Chapter 4 considers dramatic plotting, exploring competing tastes and approaches, and focusing on Ben Jonson’s Volpone and Thomas Jordan’s The Walks of Islington and Hogsdon. It considers early modern debates about narrative and plot, including the decorum and necessity of adhering to classical precedents and theories; the respective merits of simplicity and conscious craft; and the need to incorporate individual narrative ‘moments’ popular with an audience. It puts various approaches emphasising structure and conscious artifice in conversation with the alternative view that a good plot is simply one that serves the set-piece moments that a playgoer desires. It argues that both Volpone and The Walks combine complex and visible structural craft with the careful provision of set-pieces designed to appeal to playgoers who judged their plots on moments rather than movements. These case studies reveal dramatists writing subtly and effectively in conscious anticipation of multiple approaches to playhouse censure.

Chapter 1 lays out the foundational claims of Experiencing Shakespeare’s Theatres, tracing how entangled understandings of pleasure and judgement framed theatrical response and exploring evidence of widespread, varied, and continuous playhouse censure. It argues that theatrical performances were often judged ‘in parts’, with features including narrative structure, verbal construction, and actorly technique engaged with individually by playgoers. This supplies the conceptual framework for the following chapters, each focusing on a specific aspect of playhouse performance that was demonstrably subject to censure by and evocative of pleasure from playgoers: spectacle; words; plot; action.

Chapter 5 considers the technical craft of theatrical performers, focusing on Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor. This final chapter tracks habitual censure of performers’ skill that took place even whilst playgoers engaged imaginatively and emotively with fictional worlds. It traces frameworks drawn from grammar school or university education such as actio and pronuntio and even demonstrates widespread familiarity with these concepts, also brought to bear by those lacking privileged educational backgrounds. Just as importantly, close engagement with the demands of play-texts reveals many other modalities of actorly skill offered for censure alongside gesture and delivery. The Jew of Malta and The Roman Actor indicate a mixed culture of censure that encompassed action and accent but was not limited to this framework. Skills as varied as interrupting, falling over, and playing the lute all contribute to the conspicuous playhouse display of technical skill, alongside actio and pronuntio.

The Coda draws together the preceding chapters by taking a single example from Twelfth Night that encompasses all of the ‘parts’ of a play examined separately in individual chapters: spectacle, words, plot, and action. Focusing on 4.2, when Malvolio is imprisoned in a ‘dark house’, it considers the many invitations to judge all four aspects in this single scene, as well as its potential to please playgoers with all of these elements. The Coda emphasises that the separate treatment of each ‘part’ in individual chapters is a means of making visible otherwise overlooked aspects of dramatic production and theatrical censure, rather than a suggestion that for example some plays sought engagement with their spectacle alone and others with their language. It indicates the potential for future studies to draw collectively on the topics and approaches of each chapter, rather than treating them as alternative options.

The Introduction sets out the critical context and core arguments of Experiencing Shakespeare’s Theatres. It explains that the book offers a new account of 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, it investigates influences from the classical tradition and grammar school classroom to ballad and jest culture. Where prior studies have often treated ‘the judicious’ as a self-contained subset of playgoers, it reveals the variety of careful judgements made in the theatre by a wide range of playgoers. It shows that judgement and pleasure were not mutually exclusive but could be simultaneous elements of the same response. It offers an overview of the following chapters, including one tracing the wider context of pleasure and judgement, and specific chapters devoted to parts of a play that were especially subject to judgement and generative of pleasure: spectacle, words, plot, and actorly technique.

Chapter 3 considers engagements with words in performance, focusing on John Cooke’s Greene’s Tu Quoque, or The City Gallant, and Thomas Middleton’s Women, Beware Women. Tracing the plurality of linguistic tastes associated with playgoers, it tracks key forms such as jests, conceits, and ‘fresh’ language and explores key debates between heightened and plain style, and about novelty and aptness. These tastes persisted despite shifts in linguistic fashion, resulting in plays that, despite paratextual complaints about the impossibility of pleasing all tastes, encompass a striking degree of linguistic variety into their practice. Greene’s Tu Quoque and Women, Beware Women reveal playwrights catering to a variety of linguistic tastes simultaneously, even whilst asking playgoers to reflect upon the judiciousness of their tastes, and even the trustworthiness of language itself.

