Imagining Shakespeare's Original Audience, 1660-2000

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-viii

   PDF

2. Introduction: Those Nut-cracking Elizabethans

   • Bettina Boecker

   Pages 1-11

3. Shakespeare’s Elizabethan Audience in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-century Shakespeare Criticism

   • Bettina Boecker

   Pages 12-30

4. ‘No man of genius ever wrote for the mob’: Shakespeare’s Elizabethan Audience and Romantic Shakespeare Criticism

   • Bettina Boecker

   Pages 31-47

5. Enter the Groundlings

   • Bettina Boecker

   Pages 48-80

6. Childish and Primitive: Shakespeare’s Elizabethan Audience and the Turn-of-the-century Theatrical Avant-garde

   • Bettina Boecker

   Pages 81-98

7. The Rediscovery of the Judicious Few

   • Bettina Boecker

   Pages 99-117

8. Neo-Elizabethanism

   • Bettina Boecker

   Pages 118-136

9. Shakespeare’s Elizabethan Audience in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century

   • Bettina Boecker

   Pages 137-159

10. Back Matter

    Pages 160-210

    PDF

Comparatively little is known about Shakespeare's first audiences. This study argues that the Elizabethan audience is an essential part of Shakespeare as a site of cultural meaning, and that the way criticism thinks of early modern theatregoers is directly related to the way it thinks of, and uses, the Bard himself.

• Shakespeare
• Shakespeare reception
• Shakespeare criticism
• audience
• Romanticism
• theatre
• twentieth century
• William Shakespeare
• British and Irish Literature

• University of Munich, Germany

  Bettina Boecker

Bettina Boecker is Senior Lecturer at the University of Munich, Germany. She is also executive officer and research librarian at the Munich Shakespeare Library. She has published on a variety of early modern topics, but is particularly interested in the popular culture of the period and Shakespeare's afterlives.

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