Coriolanus , Antitheatricalism, and Audience Response

Abstract

This article examines the intersection of early modern English antitheatricalism, performing bodies, and audience response, arguing for a re-invigoration of a sense of theatre's "corporeality" that looks beyond conventional, semiotically-influenced readings of the bodies presented and represented on the early modern stage. The essay concentrates in particular on how the antitheatrical (or anti-audience) rhetoric of tract writers, Elizabethan civic officials and even playwrights themselves was concerned with the moral and ethical implications inherent in the live transaction between performers and spectators, and their potential to frustrate or confound the rational, stable legibility of social and cosmological hierarchies. Using Coriolanus in light of these descriptions affords a focus on how the drama places the protagonist's body at the centre of the phenomenal, lived experience of performative exchange, an exchange it depicts as profoundly unstable. The reading offers insight into Coriolanus' depiction of the audience as an active agent in constructing the body's meaning in social performance as not merely consistent with contemporary antitheatrical sentiment, but, even more so, the play's dramatization of the engagement between the actor's presenting body and the onstage audience. Through engaging with the text in this way, the article seeks to offer an image of performative corporeality that may serve to redress the balance of overly "bookish" readings of early modern theatre.