Dissertation: "Acts of Imagination: Curating the Early Elizabethan Repertories, 1582–1594"

Certified Spring 2016

Due in part to a background in classical music, I am generally interested in ensembles and the performance event. The thing I find most interesting about the English theatre industry before William Shakespeare is how playgoers decided which play to attend on a given afternoon. This had a lot to do with how playing companies managed audience expectations through the repertory system, cultivating distinctive house styles rooted in rapid technical innovation and the ability to respond to their cultural moment.

Focusing on the 1580s, the period with the greatest number of companies at work in early modern England, "Acts of Imagination" demonstrates the different ways in which these house styles were marked. Some of the stories that get uncovered include the strategy of coordinating blocking and trumpet calls to underscore political factionalism in the Lord Pembroke's plays, as well as the cosmetic techniques to light bodies on fire as part of the vision of Mediterranean diplomacy represented by the Lord Strange's company. Encompassing studies of four major troupes, each chapter underscores the fact that it was repetition, revision, and collaboration rather than novelty that produced financial success in this theatrical marketplace.

Attending to the collective process that was the Elizabethan theatre industry, my dissertation shows the ways in which dramaturgical innovation and literary production were mutually constitutive drivers, as well as how the Elizabethan theatre industry became the engine from which an oeuvre like Shakespeare's and the cult of authorship evolved.

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