Shakespeare, Popularity and the Public Sphere

Download Shakespeare, Popularity and the Public Sphere PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1316738000
Total Pages : 219 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (167 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Shakespeare, Popularity and the Public Sphere by : Jeffrey S. Doty

Download or read book Shakespeare, Popularity and the Public Sphere written by Jeffrey S. Doty and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-16 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In late Elizabethan England, political appeals to the people were considered dangerously democratic, even seditious: the commons were supposed to have neither political voice nor will. Yet such appeals happened so often that the regime coined the word 'popularity' to condemn the pursuit of popular favor. Jeffrey S. Doty argues that in plays from Richard II to Coriolanus, Shakespeare made the tactics of popularity - and the wider public they addressed - vital aspects of politics. Shakespeare figured the public not as an extension of the royal court, but rather as a separate entity that, like the Globe's spectators who surrounded the fictional princes on its thrust stage, subjected their rulers to relentless scrutiny. For ordinary playgoers, Shakespeare's plays offered good practice for understanding the means and ends of popularity - and they continue to provide insight to the public relations strategies that have come to define modern political culture.

Shakespeare, Popularity and the Public Sphere

Download Shakespeare, Popularity and the Public Sphere PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107163374
Total Pages : 219 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (71 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Shakespeare, Popularity and the Public Sphere by : Jeffrey S. Doty

Download or read book Shakespeare, Popularity and the Public Sphere written by Jeffrey S. Doty and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-16 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Machine generated contents note: 1. Introduction ; 2. Richard II and the early modern public sphere ; 3. Henry IV, the theater, and the popular appetite ; 4. Political interpretation in Julius Caesar ; 5. Measure for Measure and the problem of popularity ; 6. Coriolanus the popular man ; Conclusion

Shakespeare, Popularity and the Public Sphere: Introduction; 2. Richard II and the early modern public sphere; 3. Henry IV, the theater, and the popular appetite; 4. Political interpretation in Julius Caesar; 5. Measure for Measure and the problem of popularity; 6. Coriolanus the popular man; Conclusion

Download Shakespeare, Popularity and the Public Sphere: Introduction; 2. Richard II and the early modern public sphere; 3. Henry IV, the theater, and the popular appetite; 4. Political interpretation in Julius Caesar; 5. Measure for Measure and the problem of popularity; 6. Coriolanus the popular man; Conclusion PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781316753446
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (534 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Shakespeare, Popularity and the Public Sphere: Introduction; 2. Richard II and the early modern public sphere; 3. Henry IV, the theater, and the popular appetite; 4. Political interpretation in Julius Caesar; 5. Measure for Measure and the problem of popularity; 6. Coriolanus the popular man; Conclusion by : Jeffrey S. Doty

Download or read book Shakespeare, Popularity and the Public Sphere: Introduction; 2. Richard II and the early modern public sphere; 3. Henry IV, the theater, and the popular appetite; 4. Political interpretation in Julius Caesar; 5. Measure for Measure and the problem of popularity; 6. Coriolanus the popular man; Conclusion written by Jeffrey S. Doty and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In late Elizabethan England, political appeals to the people were considered dangerously democratic, even seditious: the commons were supposed to have neither political voice nor will. Yet such appeals happened so often that the regime coined the word 'popularity' to condemn the pursuit of popular favour. Jeffrey S. Doty argues that in plays from Richard II to Coriolanus, Shakespeare made the tactics of popularity - and the wider public they addressed - vital aspects of politics. Shakespeare figured the public not as an extension of the royal court, but rather as a separate entity that, like the Globe's spectators who surrounded the fictional princes on its thrust stage, subjected their rulers to relentless scrutiny. For ordinary playgoers, Shakespeare's plays offered good practice for understanding the means and ends of popularity - and they continue to provide insight to the public relations strategies that have come to define modern political culture"--

Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners

Download Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192529927
Total Pages : 415 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (925 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners by : Chris Fitter

