What did publicity look like before the eighteenth century? What were its uses and effects, and around whom was it organized? The essays in this collection ask these questions of early modern London. Together, they argue that commercial theater was a vital engine in celebrity’s production. The men and women associated with playing―not just actors and authors, but playgoers, characters, and the extraordinary local figures adjunct to playhouse productions―introduced new ways of thinking about the function and meaning of fame in the period; about the networks of communication through which it spread; and about theatrical publics. Drawing on the insights of Habermasean public sphere theory and on the interdisciplinary field of celebrity studies, Publicity and the Early Modern Stage introduces a new and comprehensive look at early modern theories and experiences of publicity.
Author(s): Allison K. Deutermann, Matthew Hunter, Musa Gurnis
Series: Early Modern Cultural Studies 1500–1700
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 307
City: Cham
Acknowledgments
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Introduction
Early Modern Celebrity
Publics, the Public Sphere, and Celebrity Studies
People Made Public
Part I: Knowing Audiences and Theatrical Publics
Othello’s Strange Celebrity: Race and Publicity in Early Modern Drama
Strange Othello
Local Characters
Celebrity, Crowds, and Theatrical Audiences in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus
Fame, Celebrity, and the Crowd
Playing to the Crowd
Acts of Condescension
Coriolanus Among the Volscians
Conclusion
“Bootless are your thoughts”: Audience Expectation and Surprise in the Caroline Commercial Theater
Part II: Affective Persons, Public Theatricalities
Local Celebrities Onstage and Off
Creatures of the Theater Scene
Topical Plays About Ordinary People: Private Disputes in Public Places
Multimedia Personhood and the Publicist John Taylor
Politics in the Street
Robert Armin’s “Blue John,” Early Modern Disability, and the Public Punchline
Disability Jokes and Theatrical Memes
Everybody’s Fool
Doubling and Resurrection Across the Henriad
Celebrity No-Show: The Great Eater of Kent
Making Monstrous Celebrity
Writing the Maw
Part III: Bodies Public and Imaginary
Bodies Public: The Roaring Girl and the Rise of Celebrity
Any Body, Some Body, Every Body, No Body
Two Prostheses
Fictive Presence
Desiring Moll
Taste-Maker of the Market
“There Present”
Nobody’s Business
Letters to No One
Purchasing a Name
Celebrity, Publicity, and Negation
Jonson’s Ridicule of Shakespeare: Commodifying Drama in “To the Reader” of The Alchemist
Jonson’s Reformation of Commerical Drama
Shakespeare’s Audience of “Pretenders”
Shakespeare the Witty Ignoramus
Time’s Overthrow of Law in The Winter’ Tale
Shakespeare as Autolycus
Why Jonson Mocked Shakespeare in 1612
Afterword
Author Index
Subject Index
