Chapter 4 turns to the watershed moment of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as the great anti-revenge play of its day, which by commenting on Kyd’s design and its diminished capacity for novelty, profoundly changed it. In the process, Shakespeare’s play became itself an ethically vacant theatrical space in the dramatic continuum of the period, which subsequent playwrights responded to viscerally. This chapter argues that Shakespeare introduces into the intra-theatrical ethics of the standard revenge plot a theatrical ethics of ‘marking’ which seeks to translate through spectacle and performance what is merely shown into that which is, in the world, finally marked and bearing the trace of a wound or a scar. In the process, the chapter reflects on Shakespeare’s wider intervention in the dramatic fortunes of Kyd’s dramatic legacy in raising the stakes for audience participation in the action to new levels of guilt and vexed ethical complicity.

This chapter considers non-state actors. It argues that only organized, not simply aggregate, groups can have a moral duty to securitize. This chapter goes on to examine relevant sub-state actors’ duties to securitize insiders and outsiders. Sub-state actors are permitted to securitize only when the state they reside in fails in its duty to deliver security. In such cases, relevant actors have a pro tanto obligation to securitize insiders; however, in situations where a quasi-social contract is established this duty evolves into an overriding duty. Outsiders are not – unlike in all the other chapters of this book – people in other states, but rather people not represented by the sub-state actor. Here, a pro tanto obligation to securitize outsiders is largely based on capacity.

In examining how practices of theatregoing were impacted by the war this chapter provides a partner to Claire Cochrane’s examination of theatre-making in Chapter 3. It considers changing audience demographics over the war and reveals how the ‘new’ audiences were often blamed for the deterioration of theatrical quality. It pays particular attention to the two groups of audiences that received the greatest attention during the war: women (especially single women and mothers) and servicemen. Whilst recognising the value of newspaper and magazine commentaries on audience, the chapter also draws on letters, memoirs, commentaries and diary entries to understand and draw out the first-person experience of theatre-going during the war. It highlights the impact of air raids, lighting restrictions, the Amusements Tax and other wartime conditions on audiences. It also shows how changing social realities and relations in the wider world impacted on the theatre, bringing new class and gender dynamics into the auditorium.

The Introduction begins by examining the treatment of First World War theatre in academic scholarship over the last century, and identifies reasons for its neglect and the resurgence of interest in the topic over the last decade. It considers this resurgence in relation to work on popular theatre, the focus on cultural histories of the war, and the centrality of theatre and performance to centenary commemorations. In addressing how theatre contributed to the war effort it considers themes including: recruitment and enlistment, fundraising for war charities, and the value of theatre for servicemen and the wouded. It also considers challenges to theatre production created by the wartime conditions. Drawing on the work of the Great War Theatre project it highlights the large number of war-themed plays produced during the war, arguing that plays did not have to ignore the war to be entertaining or popular. The introduction emphasises the importance of looking at the diversity of theatrical production across the country and in both amateur and professional contexts. As such it provides the framework for the in-depth analyses of these and other topics examined across the volume.

Although the theatre industry developed mainly from the nineteenth century onwards, Parisian theatres in Molière’s time already had some aspects of modern commercial entertainment – developing strategies to generate additional income and revenue through private performances, for example. This chapter examines how companies competed to position themselves as leaders in the Parisian market. It assesses the seasonal programming and level of success of the plays that were performed, examining the knock-on effect of increased competition on the Hôtel de Bourgogne in the 1660s, and shows the spending and investment choices of Molière’s troupe. As a commercial enterprise, the troupe aimed to attract Parisian audiences while continuing to please the court. It paid, therefore, particular attention to its facilities and services in the capital, and travelled outside Paris to participate in court festivities. The company had to juggle its duty to the King, for whom sumptuous and expensive entertainments were a means of showing his power and influencing other European courts, and to its bourgeois Parisian clients, who provided it with a regular income and could not, therefore, be neglected. In this respect Molière proved to be a wise man, becoming a wealthy entrepreneur of spectacles.

