Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage

<em>Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage</em> argues that environment and embodied thought continually shaped one another in the performance of early modern English drama. It demonstrates this first by establishing how characters think through their surroundings not only how they orient themselves within unfamiliar or otherwise strange locations but also how their environs function as the scaffolding for perception memory and other forms of embodied thought. It then contends that these moments of thinking through place theorize and thematize the work that playgoers undertook in reimagining the stage as the setting of the dramatic fiction. By tracing the relationship between these two registers of thought in such plays as <em> The Malcontent Dido Queen of Carthage Tamburlaine King Lear The Knight of the Burning Pestle </em> and <em>Bartholomew Fair</em> this book shows that drama makes visible the often invisible means by which embodied subjects acquire a sense of their surroundings. It also reveals how in doing so theater altered the way that playgoers perceived experienced and imagined place in early modern England.<br>