Speaker
Description
My paper treats Shakespeare’s public theaters as microcosmic focal points for macrocosmic feeling. Specifically, I establish a relationship between the architecture of public theaters like Shakespeare’s Globe, which was explicitly designed and named to reflect its representational scope, and the theatrical manipulation of its audiences’ sense of proprioception—the sensation of weight, position, and motion in the body. I show how specific moments in Hamlet, King Lear, and The Tempest align these systems to position audiences in overlapping cosmī, including the globe of the earth.
This argument brings together current research in a range of disciplines, including new work on the dynamics of playgoing in theaters like the Globe, my ongoing research on the history of proprioception in early modern thought, and recent neurocognitive studies of vicarious somatosensation. In combination, these approaches suggest that early modern public performance was invested in fostering what I will call “cosmic feeling” or “global feeling” in its audiences: a visceral sense that they were pendant in radically extensive spheres that reached not only beyond the circle of the theater but far beyond the geographical limits of their knowledge.
Short Biography
Adam Rzepka is Associate Professor of English and Director of the English Graduate Program at Montclair State University, where he teaches early modern literature and critical theory. He holds a B.A. in English and Philosophy from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago.
His research focuses on the soul as a dynamic system in early modern faculty psychology, and on the ways in which engagements with this system animated theatrical performance. His primary book project, Making Experience: Shakespeare and the Art of Immediacy, undertakes an archeology of “experience” as a rapidly changing concept in early modern discourse, and argues for Shakespeare’s theater as a key testing ground for its knowledge claims. Parts of this project have been published in Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Studies, and multiple edited volumes from Oxford University Press, Edinburgh University Press, and Palgrave.
A second book project, Anima: The Soul in Motion on Shakespeare’s Stage, argues for the emergent centrality of both internal and external motion in the early modern sciences of the soul, and shows how Shakespeare both drew on and contributed to this centrality in popular models of the liberated soul. Theoretical groundwork for this project has appeared recently in a special issue of Renaissance Drama and an edited volume from Routledge; the paper proposed above is part of that groundwork as well.
| Keywords | Shakespeare, theater, sciences of the soul, proprioception |
|---|---|
| rzepkaa@montclair.edu | |
| Affiliation | Montclair State University (USA) |
| Position | Associate Professor |
