Book contents
- Shakespeare, Spectatorship and the Technologies of Performance
- Shakespeare, Spectatorship and the Technologies of Performance
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Acknowledgements
- How to Read This Book
- Introduction
- Part I Candlelight and Architecture at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
- Chapter 1 Dominic Dromgoole’s The Changeling (2015): Social Division and Anamorphic Vision
- Chapter 2 Dominic Dromgoole’s The Tempest (2016): Labour, Technology and the Gender of Theatrical Magic
- Part II Digital Technologies and Early Modern Drama at the National Theatre and the RSC
- Part III ‘Invisible’ Technology and ‘Liveness’ in Digital Theatre Broadcasting
- Concluding Most Obscenely: Offstage Technophelias
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 1 - Dominic Dromgoole’s The Changeling (2015): Social Division and Anamorphic Vision
from Part I - Candlelight and Architecture at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 April 2020
- Shakespeare, Spectatorship and the Technologies of Performance
- Shakespeare, Spectatorship and the Technologies of Performance
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Acknowledgements
- How to Read This Book
- Introduction
- Part I Candlelight and Architecture at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
- Chapter 1 Dominic Dromgoole’s The Changeling (2015): Social Division and Anamorphic Vision
- Chapter 2 Dominic Dromgoole’s The Tempest (2016): Labour, Technology and the Gender of Theatrical Magic
- Part II Digital Technologies and Early Modern Drama at the National Theatre and the RSC
- Part III ‘Invisible’ Technology and ‘Liveness’ in Digital Theatre Broadcasting
- Concluding Most Obscenely: Offstage Technophelias
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
When The Changeling was first performed by the Lady Elizabeth’s Men at the Phoenix playhouse in 1622, the building’s history of class-conflict and bloodsports is likely to have played an important role in conditioning the audience’s responses to Middleton and Rowley’s tragedy. This, too, was an almost brand-new playhouse, rebuilt as The Phoenix after its precursor, The Cockpit, was vandalised by apprentices on Shrove Tuesday 1617 to vent their frustration at the move of the Queen’s Men from the popular Red Bull open-air playhouse into the much smaller and forbiddingly pricey repurposed indoor Cockpit. There, an elite audience now watched plays rather than the cock-fights which had also been also a popular form of entertainment for apprentices. Against the backdrop of this history of social exclusion and destructive rage at the elite, De Flores’ frustration at the mismatch between his sense of entitlement as someone who ‘tumbled into th’world a gentleman’ and the poverty that has ‘thrust [him] out to servitude’ brought the grievances of those excluded from the playhouse on to its stage (2.1.48–9). Beatrice-Joanna’s vicious rebuke ‘Think but upon the distance that creation / Set’twixt your blood and mine, and keep thee there’ conflates social superiority with sexual rejection (3.4.130–2), setting her up as the play’s gatekeeper and sexually desirable gateway to the social elite.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020