Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"West’s learned, innovative study offers a cultural anthropology of the Elizabethan stage—of the language in play texts and contemporaneous discussions of theater. West does not provide extended readings of individual plays, though he comments briefly on many. Rather, he focuses on the intertwining of confusions and conclusions—a favorite rhyme of the playwrights—in a theater where 'performances' embodied 'provocations toward meaning rather than representations of a meaning.' . . . Summing Up: Highly recommended." * Choice *
"West shows that playing, players, and playgoers were likened to a great many things, and it is in detailing these surprising affinities that he constructs a richly revealing account of the commercial theater as a social and embodied practice through the last quarter of the
sixteenth century . . . Ingenious in its methodology and invaluable in its contribution, Common Understandings is a provocation to scholars of the early modern English theater and beyond: the book invites us not only to reconsider what counts as evidence of playing, but to recast our familiar stories about it in new light."
* Modern Philology *
“This exhilarating book reveals, in vivid detail, what early modern theater was like as an experience. By investigating not playing itself, but metaphors about it, West shows how theater was viewed at the time—as a place of fear or wonder, described in terms of chaos, fighting, being in a siege, eating, dancing.
Common Understandings, Poetic Confusion enables us to understand, as never before, the edginess, thrill, and danger of plays and performance in the time of Shakespeare.” -- Tiffany Stern, author of Documents of Performance in Early Modern England
“A dazzling account of how early modern playgoers experienced theater in the decades between 1575 and 1610,
Common Understandings, Poetic Confusion links theatrical knowing and feeling to shared corporeal events and bodily sensations. Theoretically rich and brimming with telling examples, West’s book shows how the habitus of early modern playgoing was created by collective acts as simple as eating, drinking, and remembering within the bounded space of the theater.” -- Jean E. Howard, Columbia University
Table of ContentsA Note on Textual and Other Performances
Introduction
There Is Not Agreement of Opinion
All the World’s a Stage
Every Like Is Not the Same
1: Playing
Merely Players
What Learn You By That?
But Mark This Show
2: Occupatio
An Excellent Good Word Before It Was Ill Sorted
Looking Well to Borders
So Curious in New Fangles
3: Understanders
Deep in Understanding
Plain and Easy to Be Understanden
All Readers to Be Understanders
Feelingly Perceive
4: Confusion
Nothing but Confusion and Errors
Babylonical Confusion
What More Fitter Occasion?
Diverse Men of Diverse Minds
Commons Knowledge
Interlude. Playing, Thinking
5: Supposes
Valedictions to Sense
Brokers of Another’s Wit
A Stalking-Stamping Player
Authors of All the Content
6: Eating
Between Meals
Some Hungry Scenes
Playing with Food
7: Non Plus
I’ll Have a Challenge, Too
Fencers, Bearwards, Common Players
Non Plus
Trying Conclusions
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
