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.

The Chronographia is an original, experimental, and uneven work, an imaginative exercise in interpreting the past through a rhetorical performance that expands into scenes to intensify and frame events. The skills of the rhetor are summarized. The text’s interplay of voices and roles, especially the imperial role, will be examined, together with the range of emotions felt and modelled, the spaces highlighted, the structuring of scenes, and their audiences inside and outside the action. Each reign dictates its own directions, each is assessed by its embodiment in the emperor: the Body Politic being the tacit underlying metaphor in a text unusually rich in metaphor. The aim is to discover how Psellos experiments with the material and finds out its possibilities; how the work develops to accommodate the increasing pressures of his own presence and self-presentation; how the empathetic, volatile, sensibility described by Papaioannou in Psellos’ rhetoric functions in the genre of history, and, from Book Six, how the Platonic idea of indirect rule by a philosopher (Kaldellis) fares, given the interfusion of the tragic and the comic in its course.

Romanos’ funeral freights the reign of Michael IV with the burden of Michael’s past, his betrayal of Romanos, false oath, deception of Zoe, and rumours of collusion in Romanos’ death. Psellos knits these elements together with Michael’s fine performance as emperor to produce a conscience-driven, tormented figure trying to save his soul and serve his people. It is a new departure, unrepeated, into a psychological analysis of guilt, shame, and the hidden aspects of the human psyche, with Michael’s illness a metaphor for what can and cannot be known or said. Book Five draws the reader out of the dark psychic region of Book Four, through a brief, paranoid, and jerky reign characterized by poor theatricals, to an energizing, open, and collective action with a telos. Having exiled his benefactor John, Michael V tonsures and exiles Zoe, and the City rises as one to tear the imperial buildings from the earth and reset the social contract. Psellos portrays the rising as divinely inspired and articulated, with the demos assuming the empire. Imbued with ironies, their movement is neos, gives rise to lacrimae rerum, and restores the Macedonian line.

Chapter 4 examines how absurdism becomes a postcolonial aesthetic. Beginning with The Thing (1960), likely the first absurdist play in the subcontinent, the chapter focuses on the East Pakistani playwrights Sayeed Ahmad and Syed Waliullah and their dramaturgical experiments, read as reflective of a widespread engagement with absurdism in almost all of the languages of the subcontinent. Beyond encounters with Samuel Beckett (and Ahmad’s writings on not only Albert Camus, Harold Pinter, and Eugene Ionesco but everything from Ousmane Sembène to Zen Buddhism and Kabuki theater), I argue that for Ahmad and Waliullah, the absurdist register makes available a new kind of political critique and, in its abstract, decoded language, creates space for the postcolonial moral inventory. The wild heteroaesthetica of these plays (itinerant flute players, clowns, stick games, decimation) mark a departure from available dramatic modes during a period of interregnum: after the Independence of Pakistan (1947) and before the Independence of Bangladesh (1971), the absurd suggests confusion, drowsiness, and waiting as forms of postcolonial being.

In this chapter, Guy Zimmerman identifies innovative situated theater as a defining feature of LA drama, rebutting misperceived clichés about LA as a “placeless” city. Offering both a social history of 1980s and 1990s LA theater and extended readings of work by Reza Abdoh and John Steppling (alongside engagement with Luis Alfaro and Anna Deavere Smith), Zimmerman places LA theater within the broader context of the city’s unique cultural geography. He articulates how exemptions from union pay scales via the “Equity Waiver” partially liberated LA’s vibrant independent theater scene from market forces at a time when the rise of neoliberalism seemed to render such escape impossible, while also acknowledging how more recent years have applied yet greater economic and political pressures on artists attempting theatrical innovation in Los Angeles.

This chapter examines ways that different communities of ancient Greece accepted and integrated the goddess Peithō despite her ambiguous influence over social relations, economics, and politics. Borrowing principles from social psychology, the chapter reframes cult ritual and dramatic performance as means by which different poleis effectively enacted reactance reduction strategies for their citizenry. Collective practices like these reduced anxiety, shifted cognitions, and expanded tolerance for peithō’s enduring presence. The chapter identifies the foundation myths and worship rituals at Sicyon and Athens, along with performances of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, as social mechanisms that raised awareness of peithō’s threat while simultaneously foregrounding her unitive potential within the community. The chapter includes a survey of textual and material evidence for these cults and a close analysis of peithō’s double-binding effects on characters in the Oresteia, one of the most famous political dramas of the Athenian democracy.

Akin to Aristotle’s attempt in the Poetics to lay out the various conditions of artistically rendered human action that make for the most gripping treatments, Hegel develops a poetics of action that attempts to articulate what makes for the most beautiful artistic presentations of action. This chapter focuses on this “poetics of action,” and it is argued that the key to understanding Hegel’s aesthetic privileging of heroic action in his poetics lies in the peculiar ontology of the artwork itself: that is, it is argued that the decisive, transformative events that are the focus of scenes of heroic action in effect provide art with that express content that most readily fits with the artwork’s own deeper nature as such a transformative event in its own right. The chapter explores various of Hegel’s specific aesthetic judgments about dramatic settings, characters, narrative structure, and the role of ethics in art, in each case arguing that the basis of these judgments is oriented both in terms of the heroic and in terms of what enables the character of a transformative event to become most manifest.

This chapter takes up the question of whether the higher-order beauty of art is for Hegel best exemplified in the static, serene repose of classical sculpture or in the dramatic, developmental movement characteristic of the depiction of human action. Both paradigms are prevalent in Hegel’s lectures on art, and in the end the tension between them has not been fully addressed within Hegel’s lectures, nor has it been adequately addressed within existing scholarship. In addition to maintaining that the developmental paradigm fits better with the present book’s account of the ontology of the artwork as featuring the dramatic event of transformation into autonomy, the chapter also brings some textual sources to bear, and attempts to show as well that such a paradigm fits more naturally with Hegel’s claim that art is ultimately rooted in intuition and its direct, eventful encounters with the world.

Classical linguistics and racecraft have an intertwined history, in that Indo-European linguistics arose concurrently with scientific racism, and shares many of the same metaphors and conceptual frameworks. This chapter touches on this shared history, before exploring some aspects of the metalinguistics and sociolinguistics of race in the ancient world. In particular, the concept of ‘linguistic racism’ will be used to look at how ancient texts use lack of (shared) language to imply a lack of humanity, and how non-Greek speakers are compared to animals. It will also look at depictions of foreign-language speakers as the linguistic ‘other’, particularly in depictions of enslaved people.