Materiality and Cognition on the Renaissance Stage
Shakespeare and his contemporaries tend to be read on the page, isolated from their life as plays to be performed, or seen in modern productions, which push the plays in excitingly innovative directions. What is often lost in our reading, watching and study of these dramatists today, however, are the performance practices of the 16th and 17th century, and the way dramatists’ approach to set design, scripts, rehearsal and props differ in often radical and unsettling ways from our own. Where actors acting in Shakespeare plays now have the full play to read and absorb before a performance, actors in Shakespeare’s company had access only to the script for their own part, being kept in the dark about crucial elements of plot until the moment of the performance in order to create a sense of genuine discovery for audiences. Moreover, the only ‘overview’ of the play that mattered was the ‘platt’ or ‘plot’, which meant less the chronology of events or story, as it means for us today, and more the physical sheet of paper which was pasted backstage and gave details of entrances and exits for both props and players to ensure the smooth running of the performance. The masterclass will demonstrate how knowing about these seemingly strange historical practices is less about performing a dry, antiquarian exercise in reconstructing the conditions of the Renaissance stage, but about revealing how these practices were powerful catalysts for creating fresh interactions between actors and characters and for blurring together reality and artifice in the plays. It will show how attention to these elements can reveal greater depth in dramatists like Shakespeare, and the lesser known Thomas Dekker and Thomas Heywood, but also how modern theoretical writers, like the psychologist J J Gibson and the literary historian Evelyn Tribble, can help us see how far ahead of their time these writers were in their understanding of the boundary between mind and world. This masterclass will therefore look at the material remnants of the Renaissance stage, from plots to script fragments, alongside theoretical accounts of stagecraft and acting, in order to show how for these dramatists the material and the cognitive, the mundane and the theoretical, were part of the same continuum.
Host: Jacob graduated with a Double First in English from Cambridge in 2018, achieving a Starred First and top of the year at Part I. He was awarded the Rylands prize for best overall performance at Part I, and in Finals, was ranked 8th in the year and won the Bokhari Prize for a top first by Emmanuel College. This earned him a place as a Herchel Smith Fellow at Harvard University, funded by a scholarship from Emmanuel.
Suitability: Minds Underground™’s online World Literature & History masterclasses are aimed at, but not restricted to, students looking to study degrees in: English, History, English and History, Social Science courses.
Duration: Suggested 1-2 hour sessions dependent on the level of detail desired.
