This Distracted Globe

This Element attends to attention drawn away. That the Globe is a 'distracted' space is a sentiment common to both Hamlet's original audience and attendees at the reconstructed theatre on London's Bankside. But what role does distraction play in this modern performance space? What do attitudes to 'distraction' reveal about how this theatre space asks and invites us to pay attention? Drawing on scholarly research, artist experience, and audience behaviour, This Distracted Globe considers the disruptive, affective, phenomenological, and generative potential of distraction in contemporary performance at the Globe.

Worldmaking takes many forms in early modern literature and thus challenges any single interpretive approach. The essays in this collection investigate the material stuff of the world in Spenser, Cary, and Marlowe; the sociable bonds of authorship, sexuality, and sovereignty in Shakespeare and others; and the universal status of spirit, gender, and empire in the worlds of Vaughan, Donne, and the dastan (tale) of Chouboli, a Rajasthani princess. Together, these essays make the case that to address what it takes to make a world in the early modern period requires the kinds of thinking exemplified by theory.

"These essays investigate the materiality of the world in Spenser, Cary and Marlowe; its sociability, sexuality and sovereignty in Shakespeare; and the universality of spirit, gender and empire in Vaughan, Donne and the dastan (tale) of Chouboli, a Rastanjani princess"--

A debate about the relationship between playgoing and the cultural life of Shakespeare's England.

A very funny completion to Nick Warburton's trilogy of the Drama Club's production of Hamlet (seen on stage in Don't Blame it on the Boots and backstage in Easy Stages) which progresses to the after-show party Meticulous stage-manager Gerry, in charge of the refreshments and music, marshals poor Patsy into artistically arranging bridge rolls, to the accompaniment of Peer Gynt