Queen Mary, University of London
Graduate Student, English & Drama
Collaborative Doctoral Award student
Thesis Title: Globe Audiences: A Comparison of Early Modern and Current Spectatorship
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Dr Bridget Escolme
Dr Farah Karim Cooper |
About
My current doctoral research is an audience studies project that examines the conditions of production and reception at the reconstructed Globe theatre, 1997-2010, and comparatively at the first Globe theatre, 1599-1613. It considers how meaning is made by/for audiences, and how spectatorship ‘works’ in this space.
The thesis addresses the conditions of production and reception through four comparative focuses on: Space and History in the current and early modern theatre; the Labour of Spectatorship at the Globe; Illusion at the Globe; and the production of Antagonism and a sense of Community at the Globe.
Audience studies has predominantly been carried out demographically through surveys, or critically through reviews, or suppositionally through an extension of individual experience and prejudice. An engagement with the possibilities of comparative research for creating new knowledge about current and historical spectatorship represents a methodological vanguard in audience studies. Furthermore, audiences are, for the most part, spoken on behalf-of, by critics, practitioners and academics. This is an oversight which this project attempts to address. The collaborative nature of this project has made it possible to gather first-hand audience accounts of pleasure and engagement. This research intervenes in work done on audiences in both Shakespeare Studies and Performance Studies. It is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