Given that short poems were composed in the first instance for viva voce delivery to an audience (e.g. at a dinner party), the hospites of poem 4 can be located in the dining room of the poet’s home at Sirmio, and the contubernales of poem 37 on benches outside a bar on the south side of the Forum piazza. Evidence is provided of the way a poet’s friends would find ‘live audiences’ for his poems; this was the primary form of their ‘publication’, long before collection in a papyrus book. The ‘social history’ context of the poems has been unhelpfully neglected in previous scholarship.

Copyright’s test for infringement takes a uniform approach to aesthetics by treating all audiences and modalities of creative expression the same. We now know that this is not how aesthetic judgment works. The chapter describes how the law can be reformed to take differences in audiences and artistic media into account. The chapter also responds to potential objections to the use of neuroaesthetics in this legal context. A better understanding of how audiences perceive art, if implemented in the right manner, can help protect both economic and non-economic values embedded in copyright law in a more transparent way.

This chapter reconsiders the relationship between pleasure and judgement in the early modern playhouse. Whilst the significance of both pleasure and judgement to early modern playgoing is long established, critical studies have often followed the lead of a few particular playwrights’ most irritable paratextual pronouncements, in which rather extreme versions of judgement and of pleasure are explicitly framed as opposites: the censure of the wisest and highest of status is contrasted with an unthinking and unlearned pleasure that is itself defined as a lack of discernment.

Chapter 6 brings together evidence of all kinds from the whole period to create a vivid picture of popular opera and its audience in the theatre. ‘Theatre Size and Ambience’ correlates detailed historical information to produce a systematic overview of many theatre buildings, together with interior details and size of musical ensembles. Ticket admission prices at the Opéra, Comédie-Italienne and the Fair theatres are compared and assessed. Descriptions by a number of eyewitnesses (French, Italian, English, Irish and German observers) combine to give an impression of activity in popular theatre seen from the audience’s point of view. In a survey of staging, the evidence is both visual and textual: engraved and painted illustrations are analysed and ‘corrected’ so that the proportions of stage sets can be understood. Then a synopsis of stage directions suggests the material range of experience in popular opera. A survey of lighting effects is discussed in relation to stage context, showing how some comedies combined lighting effects with music.

In her 1949 article ‘We Want Books – But Do We Encourage Our Writers?’, Jamaican writer Una Marson alludes to the lack of exposure of Caribbean writers to potential readers and bemoans the lack of interest in reading. She also implies that Caribbean writers might be scarce or unproductive because they lack financial support. As the second decade of the twenty-first century closes, it is clear that the cultivation of a Caribbean reading audience as well as a market for Caribbean literature has gathered momentum since 1949. This essay considers the role of literary prizes and festivals in stimulating new writing, in growing a global audience for Caribbean literature and in supporting the careers of Caribbean writers in the region and in the Caribbean diaspora.

What do audience members feel when they go to playhouses, and how and why do they feel it? This essay explores responses to performances within plays as models for imagining the circulation of emotions in theatres. In Much Ado About Nothing, Claudio watches other men play-act versions of himself courting Hero, while Beatrice and Benedick fall in love by eavesdropping on staged stories of each other’s feelings. In Measure for Measure, a deputy representing Duke Vincentio responds unpredictably to watching Isabella’s commissioned performance of pleading on her brother’s behalf. Like playgoers, these characters experience emotions by participating vicariously in deliberately orchestrated dramas. In particular, identifying with surrogates who act on their behalf offers them otherwise risky forms of affective licence. In his depictions of these responses to performances, Shakespeare explores the uneasy status of the artificially induced emotions experienced in playhouses, and the thorny question of who or what is responsible for generating them.

