Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama


This book provides a detailed and comprehensive survey of the diverse, formal conventions of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Focusing on the relationship between the repertory system and the conventions and content of the plays, Jeremy Lopez proposes that understanding the potential for theatrical failure (the way playwrights anticipated it and audiences responded to it) is crucial for understanding the way in which the drama succeeded on the stage.

 Reviews:

"...an energetic discussion...provides an always interesting argument about what Elizabethan and Jacobean drama "assumes of its audience and how its audience experiences it and responds to it"." Susan Bennett, University of Calgary, Theatre Journal

"Lopez gives us illuminating new readings of a number of Shakespearian and other plays. Highly recommended." Bibliotheque d'humanisme et Renaissance

"Fascinating." Studies in English Literature

"I came away enriched by having been taken through a well-conceived, carefully constructed, and clear presentation." Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England Alan Dessen

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