Description
Book SynopsisA Monster with a Thousand Hands makes visible a figure that has been largely overlooked in early modern scholarship on theater and audiences: the discursive spectator, an entity distinct from the actual bodies attending early modern English playhouses. Amy J. Rodgers demonstrates how the English commercial theater's rapid development and prosperity altered the lexicon for describing theatergoers and the processes of engagement that the theater was believed to cultivate. In turn, these changes influenced and produced a cultural projection-the spectator-a figure generated by social practices rather than a faithful recording of those who attended the theater. The early modern discursive spectator did not merely develop alongside the phenomenological one, but played as significant a role in shaping early modern viewers and viewing practices as did changes to staging technologies, exhibition practices, and generic experimentation. While audience and film studies have theorized the spectat
Trade Review"A brilliant, thoughtful, and innovative book. Writing lucidly and elegantly, Amy J. Rodgers establishes not only the possibility but also the necessity of our coming to understand the ways in which the notion of audience and spectatorship was conceptualized, discussed, and imagined during the early modern period." * Peter Holland, University of Notre Dame *
Table of ContentsIntroduction. Discursive Iterations/Fearful Symmetries
Chapter 1. Toward a Theory of Discursive Spectatorship
Chapter 2. The Blood of the Muses: Violent Spectatorship and Authorial Response in The Knight of the Burning Pestle
Chapter 3. The Book of Praises: The Spectator as Reader in Shakespeare's Romances
Chapter 4. The Language of Looking: Making Senses Speak in Jonsonian Masque
Epilogue. The Discursive Spectator and the Question of History
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
