Early Modern Drama: Memory Studies, Historical Phenomenology, Cultural Geography

This study is part of the larger research project DramaSCAPES and explores the relation between the performance of space and the spaces of performance in the early modern period. It examines how multiple-venue plays like Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (1587) or Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) relied on the cognitive ecologies of the different material environments in which they were staged. Performances in varying sites worked with and on the memories spectators held, either of previous usages of the site, or of other sites evoked by a play. Different performance sites – understood as material environments – afforded different staging possibilities and different experiences of a performance. The project claims that some plays were produced with such spatial mnemonic affordances in mind, and that the printed playtexts bear traces of such site-responsive performances. Apart from generating innovative readings of selected plays, it seeks to establish ‘site-responsivity’ as a new concept in early modern performance studies and theatre history, which will help grasp the material and mental interactions between space, performance and audience at the heart of DramaSCAPEs.