Community-Making in Early Stuart Theatres ─ Stage and Audience

Twenty of the world's leading experts on early modern drama collaborate in this volume to address three research questions: Judging from their representations of human beings interacting or failing to interact on stage, what were early Stuart dramatists' own perceptions of community-making? Is it possible to identify particular aspects of early Stuart dramatic writing which tended to weld together, or to keep separate, different groupings within the first audiences? And, What was the relationship between the community-making which happened or failed to happen on stage and the community-making which happened or failed to happen within the first audiences? The book falls into two complementary parts. Chapters belonging to Part One take up one or more of the three research questions as they relate to a number of period trends in early Stuart theatrical activity (1603–1649). Chapters belonging to Part Two take up one or more of the research questions as they relate to particular dramatists, as arranged in approximately chronological order. Much of the research has to do with public theatrical performance, though a number of texts relating to more private or elitist activities (women's drama, for instance, and court masques) are also discussed, in so far as they illuminate the book's predominant subject matter by way of contrast.

Roger D. Sell is H.W. Donner Research Professor of Literary Communication at A…bo Akademi University, Finland. Anthony W. Johnson is Professor and Head of English Philology at the University of Oulu, Finland. Helen Wilcox is Professor of English at Bangor University, Wales.