Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Wright, Clare

Titel

Ontologies of Play: Reconstructing the Relationship between Audience and Act in Early English Drama

Ist Teil von

• Shakespeare bulletin, 2017-07, Vol.35 (2), p.187-206

Ort / Verlag

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In doing so, I will suggest that the continued use of the play-world-real-world paradigm in early drama studies is indicative of an enduring, if unconscious, conceptual bias towards post-nineteenth-century spatial and dramaturgical aesthetics and illustrate the incompatibility of this model with the extant evidence of early dramatic practice.Because early modern playwrights and players were building on an earlier performance tradition, I will, however, venture back into the dramatic heritage of early modern playhouses to explore late-medieval drama and its contexts.[...]as this essay will go on to argue, it is not at all clear that in early drama it was a part of the established aesthetic, at least, not in the ways we might expect.[...]the dramaturgical features highlighted by Gurr as denying illusionism (speaking in verse rather than prose, direct address, boys playing women) are conventions inherited from earlier dramatic forms that aimed neither to present fiction or to create an illusion of reality.3 Even more radical approaches, like Robert Weimann's theory of locus and platea, rely on the play world/real world binary.In which case, in addition to being "attentive to the organizing spatial principles of locus and platea," as Rycroft argues in this special issue (225), reconstruction and practice-based research must also take into account pre-modern dramatic ontologies, the core conceptual paradigms that inspired such methods.[...]for practice-as-research to break new ground in understanding early modern drama and what was truly new about the playhouses, for it to find fresh ways of thinking about pre-modern drama, it must not only explore dramatic spaces, places and practices, but must also recognize the cultural contingency of the idea and the essential nature of performance itself.According to the OED, the earliest usage of "verisimilitude" in English is in Philemon Holland's 1603 translation of Plutarch's Moralia ("verisimilitude").