“The Sense of an Audience: Spectators and Spectatorship in Early Modern England, 1576-1612

Rodgers’ dissertation examines discourses of spectatorship that emerge alongside the development of the professional theater in early modern England. The sixteenth century witnessed a surge in a particular form of mass entertainment: professional drama. As the English commercial theater prospered, Tudor-Stuart culture developed new ways to describe the sort of looking that playgoing encouraged. Audience studies have tended to focus primarily on the effects of twentieth-century visual mediums on the modern spectator. Rodgers reframes spectatorship as a subject of inquiry that has been shaped by multiple influences and histories rather than as a telos that culminates in modern viewing technologies and subjects.