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Common Understandings, Poetic Confusion: Playhouses and Playgoers in Elizabethan England

Online ISBN:
9780226808987
Print ISBN:
9780226808840
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
Book

Common Understandings, Poetic Confusion: Playhouses and Playgoers in Elizabethan England

William N. West
William N. West
Northwestern University
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Published online:
19 May 2022
Published in print:
14 December 2021
Online ISBN:
9780226808987
Print ISBN:
9780226808840
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press

Abstract

Common Understandings, Poetic Confusion asks what Elizabethan playing was like by exploring the figurative language with which its interested contemporaries spoke about it. There are very few eyewitness accounts of performances of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but many descriptions that liken them to more familiar activities, among them playing, eating, supposing, fighting, and especially understanding and confusion. These likenesses recur with enough frequency and show enough consistency to be understood as a specific discourse of playing, as distinct from early modern theories of theater as from modern notions of it. The book tries to articulate the position of the understanders, members of the audience who stood below the stage in the yard and were said to understand nothing of the play. But their understanding was not aloof, individual, or articulate. It was engaged, active, collective, and participatory, and understanders experienced themselves as part of what they attended. Like their understanding, the confusion attributed to them was at once physical and cognitive; poured together from all parts into the playhouses, they could only be understood as confused. But their confusion was generative; their disorder prompted new orderings and transformations, and in the sense that it made something new it was poetic. The collaborative experiences that playing instigated did not belong to any individual but were common to the assembled, variegated crowd. In the circuits of exchange, production, and consumption that playing constituted and that made up playing, emerged new forms of thinking and feeling distributed across persons and times.

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