Download or read book Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners written by Chris Fitter and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-18 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners is a highly original contribution to our understanding of Shakespeare's plays. It breaks important new ground in introducing readers, lay and scholarly alike, to the existence and character of the political culture of the mass of ordinary commoners in Shakespeare's England, as revealed by the recent findings of 'the new social history'. The volume thereby helps to challenge the traditional myths of a non-political commons and a culture of obedience. It also brings together leading Shakespeareans, who digest recent social history, with eminent early modern social historians, who turn their focus on Shakespeare. This genuinely cross-disciplinary approach generates fresh readings of over ten of Shakespeare's plays and locates the impress on Shakespearean drama of popular political thought and pressure in this period of perceived crisis. The volume is unique in engaging and digesting the dramatic importance of the discoveries of the new social history, thereby resituating and revaluing Shakespeare within the social depth of politics.

Shakespeare's Reading Audiences

Download Shakespeare's Reading Audiences PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108121373
Total Pages : 229 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (81 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Shakespeare's Reading Audiences by : Cyndia Susan Clegg

Download or read book Shakespeare's Reading Audiences written by Cyndia Susan Clegg and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-26 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study grows out of the intersection of two realms of scholarly investigation - the emerging public sphere in early modern England and the history of the book. Shakespeare's Reading Audiences examines the ways in which different communities - humanist, legal, religious and political - would have interpreted Shakespeare's plays and poems, whether printed or performed. Cyndia Susan Clegg begins by analysing elite reading clusters associated with the Court, the universities, and the Inns of Court and how their interpretation of Shakespeare's Sonnets and Henry V arose from their reading of Italian humanists. She concludes by examining how widely held public knowledge about English history both affected Richard II's reception and how such knowledge was appropriated by the State. She also considers The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry V, and Othello from the point of view of audience members conversant in popular English legal writing and Macbeth from the perspective of popular English Calvinism.

Aemilia Lanyer as Shakespeare’s Co-Author

Download Aemilia Lanyer as Shakespeare’s Co-Author PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000567214
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (5 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Aemilia Lanyer as Shakespeare’s Co-Author by : Mark Bradbeer

Download or read book Aemilia Lanyer as Shakespeare’s Co-Author written by Mark Bradbeer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-31 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents original material which indicates that Aemilia Lanyer – female writer, feminist, and Shakespeare contemporary – is Shakespeare’s hidden and arguably most significant co-author. Once dismissed as the mere paramour of Shakespeare’s patron, Lord Hunsdon, she is demonstrated to be a most articulate forerunner of #MeToo fury. Building on previous research into the authorship of Shakespeare’s works, Bradbeer offers evidence in the form of three case studies which signal Aemilia’s collaboration with Shakespeare. The first case study matches the works of "George Wilkins" – who is currently credited as the co-author of the feminist Shakespeare play Pericles (1608) – with Aemilia Lanyer’s writing style, education, feminism and knowledge of Lord Hunsdon’s secret sexual life. The second case-study recognizes Titus Andronicus (1594), a play containing the characters Aemilius and Bassianus, to be a revision of the suppressed play Titus and Vespasian (1592), as authored by the unmarried pregnant Aemilia Bassano, as she then was. Lastly, it is argued that Shakespeare’s clowns, Bottom, Launce, Malvolio, Dromio, Dogberry, Jaques, and Moth, arise in her deeply personal war with the misogynist Thomas Nashe. Each case study reveals new aspects of Lanyer’s feminist activism and involvement in Shakespeare’s work, and allows for a deeper analysis and appreciation of the plays. This research will prove provocative to students and scholars of Shakespeare studies, English literature, literary history, and gender studies.

Publicity and the Early Modern Stage

Download Publicity and the Early Modern Stage PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030523322
Total Pages : 299 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (35 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Publicity and the Early Modern Stage by : Allison K. Deutermann

Download or read book Publicity and the Early Modern Stage written by Allison K. Deutermann and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-05-07 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What did publicity look like before the eighteenth century? What were its uses and effects, and around whom was it organized? The essays in this collection ask these questions of early modern London. Together, they argue that commercial theater was a vital engine in celebrity’s production. The men and women associated with playing—not just actors and authors, but playgoers, characters, and the extraordinary local figures adjunct to playhouse productions—introduced new ways of thinking about the function and meaning of fame in the period; about the networks of communication through which it spread; and about theatrical publics. Drawing on the insights of Habermasean public sphere theory and on the interdisciplinary field of celebrity studies, Publicity and the Early Modern Stage introduces a new and comprehensive look at early modern theories and experiences of publicity.

