Embodied Communication and the Early Modern Playhouse
One of the most popular Elizabethan performers was Richard Tarlton of the Queen’s Men, a clown with an extraordinary talent for improvisation who was also an expert fencer, dancer, and musician. He was culturally influential. His antics are repeated and lauded in the popular literature of his day; he was the mentor of the Shakespearean clown, Robert Armin; and he is the probable source of inspiration behind Shakespeare’s Yorick in Hamlet. Taking the versatility and enduring legacy of Tarlton’s performance skills as its starting point, this course will examine the non-verbal ways in which meaning was produced by all early modern players for first audiences of the plays of Shakespeare and contemporaries.
The course proposes that the skills of improvisation, physical co-ordination, timing, balance, and ‘reading’ people were integral to the dramatic success of players and the storytelling of the playhouse stage. We will explore historical sources that offer insight into rehearsal practices; actors’ physical conditions; the energy, feel, and sound of a play in performance; and the competence of the audience to ‘read’ the various kinds of embodied communication that transformed and deepened meaning-making in plays. We will engage with theatre history, cultural history, and performance studies scholarship on stage direction, the provincial and international travels of players, and local customs which brought communities together through dancing, singing, acting, and sports like fencing.
Our purpose here is to arrive at an informed understanding of the central place of movement arts in Shakespeare’s and other playwrights’ works.
Finally, we will turn to a range of plays to interrogate how our reading practices have been altered and strengthened by our contextual discoveries.