Performance matters: Culture and theatrical signification in the early English public playhouses

This study explores the cultural implications of theatrical performance in early modern England. Every time and place has its own style of theatre with its own particular theatrical conventions: a boy actor may represent a female character, unbound hair may represent madness, raised hands may represent joy, the color white may represent death. Through an examination of the material conditions of Renaissance public theatres—their playing spaces and resources, their costumes and properties, their schedule of performances, their repertory of plays—I map out the set of performance conventions used by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. These representational strategies, I argue, constituted a semiotic system, a “language” or “grammar” of theatre specific to early modern England. I trace the cultural reasons why these particular performance conventions developed at this time, and I suggest the ways in which the medium of performance affected the cultural discourses circulated through plays. Chapter One sets up the conceptual framework for my investigation. I argue that not all moments in plays are created equal: some scenes, characters, and actions imprint themselves indelibly on the minds of spectators while others are quickly forgotten. Each of the subsequent chapters examines a particular dynamic in the semiotics of early modern theatre as well as a particular cultural context through which it can be understood. In Chapter Two I consider onstage dances as representation, festivity, and entertainment, and I argue that theatrical spectacle contributed to the experience of playgoing as communal and participatory. Chapter Three relates representations of dismemberment to bearbaiting, judicial punishment, and other forms of spectacular violence, and it suggests that such moments problematized the theatrical status of the actor\u27s body. Chapter Four focuses on plays-within-plays and scenes of spectatorship and explores how early modern ideas about sight and sound influenced the interpretive strategies of Renaissance playgoers. By examining the relationship between theatre as a representational system and as a spectacular entertainment in its own right, and by connecting these performance dynamics to the cultural specificities of early modern England, this project seeks to make a methodological intervention, bridging the gap between performance theory and cultural studies