Thomas Middleton and the Plural Politics of Jacobean Drama

Download Thomas Middleton and the Plural Politics of Jacobean Drama PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 1501513761
Total Pages : 236 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (15 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Thomas Middleton and the Plural Politics of Jacobean Drama by : Mark Kaethler

Download or read book Thomas Middleton and the Plural Politics of Jacobean Drama written by Mark Kaethler and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-05-10 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Middleton and the Plural Politics of Jacobean Drama represents the first sustained study of Middleton’s dramatic works as responses to James I’s governance. Through examining Middleton’s poiesis in relation to the political theology of Jacobean London, Kaethler explores early forms of free speech, namely parrhēsia, and rhetorical devices, such as irony and allegory, to elucidate the ways in which Middleton’s plural art exposes the limitations of the monarch’s sovereign image. By drawing upon earlier forms of dramatic intervention, James’s writings, and popular literature that blossomed during the Jacobean period, including news pamphlets, the book surveys a selection of Middleton’s writings, ranging from his first extant play The Phoenix (1604) to his scandalous finale A Game at Chess (1624). In the course of this investigation, the author identifies that although Middleton’s drama spurs political awareness and questions authority, it nevertheless simultaneously promotes alternative structures of power, which manifest as misogyny and white supremacy.

Shakespeare's Sceptered Isle

Download Shakespeare's Sceptered Isle PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : McFarland
ISBN 13 : 1476685827
Total Pages : 261 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (766 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Shakespeare's Sceptered Isle by : Brian Carroll

Download or read book Shakespeare's Sceptered Isle written by Brian Carroll and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2022-05-18 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work searches Shakespeare's history and Roman plays to find the raw materials of English national consciousness and identity. The messages of Shakespeare's history plays are not principally the plots or "facts" of the dramas but the attitudes and imaginings they elicited in audiences. Reading Shakespeare through the lens of national identity is a study almost as old as the plays themselves, and many scholars have found various articulations of nationhood in Shakespeare's plays. This book argues that Shakespeare's histories furnished modern England with a curriculum for constructing a national identity, a confidence of language and culture, and a powerful new medium through which to communicate and express this negotiated identity. Highlighting the application of semiotics, it studies the playwright's use of symbols, metonymy, symbolic codes, and metaphor. By examining what Shakespeare and playgoers remembered and forgot, as well as the ways ideas were framed, this book explores how a national identity was crafted, contested, and circulated.

Political and religious practice in the early modern British world

Download Political and religious practice in the early modern British world PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 1526151340
Total Pages : 261 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (261 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Political and religious practice in the early modern British world by : William J. Bulman

Download or read book Political and religious practice in the early modern British world written by William J. Bulman and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together cutting-edge research by some of the most innovative scholars of early modern Britain. Inspired in part by recent studies of the early modern ‘public sphere’, the twelve chapters collected here reveal an array of political and religious practices that can serve as a foundation for new narratives of the period. The practices considered range from deliberation and inscription to publication and profanity. The narratives under construction range from secularisation to the rise of majority rule. Many of the authors also examine ways British developments were affected by and in turn influenced the world outside of Britain. These chapter will be essential reading for students of early modern Britain, early modern Europe and the Atlantic World. They will also appeal to those interested in the religious and political history of other regions and periods.

