Reading material [for] performance theater and textuality in the English Renaissance

"Reading Material [for] Performance" is a study that examines the phenomenon of offstage action in the popular drama of the English Renaissance. Most plays from the period feature dramatic episodes that audiences never directly witness but that habitually shape the events that they do observe on the stage. Beginning from the premise that most offstage action is actually performed onstage through storytelling, I argue that such action constitutes a discursive dimension of theatricality. The project claims that the conjunction of embodied performance and verbal narrative raises a variety of formal and epistemological problems, which invite both playreaders and playgoers to participate actively in the construction of dramatic meaning. The four chapters address the implications of offstage action in classical dramatic theory, including that of Aristotle, Horace, and Sir Philip Sidney; in early modern printed play-texts such as John Ford's Perkin Warbeck, Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Thomas Middleton's Women Beware Women, and William Shakespeare's Henry V and Much Ado About Nothing; in the architecture of Renaissance amphitheaters like the Rose and the Globe; and in the physical characteristics of the manuscript play "The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore." When sharing the stage in each of these contexts, narrative and enactment combine their distinct rhetorical effects, creating a dynamic interpretive structure within which dramatic audiences are encouraged to resolve the uneasy relationship between the two representational modes.