In this transformative study, Simon Smith explores how playwrights like Shakespeare crafted their plays for demanding and varied commercial audiences. Rediscovering the many forms of judgement practised in the early modern playhouse, he investigates influences ranging from the classical tradition and grammar-school classroom to ballad and jest culture. Where many prior studies have treated 'the judicious' as a self-contained subset of playgoers, Smith reveals the variety of careful assessments made in the theatre by a wide range of playgoers, showing that judgement and pleasure were often simultaneous elements of the same response. Chapters examine specific parts of plays that were especially subject to evaluation and generative of enjoyment: spectacle, words, plot, and actorly technique. Close readings shed fresh light on much-studied plays such as Hamlet and Volpone, as well as exploring several unfairly overlooked plays. This is a Flip it Open title and may be available open access on Cambridge Core.

‘Smith offers a wonderfully insightful introduction to both the mechanics and the aesthetics of performing in the early modern playhouses. Grounded in both contemporary evidence and scholarship in fields as various as spectatorship, affect, and early modern theories of judgement, Experiencing Shakespeare's Theatres is a significant intervention in the field.'

Greg Walker - Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature, The University of Edinburgh

‘Experiencing Shakespeare's Theatres is an invigorating examination of early modern playgoing and audience-making. Offering an ethically and methodologically original reappraisal of ‘judgement', Simon Smith draws ingeniously on historical and literary archives to capture the heterogeneity of audience cultures and the radical economies of ‘pleasure' that were the commercial theatre's trade.'

Peter Kirwan - Professor of Shakespeare & Performance, Mary Baldwin University