Shakespeare and the materiality of performance

"Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance is an important book, charting Shakespearean theatre not as the reproduction of a script but as an event. Erika T. Lin searchingly sets the signifying and embodied designs of stage performance in dialogue with other forms of meaningful early modern action, notably dance and sports, to refine the cultural attitudes and practices that conditioned early modern attitudes toward performance. Ranging across an impressive variety of sources, from folk festivity to anatomy texts to architecture, Lin excavates the contingencies that animated the signifying materialities of theatrical performance for early modern audiences."--W. B. Worthen, Alice Brady Pels Professor in the Arts, Barnard College. "If the original Globe Theatre had run backstage tours, Lin would have been the perfect docent. In Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance she manages to connect planks, nails, costumes, and props with physical bodies, psychology, and subjectivity. In more ways than one, this is a book of tremendous reach."--Bruce R. Smith, author of Phenomenal Shakespeare. Drawing on scientific treatises, murder pamphlets, travel narratives, dream manuals, religious sermons, festive sports, and other fascinating primary sources, Erika T. Lin reconstructs playgoers' typical ways of thinking and feeling and demonstrates how these culturally-trained habits of mind of Shakespeare's audience shaped not only dramatic narratives but also the presentational dynamics of onstage action. Combining literary criticism, theatre history, and performance theory, this ground-breaking study explodes received ideas about mimesis, spectacle, and semiotics as it uncovers the ways in which early modern performance functioned as a material medium, revising and producing social attitudes and practices --Book Jacket.