Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage argues that environment and embodied thought continually shaped one another in the performance of early modern English drama. It demonstrates this, first, by establishing how characters think through their surroundings - not only how they orient themselves within unfamiliar or otherwise strange locations, but also how their environs function as the scaffolding for perception, memory, and other forms of embodied thought. It then contends that these moments of thinking through place theorise and thematise the work that playgoers undertook in reimagining the stage as the setting of the dramatic fiction. By tracing the relationship between these two registers of thought in such plays as The Malcontent, Dido Queen of Carthage, Tamburlaine, King Lear, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and Bartholomew Fair, this book shows that drama makes visible the often invisible means by which embodied subjects acquire a sense of their surroundings. It also reveals how, in doing so, theatre altered the way that playgoers perceived, experienced, and imagined place in early modern England.

About the Author
Andrew Bozio is Assistant Professor of English at Skidmore College, where he teaches courses on early modern English drama and literary theory.

Reviews
Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage is an ambitious rethinking of the ways in which playwrights, players, and audiences collaborated to imagine places into being. * Jonathan Baldo, Shakespeare Quarterly *
Thinking through Place returns to the hexed ground of the theater of memory, astutely distinguishing theater from memory theater as mobile to static, changeable to durable. Recognizing both the long tradition of analysis of theatrical place and its own distinctness within it, Thinking through Place reweaves pioneering and foundational work by Frances Yates, Mary Carruthers, Lina Bolzoni, John Gillies, and Richard Helgerson on mental and global geographies in terms of particular institutions of performance and how through them various kinds of places are opened imaginatively by players to viewers ... Thinking through Place concentrates on how the place of the playhouse constructed other places, but it ends with a powerful observation that seems to promise a new world to explore * William N. West, SEL *
Admirable for its clarity despite its often complex content, Thinking Through Place provides some useful new vocabulary and a fresh approach to the application of theories of place to early modern drama ... The number and variety of plays Bozio uses to make his argument speak to the interpretive potential of applying his concept of ecological thinking to the early modern dramatic canon. * Jess Landis, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England *
In this deeply thoughtful and layered book, Andrew Bozio argues that early modern drama reveals important insights into the complex human process of turning natural spaces into meaningful sites of place-thought and -being... impressive intellectual work of this illuminating book makes me want to read Bozio's thoughts about co-evolved embodiment and emplacement in his future research. * Randall Martin, Early Theatre *
... worth studying for its innovative and well-grounded ideas. * J. S. Carducci, CHOICE *
In Thinking through Place on the Early Modern English Stage, Andrew Bozio offers fresh readings of some of the most interesting plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries and provides a compelling account of how "thinking unfolds through and as an ecology on the earlymodern English stage" (183). * David McInnis, Modern Philology *



Book Information
ISBN 9780198846567
Author Andrew Bozio
Format Hardback
Page Count 226
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 428g
Dimensions(mm) 223mm * 145mm * 22mm