Common Understandings, Poetic Confusion

Description

A new account of playgoing in Elizabethan England, in which audiences participated as much as performers.
  What if going to a play in Elizabethan England was more like attending a football match than a Broadway show—or playing in one? In Common Understandings, Poetic Confusion, William N. West proposes a new account of the kind of participatory entertainment expected by the actors and the audience during the careers of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. West finds surprising descriptions of these theatrical experiences in the figurative language of early modern players and playgoers—including understanding, confusion, occupation, eating, and fighting. Such words and ways of speaking are still in use today, but their earlier meanings, like that of theater itself, are subtly, importantly different from our own. Playing was not confined to the actors on the stage but filled the playhouse, embracing audiences and performers in collaborative experiences that did not belong to any one alone but to the assembled, various crowd.  What emerged in playing was a kind of thinking and feeling distributed across persons and times that were otherwise distinct. Thrown apples, smashed bottles of beer, and lumbering bears—these and more gave verbal shape to the physical interactions between players and playgoers, creating circuits of exchange, production, and consumption.  
  William N. West is professor of English, comparative literary studies, and classics at Northwestern University. He is the author of As If: Essays in “As You Like It” and Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe. He also edits the journal Renaissance Drama.
  A 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