Theater, Judgment, Form: Three Case Studies

Come check out our panel on Saturday 23 March at the 2024 Renaissance Society of America conference in Chicago, USA!

Session Title: Theater, Judgment, Form: Three Case Studies

Session Description: Situating itself at the crossroads of performance studies, book history, and intellectual history, this session explores how theater (as a material practice) and judgment (as a rhetorical skill) existed in a mutually constitutive relationship in early modern England, often playing itself out at the level of form. Each of the three papers in this session offers a case study in what this might look like, treating “form” variously in dramaturgical, typographic, and generic terms. A closing response will frame these papers through a series of broader literary, cultural, and philosophical questions. This session is part of four-year collaborative research project called “Theater and Judgment in Early Modern England,” funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, based at the University of Lausanne, and directed by Kevin Curran. It will be of potential interest to any scholar working on theater and the history of ideas, rhetoric and humanist education, or theories of form.

Organizer and Chair: Kevin Curran (University of Lausanne)

Respondent: Stephanie Elsky (Rhodes College)

“Typographies of Judgment in Lodge and Greene’s A Looking Glass for London and England”

Céline Magada (University of Lausanne)

“Embodying Judgment in Respublica (c. 1553)”

Patrick Durdel (University of Lausanne)

“Shakespeare’s Tragicomic Experimentation: Erasmian and Morean ‘Morosophy’ in Shakespeare’s Late Plays”

Georgia Fulton (University of Geneva)