ABOUT THIS BOOK

A new account of playgoing in Elizabethan England, in which audiences participated as much as performers.

What if going to a play in Elizabethan England was more like attending a football match than a Broadway show—or playing in one? In Common Understandings, Poetic Confusion, William N. West proposes a new account of the kind of participatory entertainment expected by the actors and the audience during the careers of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. West finds surprising descriptions of these theatrical experiences in the figurative language of early modern players and playgoers—including understanding, confusion, occupation, eating, and fighting. Such words and ways of speaking are still in use today, but their earlier meanings, like that of theater itself, are subtly, importantly different from our own. Playing was not confined to the actors on the stage but filled the playhouse, embracing audiences and performers in collaborative experiences that did not belong to any one alone but to the assembled, various crowd. What emerged in playing was a kind of thinking and feeling distributed across persons and times that were otherwise distinct. Thrown apples, smashed bottles of beer, and lumbering bears—these and more gave verbal shape to the physical interactions between players and playgoers, creating circuits of exchange, production, and consumption.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

William N. West is professor of English, comparative literary studies, and classics at Northwestern University. He is the author of As If: Essays in “As You Like It” and Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe. He also edits the journal Renaissance Drama.

REVIEWS

“This exhilarating book reveals, in vivid detail, what early modern theater was like as an experience. By investigating not playing itself, but metaphors about it, West shows how theater was viewed at the time—as a place of fear or wonder, described in terms of chaos, fighting, being in a siege, eating, dancing. Common Understandings, Poetic Confusion enables us to understand, as never before, the edginess, thrill, and danger of plays and performance in the time of Shakespeare.”

— Tiffany Stern, author of Documents of Performance in Early Modern England

“A dazzling account of how early modern playgoers experienced theater in the decades between 1575 and 1610, Common Understandings, Poetic Confusion links theatrical knowing and feeling to shared corporeal events and bodily sensations. Theoretically rich and brimming with telling examples, West’s book shows how the habitus of early modern playgoing was created by collective acts as simple as eating, drinking, and remembering within the bounded space of the theater.”

— Jean E. Howard, Columbia University

"West’s learned, innovative study offers a cultural anthropology of the Elizabethan stage—of the language in play texts and contemporaneous discussions of theater. West does not provide extended readings of individual plays, though he comments briefly on many. Rather, he focuses on the intertwining of confusions and conclusions—a favorite rhyme of the playwrights—in a theater where 'performances' embodied 'provocations toward meaning rather than representations of a meaning.' . . . Summing Up: Highly recommended."

— Choice

"West shows that playing, players, and playgoers were likened to a great many things, and it is in detailing these surprising affinities that he constructs a richly revealing account of the commercial theater as a social and embodied practice through the last quarter of the
sixteenth century . . . Ingenious in its methodology and invaluable in its contribution, Common Understandings is a provocation to scholars of the early modern English theater and beyond: the book invites us not only to reconsider what counts as evidence of playing, but to recast our familiar stories about it in new light."

— Modern Philology

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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