Of all the many disparaging comments aimed at Jonson over the years, the accusation that he, or his work, is ‘pedantic’, is one of the most common. With reference to Montaigne, early modern debates about Latinate language, and the appearance of Jonson’s plays and poetry in the 1616 Works, this essay attempts to reframe the idea of pedantry to illuminate the broader meanings of the term as it is applied to Jonson. What is that concept doing in critical discourse? How does it position scholars, readers, and teachers in social space? As it pursues these ideas, the essay links some of the evidence of Jonson’s putative pedantry to wider aesthetic and thematic patterns in his 1616 folio. It argues that elements of the Works that get called ‘pedantic’ often reach out in complex ways to an audience that was only just beginning to understand itself as such. Along the way, it pays close attention to the logic of insult, to the place of complex and incomprehensible language in the plays, and to the effects of Jonson’s favourite technique for playful, and sometimes angry audience creation: division and classification.

From the time of their premieres, Carmen was an immediate success both in Portugal (Lisbon, 1885, in Italian) and, before this, in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro, 1881, in French). By 1915, thanks to travelling companies, principally Italian and French, the opera was widely known and popular throughout both countries, reaching not only principal cities on the coast or up river, but also in the interior, accessible through the increasing railway networks, particularly striking in the hinterland of São Paulo. Performance conditions were very variable, with difficulties often experienced in relation to the orchestra and choruses. Audiences in Lisbon had very high expectations, which were rarely met, while in Brazil reception was much more spontaneous and appreciative. Parodies of Carmen, imported and locally produced, were a feature in both countries. In 1911 a travelling children’s company in Rio, São Paulo and the south of Brazil raised questions in the local press about working conditions and particularly child labour.

In this chapter Jolyon Mitchell analyses how audiences, journalists and producers interact with media representations of violence. More precisely he examines the practices of revealing, representing, redacting, remembering, and responding to mediated images of violence, using a wide range of examples from different media. While recognizing the power of vivid journalistic written and verbal descriptions of violence, through this essay Mitchell primarily considers visual representations over the last two centuries, starting from the 1810s, in the decade before the first photograph (c.1826), to the present day, concentrating upon non-cinematic examples, such as photographic portrayals of non-fictional violence. Other practices such as hiding, selecting, overlooking, forgetting and recollecting are juxtaposed with these core practices of revealing, representing, redacting, remembering and responding. Mitchell argues that these related practices contribute to the way violence manifests itself around the circuit of communication, which begins with acts of creation and production of images of violence, and which is then followed by their dissemination, reception and recycling. Reflecting further on this circuit of communication and these related practices helps answer questions such as: Why do certain images of violence receive more attention than others? Why are some media representations of violence remembered and others easily forgotten?

Operettas and their creation have long been considered a system of standardized production. This chapter examines the ‘operetta industry’ as it developed in Vienna around 1900 with a focus on theatrical production practice and the ways it shaped the genre’s artistic development. Sources include librettos, periodicals, archival sources and Operettenkönige, a backstage operetta novel of unknown authorship, published in 1911. Vienna’s operetta circle was a self-contained, vertically integrated system which controlled all aspects of operetta composition and production, from the mentorship of young composers to press reception and the publication and export of successful works. Critics saw this regulation as an impediment to artistic innovation, but to insiders the high level of control was necessary to set genre conventions. For them, innovation belonged in the small-scale, self-conscious manipulation of these norms. While lucrative and popular, the industry did not often easily respond to large-scale change, and eventually became so highly leveraged that a single unsuccessful season could put a major theatre out of business. As operetta declined in favour of the revue and film, the industry disintegrated.

In a continuation of the previous chapter, Chapter 3, which seals the book’s first section, explores how Iranian women’s magazines of the late Pahlavi era sought to co-opt new readership—culturally, socially and economically—and how circumstances of their production, cultural trends, technological innovations, and ensuing developments in the media industry affected their efforts. Understanding the circumstances under which these magazines developed and operated contributes to the assessment not only of their content, but also their approach to various categorizations of the woman of modernity. It reveals the complex structure and process of the magazines’ representation of women, the cultural and economic formations that supported it, and the social relations involved in the production of the gendered discourse and identity in the late Pahlavi era.