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