Preliminary Material -- Introduction: Dramatic Experience: The Poetics of Drama and the Early Modern Public Sphere(s) -- 1 Opening Spaces for the Reading Audience: Fernando de Rojas’s Celestina (1499/1502) and Niccolò Machiavelli’s Mandragola (1518) / Sven Thorsten Kilian -- 2 Why Do Men Go Blind in the Theatre? Gender Riddles and Fools’ Play in the Italian Renaissance Comedy Gl’Ingannati (1532) / Katja Gvozdeva -- 3 The Accademia degli Alterati and the Invention of a New Form of Dramatic Experience: Myth, Allegory, and Theory in Jacopo Peri’s and Ottavio Rinuccini’s Euridice (1600) / Déborah Blocker -- 4 Il favore degli dei (1690): Meta-Opera and Metamorphoses at the Farnese Court / Wendy Heller -- 5 Entertainment for Melancholics: The Public and the Public Stage in Carlo Gozzi’s L’Amore delle tre melarance / Tatiana Korneeva -- 6 Pierre Nicole, Jean-Baptiste Dubos, and the Psychological Experience of Theatrical Performance in Early Modern France / Logan J. Connors -- 7 The Catharsis of Prosecution: Royal Violence, Poetic Justice, and Public Emotion in the Russian Hamlet (1748) / Kirill Ospovat -- 8 The Politics of Tragedy in the Dutch Republic: Joachim Oudaen’s Martyr Drama in Context / Nigel Smith -- 9 Devils On and Off Stage: Shifting Effects of Fear and Laughter in Late Medieval and Early Modern German Urban Theatre / Hans Rudolf Velten -- 10 Imagining the Audience in Eighteenth-Century Folk Theatre in Tyrol / Toni Bernhart -- 11 Nô within Walls and Beyond: Theatre as Cultural Capital in Edo Japan (1603–1868) / Stanca Scholz-Cionca -- Index.

Available to subscribing member institutions only.

In Dramatic Experience: The Poetics of Drama and the Early Modern Public Sphere(s) Katja Gvozdeva, Tatiana Korneeva, and Kirill Ospovat (editions.) focus on a fundamental question that transcends the disciplinary boundaries of theatre studies: how and to what extent did the convergence of dramatic theory, theatrical practice, and various modes of audience experience — among both theatregoers and readers of drama — contribute, during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, to the emergence of symbolic, social, and cultural space(s) we call ‘public sphere(s)’? Developing a post-Habermasian understanding of the public sphere, the articles in this collection demonstrate that related, if diverging, conceptions of the ‘public’ existed in a variety of forms, locations, and cultures across early modern Europe — and in Asia.