Full Description
Early modern dramatists entertained audiences by staging experiential and experimental knowledge, especially consequential forms of coming to or arriving at knowledge. The contributors to this collection explore the ways in which the culture's fascination with forms of knowledge creation - scientific, experiential, religious - shaped early modern drama. Experiential and Experimental Knowledge on the Early Modern English Stage addresses these issues from phenomenological, political and ethical perspectives and in terms of histories of science, cognitive and affective studies, and discourses of the body. Across the volume, the contributors articulate how the early modern stage served as a site where knowledge was not merely performed but produced and interrogated, imagined and transformed.
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Series Editors' Preface
Introduction: Experimenting with Experience: Virtual Knowledge on the Early Modern English Stage
Pavneet Aulakh, James Kearney and Adam Rzepka
Part I. Experiential Knowledge
1. Experiencing Shakespeare's Experiences
Bruce R. Smith
2. Sad Experience: Jaques, Polonius, Gloucester
Adam Rzepka
Part II. Experimental Forms and Frames
3. Theatre as Portal: A Shakespearean Thought Experiment
Wendy Beth Hyman
4. Fictional Hypothesis, Lived Experience and Re-worlding in The Tempest
Jane Hwang Degenhardt
5. Amazement in The Tempest
Jenny C. Mann
Part III. Embodied Knowledge
6. Knowing Instincts in Shakespeare's Macbeth
Katherine Walker
7. Laughing Matters: Violence, Witness and Experiential Knowledge in The Massacre at Paris
Katie Adkison
Part IV. Experiential and Experimental Philosophy
8. Theatrical Experiments and Experiential Protestants: Shakespearean Iconoclasm in Love's Labors Lost
Jennifer Waldron
9. 'Boys that play with watry Bubbles': Innocence and Experience at the Infancy of Science
Elizabeth L. Swann
10. Through 'the woods of experience': Minding the Gaps in the Time of Experiment
Pavneet Aulakh
Afterword
Julia Reinhard Lupton
Notes on Contributors
Bibliography
Index



