Staging Failure

Midway through The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Rafe mistakes the Bell Inn for an ancient castle. This chapter draws upon that episode to show how failures of ecological thinking can disrupt the assumptions that are embedded within a particular place. Contrasting Rafe’s misreading of the Bell with similar episodes in Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, the chapter establishes both the particular cognitive ecology that sustains Rafe’s error and its implications for early modern theater. It argues that Rafe’s disorientation satirizes the way that early modern playgoers reimagined the stage as a dramatic setting, helping to illuminate the multiple mistakes that George and Nell make as they interrupt the performance of The London Merchant. Borrowing insights from queer theory and disability studies, the chapter concludes by suggesting that George and Nell’s disorientation reveals the normative conventions that are embedded within the physical and social environment of the early modern playhouse. In this way, madness, confusion, and other forms of cognitive failure allow The Knight of the Burning Pestle to stage the incommensurability of the two dominant ways of thinking through the Blackfriars.

Marlowe and the Ecology of Remembrance

This chapter argues that Marlowe’s earliest dramatic works—namely, Dido, Queen of Carthage and the first and second parts of Tamburlaine—share an investment in ecological memory, a form of recollection in which place shapes both the contours and the contents of memory itself. In Dido, Aeneas’s efforts to remember the fallen city of Troy—first through hallucination and later through his attempts to rebuild that city—reveal a tension at the heart of ecological memory, the ease with which the memory of a place can disrupt an individual’s sense of their immediate surroundings and thereby disorient them. Similarly, Tamburlaine stages a tension between two ways of thinking through the environment: a territorializing thought, embodied in Tamburlaine’s “aspyring mind,” and the ecological memory that is figured most poignantly in Zenocrate’s relationship to Damascus. In this way, Marlowe’s earliest plays trace the gap between places remembered and those imagined in order to stage the collision of different forms of ecological thinking.

Forms of Emplacement

Taking its cue from William Sly’s performance of a disoriented playgoer in the Induction to John Marston’s The Malcontent, this chapter puts theatrical performance in dialogue with two other modes of thinking through place in the early modern period: first, what Mary Carruthers has termed the “architectural” model of the arts of memory, and, second, chorography, or the practice of describing a region in terms of its topographical features and history. It argues that these modes resemble one another in depicting place as a kind of phenomenological assemblage, one that comes into being as the disparate features of an ambient environment are perceived and organized within embodied thought. This resemblance reveals the intimate relationship between environment and embodied thought within the early modern English playhouse, and it thereby suggests that theatrical performance was less a form of spatial abstraction than a means of transforming the way that playgoers perceived, experienced, and navigated their surroundings.

Bartholomew Fair and the Performativity of Place

This chapter uses Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair to theorize the performativity of place on the early modern stage. The Induction establishes what will be a central concern for Jonson’s play: namely, how can Bartholomew Fair contend with the memories that playgoers have of the fair’s setting in Smithfield, when such memories may reveal the inadequacy of the theatrical enterprise? Tracing the play’s efforts to resolve this problem in its engagement with the perceptions and the memories of playgoers, the chapter shows how the Induction functions as a cognitive system for managing thought within the playhouse, to the specific end of creating a theatrical Smithfield. Similarly, the play’s depiction of Smithfield shows how perception, movement, and other forms of embodied thought work together to bring place into being. Like the atoms of the Lucretian universe, which shape the cosmos through continual swerving, the characters of Bartholomew Fair create Smithfield through their collective movement, revealing that space is not an a priori dimension but rather an emergent entity. By figuring Smithfield as a site in which individuals and ideologies repeatedly collide with one another—most notably in the interaction of Bartholomew Cokes and Zeal-of-the-land Busy—the play foregrounds the generative potential of disruption and displacement to suggest that disorientation can alter the physical contours of a place.

The Perception of Place in King Lear

This chapter traces the relationship between perception and place in King Lear. Through a reading of Gloucester’s claim to “see” the world “feelingly,” it first argues that Shakespeare’s play both theorizes and enacts a phenomenology of place in the approach to Dover cliff. There, Edgar’s efforts to deceive his father as to the nature of his surroundings work not only reveal the role of perception within the phenomenology of place; they also disrupt that phenomenology, as Edgar’s suggestion that his father’s senses betray him leaves Gloucester with no way of orientating himself within the world. Similarly, Lear’s encounter with the storm shows that the inability to feel one’s surroundings can effect a kind of displacement, leading to a profound disorientation in madness. As such, the chapter furthers the book’s inquiry into the nature of ecological thinking by shifting the emphasis to moments in which such thinking fails, as characters struggle to orient themselves within increasingly imperceptible locations.

Introduction

Through a brief reading of Doctor Faustus, the introduction first suggests how characters think through their surroundings on the early modern English stage and how, in turn, playgoers relied upon the same process to orient themselves within the dramatic fiction. Drawing upon the concepts of situated cognition and cognitive ecology, the introduction defines this process of thinking through place as “ecological thinking.” After establishing that characters typically engage in ecological thinking to orient themselves within place, the introduction concludes by suggesting how this emphasis upon embodied and extended thought reframes our understanding of the relationship between space and place on the early modern stage.

Conclusion

The conclusion draws together the book’s major findings through a reading of Descartes’s Discourse on Method, focusing primarily upon the relationship between place and thought in the theorization of the cogito. Against Descartes’s fantasy of disembodied and placeless mind, the conclusion suggests that early modern English drama stages the impossibility of separating thought from its foundation in embodiment and environment, as well as the consequences—alternately tragic and comic—of attempting to do so. Not only do the plays considered in this book show thinking to be an ecological phenomenon; they also reveal that the act of thinking through place can transform the contours of a location.