Results by title

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.  
 

Examining playhouses of the super-rich to understand how architecture contributed to the construction of elite identity and modern childhood

Playhouses and Privilege explores children’s playhouses built on British and American estates between the 1850s and the mid-1930s. Different from the prefabricated buildings that later populated suburban backyards, these playhouses were often fully functional cottages designed by well-known architects for British royalty, American industrialists, and Hollywood stars. As Abigail A. Van Slyck shows, these buildings were more than extravagant spaces to cultivate children’s imaginations and fantasy lives.

Reviewing a rich archive that includes extant buildings, site plans, family photographs, baby books, and intimate household correspondence, Van Slyck demonstrates that these structures were tools of social reproduction shaped by elite parents’ attitudes toward child-rearing, education, and class privilege. Recognizing playhouses as stages for the purposeful performance of upper-class identity, she illuminates their importance in influencing children to internalize gendered codes of conduct as they enacted rituals of hospitality and learned how to supervise servants.

From Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s Swiss Cottage, built on their Osborne estate in 1853, to the children’s cottage constructed on the grounds of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Newport mansion in 1886, and from the miniature bungalow commissioned in 1926 for the Dodge Brothers Motor Company heiress to the corporate-sponsored glass-block playhouse given to Shirley Temple in 1936, Van Slyck surveys a variety of playhouses and their milieus to trace the evolution of elite childhood and the broader social practices of wealth. Playhouses and Privilege makes clear that, far from being frivolous, playhouses were carefully planned architectural manifestations of adult concerns, integral to the reproduction of class privilege.