Chapter 2 explores early modern playhouse engagements with stage sights, focusing on Hamlet and Dekker and Ford’s The Sun’s Darling. It argues that whilst some early modern commentators distinguished the discerning ear from the passive gaze, it was more commonly held that commercial drama is best encountered with judicious ear and censorious eye. Building upon important work by Gillian Woods, Lauren Robertson, Amy J. Rodgers, and others who have recently dismantled long-standing assumptions about passive, uncritical engagements with playhouse spectacle, the chapter recovers a culture of playhouse engagement through sight that was as censorious as it was pleasurable, reflecting dramatic craft and theatrical convention concomitantly committed to the habitual and sophisticated use of visual dramaturgy. Hamlet exemplifies the ubiquity of visual censoriousness even in the reception of plays that may not seem ripe for such engagement, whilst The Sun’s Darling’s concerted visual stagecraft demonstrates just how high playwrights’ expectations of commercial theatregoers’ visual judiciousness could be.

Using examples from Bishop’s letters and diaries, as well as more recent theoretical accounts, the introduction explores various meanings of the word ‘style’ and their pertinence to Bishop’s work. The introduction highlights the predominance of biographical criticism in works on Bishop (and other twentieth-century writers) and instead argues for the importance of stylistic criticism. This chapter goes on to delineate two broader trends in contemporary literary criticism – historicist on the one hand, formalist on the other – and outlines their shortcomings in understanding the nuances of particular poems and literary works. The chapter then outlines this book’s focus on several aspects of style across Bishop’s entire oeuvre, including cliché, simile, allusion, and correctio. The introduction ends by arguing that aesthetic evaluation and judgement are central to the responsible and rigorous practice of literary criticism.

Different sorts of evidence for a singular causal claim impact its overall warrant in different ways. We show how to assemble the evidence we have identified to provide an overall assessment of its strength of support/warrant for claims at issue, giving a rough guide to the significance of particular kinds of evidence within our schema and the identification of gaps in the evidence. This cannot be too formal a process (you shouldn’t pretend to more precision than is available) but we suggest the use of arguments to make sense of relations between pieces of evidence and causal claims, as per Fuller et al., and proper application of the ‘weakest link’ principle. We offer a catalogue of nodes to incorporate into such arguments based on our evidence categories.

Aside from some attention to the notion of material falsity that Descartes cites, Francisco Suárez’s broader discussion of falsity in Metaphysical Disputations 9 has received little scholarly attention. This chapter takes a broader look, starting with Suárez’s claim that falsity, unlike truth, is properly attributed only to intellectual acts of composition and division, before focusing on the question of where false judgements or errors come from. Suárez considers several possible sources—God, an evil angel, apparent evidentness—that might make us form false judgements, but argues that none of them actually necessitate false judgements. In line with his doxastic voluntarism, Suárez concludes instead that our wills are the source of our errors. We voluntarily assent to false propositions (though in a different work, Suárez seems more open to recognizing involuntary error). The similarity between Suárez’s account of error and Descartes’ later account is easy to see.

Chapter 5 discusses the various timelines involved in the question of the imprescriptibility of atrocity crimes. I distinguish between four timelines involved in imprescriptibility and assess these from the viewpoint of legal values and philosophical debates on forgiveness. Taking the perspective of the judge, the chapter ends by spelling out what is at stake in the judgement on an imprescriptible international crime.

This chapter engages with Bowen’s writings of the Second World War. It explores how these texts responded to the narratives, myths, and lies fed to Britons to maintain wartime morale and to aid the transformation, in the immediate post-war period, of traumatic and discontinuous experiences into palatable histories. The chapter begins with Bowen’s wartime autobiographical works, Bowen’s Court and Seven Winters (1942), both of which register anxieties about how personal experiences and recollections may be disputed by the assertions of historical accounts. These works are then discussed in relation to comparable concerns which emerged in the final months of the Second World War, once news of the Holocaust began to challenge both narratives which had stressed the terrible conditions endured in Britain and the scepticism many civilians had professed about reports of Nazi atrocities. Central to this argument is a reading of Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1949): a post-war novel that links the painful forms of retrospective censure suffered by its heroine to questions circulating in this period about personal responsibility and the limits of judgement.