William N. West. Common Understandings, Poetic Confusion: Playhouses and Playgoers in Elizabethan England
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13136/sjtds.v9i1.411Abstract
William N. West’s Common Understandings, Poetic Confusion: Playhouses and Playgoers in Elizabethan England, suited for specialists and non-specialists alike, is a boldly original and impressively versatile study of the discourses as well as experiences of the participatory entertainment offered at early modern London’s commercial playhouses. Deftly coordinating rigorous historical research, analysis of numerous but always salient primary sources, and theoretically informed, convincing interpretation, West opens a variety of fresh perspectives on the topic. Beginning with a demonstration of the aptness of “Playing”, rather than Theatre or Drama, as a descriptive and critical designation, he follows a propositional approach in the succeeding chapters on “Occupatio” through “Non Plus”, via “Confusion,” “Eating,” and other common criteria, to articulate a new understanding of how Elizabethans spoke of playgoing, rather than identifying what it meant to them. This lucidly written and truly ground-breaking monograph offers an extraordinarily rich, diverse array of critical insights that promise not only to change and re-direct our knowledge of its subject matter, but also to pave the way for fruitful commentary and enlightened understandings to come.
Keywords: playhouses; playgoing; Elizabethan England; poetic confusion; occupation; reoccupation; forms of life
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2023 Skenè. Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Open Access Policy
This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.
This Journal is a CC-BY 4.0 publication (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This Licence allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this Journal, providing a link to the Licence and explicitly underlining any change (full mention of Issue number, year, pages and DOI is required).
- The Author retains (i) the rights to reproduce, to distribute, to publicly perform, and to publicly display the Article in any medium for any purpose; (ii) the right to prepare derivative works from the Article; and (iii) the right to authorise others to make any use of the Article so long as the Author receives credit as Author and the Journal in which the Article has been published are cited as the source of first publication of the Article. For example, the Author may make and distribute copies in the course of teaching and research and may post the Article on personal or institutional Web sites and in other open-access digital repositories.
- The Author is free to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the Journal’s published version of the work, with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this Journal and explicitly underlining any change (full mention of Issue number, year, pages and DOI is required).
- The Author is permitted and encouraged to post their work online after the evaluation process has been successfully passed, as it can lead to productive exchanges as well as to a wider dissemination of the published work.