Democracy and Anti-Democracy in Early Modern England 1603–1689

Download Democracy and Anti-Democracy in Early Modern England 1603–1689 PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 900440662X
Total Pages : 317 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (44 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Democracy and Anti-Democracy in Early Modern England 1603–1689 by : Cesare Cuttica

Download or read book Democracy and Anti-Democracy in Early Modern England 1603–1689 written by Cesare Cuttica and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-07-18 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Listen to the podcast here. This cross-disciplinary collection of essays examines – for the first time and in detail – the variegated notions of democracy put forward in seventeenth-century England. It thus shows that democracy was widely explored and debated at the time; that anti-democratic currents and themes have a long history; that the seventeenth century is the first period in English history where we nonetheless find positive views of democracy; and that whether early-modern writers criticised or advocated it, these discussions were important for the subsequent development of the concept and practice ‘democracy’. By offering a new historical account of such development, the book provides an innovative exploration of an important but overlooked topic whose relevance is all the more considerable in today’s political debates, civic conversation, academic arguments and media talk. Contributors include Camilla Boisen, Alan Cromartie, Cesare Cuttica, Hannah Dawson, Martin Dzelzainis, Rachel Foxley, Matthew Growhoski, Rachel Hammersley, Peter Lake, Gaby Mahlberg, Markku Peltonen, Edward Vallance, and John West.

Shakespeare among the Moderns

Download Shakespeare among the Moderns PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501725483
Total Pages : 306 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Shakespeare among the Moderns by : Richard L. Halpern

Download or read book Shakespeare among the Moderns written by Richard L. Halpern and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-05 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modernist writers, critics, and artists sparked a fresh and distinctive interpretation of Shakespeare's plays which has proved remarkably tenacious, as Richard Halpern explains in this lively and provocative book. The preoccupations of such high modernists as T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and James Joyce set the tone for the critical reception of Shakespeare in the twentieth century. Halpern contends their habits of thought continue to dominate postmodern schools of criticism that claim to have broken with the modernist legacy.Halpern addresses such topics as imperialism and modernism's cult of the primitive, the rise of mass culture, modernist anti-semitism, and the aesthetic of the machine. His discussion considers figures as diverse as Orson Welles and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Shakespeare critics including Northrop Frye, Cleanth Brooks, Stephen Greenblatt, and Stanley Cavell. Shakespeare's works have been subjected to a continuing process of historical reinterpretation in which every new era has imposed its own cultural and ideological presuppositions on the plays. The most enduring contribution of modernism, Halpern suggests, has been the juxtaposition of an awareness of historical distance and a mapping of Shakespeare's plays onto the present. Using modernist themes and approaches, he constructs new readings of four Shakespeare plays.

Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling

Download Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812295188
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (122 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling by : Musa Gurnis

Download or read book Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling written by Musa Gurnis and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2018-07-31 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling explores the mutually generative relationship between post-Reformation religious life and London's commercial theaters. It explores the dynamic exchange between the imaginatively transformative capacities of shared theatrical experience, with the particular ideological baggage that individual playgoers bring into the theater. While early modern English drama was shaped by the polyvocal, confessional scene in which it was embedded, Musa Gurnis contends that theater does not simply reflect culture but shapes it. According to Gurnis, shared theatrical experience allowed mixed-faith audiences to vicariously occupy alternative emotional and cognitive perspectives across the confessional spectrum. In looking at individual plays, such as Thomas Middleton's A Game of Chess and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, Gurnis shows how theatrical process can restructure playgoers' experiences of confessional material and interrupt dominant habits of religious thought. She refutes any assumption that audiences consisted of conforming Church of England Protestants by tracking the complex and changing religious lives of seventy known playgoers. Arguing against work that seeks to draw fixed lines of religious affiliation around individual playwrights or companies, she highlights the common practice of cross-confessional collaboration among playhouse colleagues. Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling demonstrates how post-Reformation representational practices actively reshaped the ways ideologically diverse Londoners accessed the mixture of religious life across the spectrum of beliefs.

