This introduction outlines the concept of ‘shaping’ as a historical and theoretical term for understanding Shakespeare’s dramatic practice. It offers several close readings of the word ‘shape’ and its cognates in Shakespeare’s work, and in several of his sources. It argues for an understandning of creative morphology that sees the constituent parts of words as sites creative potential for Shakespeare. It offers an critical overview of the scholarly field and situates the book’s contribution within ongoing debates.

This chapter considers MacDonald’s work as a scholar and lecturer. From his 1859 appointment as professor of English literature and philosophy at Bedford College, to his (often sold-out) lecture tours in Britain, Europe, and North America, to the publication of his annotated Folio-based edition of Hamlet in 1885, MacDonald’s work as a scholar took various forms over the course of his literary career. What remained consistent, however, was his insistence that the critic should take a generous, affective approach, prioritising strengths over weakness and helping readers to experience the works at an emotional level. Drawing on both unpublished lectures and published scholarly works such as A Dish of Orts (1893) and the edition of Hamlet, this chapter explores MacDonald’s emphasis on the multivalence of texts, which anticipates post-critical approaches. However, the chapter also places him in dialogue with nineteenth-century critics Matthew Arnold and F. G. Fleay in order to draw out the distinctiveness of his critical approach within his context.

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.

One of the outcomes of the recent demographic shift to cities was a concomitant insecurity about identity. This was exploited by fraudsters, including the notorious Shakespeare forger, John Payne Collier. News of his misdemeanours broke in the summer, when the country was also learning about George Eliot’s ‘real’ identity. Unlike her contemporaries, Eliot’s identity could not be secured by a group or network of friends and acquaintances, which made her vulnerable to the machinations of Joseph Liggins, who claimed to have written her fiction. The revelation of her identity was coldly received by some women writers, who might have feared for their own reputations, and The Athenaeum, which sought to pillory Eliot as a distraction whilst they championed Payne Collier. Eliot’s own take on the identity question may be seen in ‘The Lifted Veil’, which defends the necessity of the multiplicity of identity, and of a degree of mystery.

In dialogue with Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Shakespeare, this chapter articulates the difference between an “idol” of experience, which necessarily disappoints desire, and an “icon” of experience, which necessarily surprises; it sketches the parallels between two iconic modes of experience, Heidegger’s wonder for being and St. Francis’s thanksgiving for existence, and it argues that the latter constitutes a unique phenomenological reduction, which distinguishes aletheism from other forms of phenomenology as well as separates it from other sciences. “That desired and hidden other, which thankfully causes the world and me to be, is ‘God’.”

When the King’s Men took over the residency of the Blackfriars indoor theatre in 1609, they embarked upon a period of conscious reinvention of company identity, combining their existing resources and reputation with a new playing space, audience, financial approach, and performative sensibility. The company made music a key part of this reinvention, drawing on its new assets to increase the presence and variety of original music in its plays. By 1642 they still held a reputation for musical innovation, performing newly written music for both new and older plays in the repertory; their musical settings were still newly circulated in manuscript and print into the 1650s. This chapter explores these musical reinventions, examining dramatic impacts of altered lyrics, melody, harmony, accompaniment, and performance style.

Mongolia hovers on the edge of early English drama: While no playtexts survive from the Elizabethan period featuring their history, there are consistent allusion to the peoples of the Tatary tribes unified under Chinggis Khan in English theatrical documents from 1536 onward. This chapter takes as a key case one of the eight surviving backstage-plots of the period to consider the stage life of Chinggis Khan inaugurated by the lost “Tamar Cham” plays. The two plays proved highly successful in the Elizabethan era and continued to haunt the paratextual record of early English performance into the late eighteenth century. The chapter explicates the financial data of the “Tamar Cham” plays in a repertorial context invested in Mediterranean tyrants to situate two newly discovered medieval source documents that together suggest a particular nostalgia in a fantasy if global unity.

The Introduction explains the collection’s argument, structure, and its interventions in the field. We challenge the fetishization of firsts in early modern drama studies, first performances, and first editions and highlight problems with privileging “maiden” performances and print “inceptions” of Renaissance plays over their ghost-like “afterlives” on the stage and page. Engaging with recent work in theatre and book history and editorial studies, the Introduction explores the idea that plays are indelibly marked and transformed by their transhistorical movement through different cultural sites of production and reception. We argue, in short, that the social, political, and aesthetic meanings of Renaissance drama were shaped by processes of renewal.

This chapter explores the political implications of reprinting Othello in republican England. Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the publication of early modern drama during the mid seventeenth century, examining how the ban on theatrical performance and the circumstances of civil war and revolution shaped the production and reception of pre-Civil War plays. The chapter builds on these studies by situating Othello within the ideological currents of English republicanism, focusing on the ways in which Venice, the play’s setting, took on new and pressing significance during the 1650s as a model of kingless governance. Renowned both for its elitist, rather than populist, tendencies as well as for its institutional stability, Venice exemplified an aristocratic form of republicanism that promised to secure traditional social hierarchies. By reprinting Othello in 1655, the bookseller William Leake capitalized on the topicality and political associations of the play’s Venetian milieu.