Imagining Shakespeare's Original Audience, 1660-2000: Groundlings, Gallants, Grocers

by Bettina Boecker

Overview

Comparatively little is known about Shakespeare's first audiences. This study argues that the Elizabethan audience is an essential part of Shakespeare as a site of cultural meaning, and that the way criticism thinks of early modern theatregoers is directly related to the way it thinks of, and uses, the Bard himself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781137379955
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	09/18/2015
Series:	Palgrave Shakespeare Studies
Edition description:	1st ed. 2015
Pages:	210
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.02(d)

About the Author

Bettina Boecker is Senior Lecturer at the University of Munich, Germany. She is also executive officer and research librarian at the Munich Shakespeare Library. She has published on a variety of early modern topics, but is particularly interested in the popular culture of the period and Shakespeare's afterlives.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Shakespeare's Elizabethan Audience in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Shakespeare Criticism
2. 'No man of genius ever wrote for the mob': Shakespeare's Elizabethan Audience and Romantic Shakespeare Criticism
3. Enter the Groundlings
4. Childish and Primitive: Shakespeare's Elizabethan
5. The Rediscovery of the Judicious Few
6. Neo-Elizabethanism
7. Shakespeare's Elizabethan Audience in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century
Appendix: The Grocer's Wife
Bibliography
Index