Early modern audiences, readerships, and viewerships were not homogenous. Differences in status, education, language, wealth, and experience (to name only a few variables) could influence how a group of people, or a particular person, received and made sense of sermons, public proclamations, dramatic and musical performances, images, objects, and spaces. The ways in which each of these were framed and executed could have a serious impact on their relevance and effectiveness. The chapters in this volume explore the ways in which authors, poets, artists, preachers, theologians, playwrights, and performers took account of and encoded pluriform potential audiences, readers, and viewers in their works, and how these varied parties encountered and responded to these works. The contributors here investigate these complex interactions through a variety of critical and methodological lenses.

This book makes a significant contribution to recent scholarship on the ways in which women responded to the regulation of their behavior by focusing on representations of women speakers and their audiences in moments Smith identifies as "scenes of speech." This new approach, examining speech exchanges between a speaker and audience in which both anticipate, interact with, and respond to each other and each other's expectations, demonstrates that the prescriptive process involves a dynamic exchange in which each side plays a role in establishing and contesting the boundaries of acceptable speech for women. Drawing from a wide range of evidence, including pamphlets, diaries, illustrations, and plays, the book interprets the various and at times contradictory representations and reception of women’s speech that circulated in early modern England. Speech scenes examined within include wives' speech to their husbands in private, private speech between women, public speech before death, and the speech of witches. Looking at scenes of women’s speech from male and female authors, Smith argues that these early modern texts illustrate a means through which societal regulations were negotiated and modified. This book will appeal to those with an interest in early modern drama, including the playwrights Shakespeare, Cary, Webster, Fletcher, and Middleton, as well as readers of non-dramatic early modern literary texts. The volume is of particular use for scholars working in the areas of early modern literature and culture, women’s history, gender studies, and performance studies.

This guide provides the best practices and reference resources, both print and electronic, that can be used in conducting research on literature of the British Renaissance and Early Modern Period. This volume seeks to address specific research characteristics integral to studying the period, including a more inclusive canon and the predominance of Shakespeare.

Cover -- Half Title -- Titel Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1 "Unquiet all night": Curtain Lectures and a Wife's Speech to Her Husband -- 2 "Their whispers, one in another's ear": Imagining Private Speech Between Women -- 3 "I know thy thoughts": Witches Speak to Their Audiences -- 4 Regret, Reconsideration, and Reclamation: Audiences Witness Women's Death Speech -- Afterword -- Index

This essay collection builds on the latest research on the topic of theatre audiences in early modern England. In broad terms, the project answers the question, 'How do we define the relationships between performance and audience?'.

Conversational Exchanges in Early Modern England (1549–1640) presents an opportunity to understand how texts, performances, politics, and historical topics intersected and informed cultural productions during this period. These analyses of conversational exchanges across genres permit readers to grasp how conversation functioned as both a compositional methodology and an interpretive hermeneutic in early modern England. The essays gathered here adopt eclectic critical approaches from the perspectives of historicism, gender studies, print culture studies, performance studies, object-oriented ontologies, and the digital humanities to collectively argue that “conversation” is not only a site of reproductive intercourse, but one of metamorphic between-ness. As this book demonstrates, conversation extends what is conventionally thought of as “source study” by treating multiple sources as active interlocutors. These essays discuss how writers of this period push the boundaries of conventional, diachronic imitation by engaging with ancient and/or contemporary sources to lend a sense of immediacy to the subject at hand. Each contribution examines the varying degrees to which “conversation” carries within itself a sense of internal crisis, a turning back and forth, a form of sexual and textual intercourse that does not simply reproduce, but metamorphoses with each interaction.

Through short, provocative readings of unfamiliar plays, this book provides the first ever history of the canon of Renaissance drama.