Community-Making in Early Stuart Theatres

<p>Twenty-two leading experts on early modern drama collaborate in this volume</p><p>to explore three closely interconnected research questions. To what extent did</p><p>playwrights represent <i>dramatis personae </i>in their entertainments as forming or</p><p>failing to form communal groupings? How far were theatrical productions likely</p><p>to weld or separate different communal groupings within their target audiences?</p><p>And how might such bondings or oppositions among spectators have tallied with</p><p>the community-making or -breaking on stage? Chapters in Part One respond to</p><p>one or more of these questions by reassessing general period trends in censorship</p><p>theatre attendance forms of patronage playwrights’ professional and linguistic</p><p>networks their use of music and their handling of ethical controversies.</p><p>In Part Two responses arise from detailed re-examinations of particular plays</p><p>by Shakespeare Chapman Jonson Beaumont and Fletcher Cary Webster Middleton</p><p>Massinger Ford and Shirley. Both Parts cover a full range of early-Stuart</p><p>theatre settings from the public and popular to the more private circumstances</p><p>of hall playhouses court masques women’s drama country-house theatricals</p><p>and school plays. And one overall finding is that although playwrights frequently</p><p>staged or alluded to communal conflict they seldom exacerbated such divisiveness</p><p>within their audience. Rather they tended toward more tactful modes of</p><p>address (sometimes even acknowledging their own ideological uncertainties) so</p><p>that at least for the duration of a play their audiences could be a community</p><p>within which internal rifts were openly brought into dialogue.</p>