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Chapter 1 - Shakespeare’s Motists

from Part I - Players

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 March 2022

Simon Smith
Affiliation:
Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham
Emma Whipday
Affiliation:
University of Newcastle
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Summary

It has long been a critical commonplace to say that Shakespeare’s audience went to hear rather than see a play. Rhetorical virtuosity was the draw, and performed on a relatively bare stage. Recent scholarship has begun to complicate this view by excavating – quite literally, aided by recent archaeological finds on the sites of early theaters and figuratively, using digital data-mining techniques – new evidence regarding stage spectacle and spectatorship, from fashionable costumes and eye-catching properties to sophisticated stage-machinery and fireworks. In casting early modern theatre as a contest between the ears and eyes, or words and “stage-pictures,” however, scholarly attention has largely been confined to the head, ignoring the bodies-in-motion that defined theatrical experience. Although studies of theatrical gesture have introduced a modicum of movement into this relatively static “picture,” the tendency has been to focus on talking heads / facial expressions and posing hands (often depicted as a frozen series of stills), which seem to hover magically above 2 invisible feet and legs. This chapter reconsiders the ways in which meaning and emotion were conveyed between players and playgoers in the public amphitheaters from head to toe – or rather, from the ground up. Drawing on a variety of evidence, including stage directions, rhetorical and aesthetic treatises, documents of theater history, and material artifacts, such as MoLA’s shoe-finds at the Rose and Globe, we will consider the “two-hour’s traffic” of the stage as propelled and perceived through the feet.

Type
Chapter
Information
Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England
Actor, Audience and Performance
, pp. 18 - 36
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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