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Coda

Frame

from Part III - Theater History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2023

Lauren Robertson
Affiliation:
Columbia University, New York
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Summary

The coda considers the effect of the eighteen-year closure during the Interregnum on the commercial theater’s phenomenology of uncertainty. When Thomas Killigrew and William Davenant were granted patents to form theater companies by Charles II in 1660, they did not return to the practices of the earlier theatrical era, instead outfitting playhouses with the perspective sets and proscenium frames of court and Continental performance. The coda demonstrates that heroic drama, the first major genre to emerge under these new performance conditions, favored resolution rather than ambiguity. In John Dryden’s vision of the new genre, majestic spectacles that aimed to control spectators’ imaginations replaced the ambivalent metatheatricality of the earlier theater. The Restoration theater, the coda suggests, ultimately rejected the uncertainty that had defined theatrical experience from the late sixteenth to mid-seventeenth century.

Type
Chapter
Information
Entertaining Uncertainty in the Early Modern Theater
Stage Spectacle and Audience Response
, pp. 218 - 225
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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  • Coda
  • Lauren Robertson, Columbia University, New York
  • Book: Entertaining Uncertainty in the Early Modern Theater
  • Online publication: 02 February 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009225137.010
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  • Coda
  • Lauren Robertson, Columbia University, New York
  • Book: Entertaining Uncertainty in the Early Modern Theater
  • Online publication: 02 February 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009225137.010
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Coda
  • Lauren Robertson, Columbia University, New York
  • Book: Entertaining Uncertainty in the Early Modern Theater
  • Online publication: 02 February 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009225137.010
Available formats
×