New World Drama

Download New World Drama PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822395738
Total Pages : 392 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (223 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis New World Drama by : Elizabeth Maddock Dillon

Download or read book New World Drama written by Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-01 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In New World Drama, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon turns to the riotous scene of theatre in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world to explore the creation of new publics. Moving from England to the Caribbean to the early United States, she traces the theatrical emergence of a collective body in the colonized New World—one that included indigenous peoples, diasporic Africans, and diasporic Europeans. In the raucous space of the theatre, the contradictions of colonialism loomed large. Foremost among these was the central paradox of modernity: the coexistence of a massive slave economy and a nascent politics of freedom. Audiences in London eagerly watched the royal slave, Oroonoko, tortured on stage, while audiences in Charleston and Kingston were forbidden from watching the same scene. Audiences in Kingston and New York City exuberantly participated in the slaying of Richard III on stage, enacting the rise of the "people," and Native American leaders were enjoined to watch actors in blackface "jump Jim Crow." Dillon argues that the theater served as a "performative commons," staging debates over representation in a political world based on popular sovereignty. Her book is a capacious account of performance, aesthetics, and modernity in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.

Hamlet's Moment

Download Hamlet's Moment PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 019106324X
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (91 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Hamlet's Moment by : András Kiséry

Download or read book Hamlet's Moment written by András Kiséry and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-28 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hamlet's Moment identifies a turning point in the history of English drama and early modern political culture: the moment when the business of politics became a matter of dramatic representation. Drama turned from open, military conflict to diplomacy and court policy, from the public contestation of power to the technologies of government. Tragedies of state turned into tragedies of state servants, inviting the public to consider politics as a profession-to imagine what it meant to have a political career. By staging intelligence derived from diplomatic sources, and by inflecting the action and discourse of their plays with a Machiavellian style of political analysis, playwrights such as Shakespeare, Jonson, Chapman, and Marston transformed political knowledge into a more broadly useful type of cultural capital, something even people without political agency could deploy in conversation and use in claiming social distinction. In Hamlet's moment, the public stage created the political competence that enabled the rise of the modern public sphere.

The Elizabethan Top Ten

Download The Elizabethan Top Ten PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317034457
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (17 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Elizabethan Top Ten by : Emma Smith

Download or read book The Elizabethan Top Ten written by Emma Smith and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-23 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engaging with histories of the book and of reading, as well as with studies of material culture, this volume explores ’popularity’ in early modern English writings. Is ’popular’ best described as a theoretical or an empirical category in this period? How can we account for the gap between modern canonicity and early modern print popularity? How might we weight the evidence of popularity from citations, serial editions, print runs, reworkings, or extant copies? Is something that sells a lot always popular, even where the readership for print is only a small proportion of the population, or does popular need to carry something of its etymological sense of the public, the people? Four initial chapters sketch out the conceptual and evidential issues, while the second part of the book consists of ten short chapters-a ’hit parade’- in which eminent scholars take a genre or a single exemplar - play, romance, sermon, or almanac, among other categories-as a means to articulate more general issues. Throughout, the aim is to unpack and interrogate assumptions about the popular, and to decentre canonical narratives about, for example, the sermons of Donne or Andrewes over Smith, or the plays of Shakespeare over Mucedorus. Revisiting Elizabethan literary culture through the lenses of popularity, this collection allows us to view the subject from an unfamiliar angle-in which almanacs are more popular than sonnets and proclamations more numerous than plays, and in which authors familiar to us are displaced by names now often forgotten.

The Pursuit of Style in Early Modern Drama

Download The Pursuit of Style in Early Modern Drama PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1009050788
Total Pages : 271 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (9 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Pursuit of Style in Early Modern Drama by : Matthew Hunter

Download or read book The Pursuit of Style in Early Modern Drama written by Matthew Hunter and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-25 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pursuit of Style in Early Modern Drama examines how early modern plays celebrated the power of different styles of talk to create dynamic forms of public address. Across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, London expanded into an uncomfortably public city where everyone was a stranger to everyone else. The relentless anonymity of urban life spurred dreams of its opposite: of being a somebody rather than a nobody, of being the object of public attention rather than its subject. Drama gave life to this fantasy. Presented by strangers and to strangers, early modern plays codified different styles of talk as different forms of public sociability. Then, as now, to speak of style was to speak of a fantasy of public address. Offering fresh insight for scholars of literature and drama, Matthew Hunter reveals how this fantasy – which still holds us in its thrall – played out on the early modern stage.