Dramascapes

Project summary

DramaSCAPEs is a project in literary studies and theatre history that aims at developing an innovative conceptual framework for understanding early modern drama and its spatial, cognitive, affective and perceptual ecologies. The acronym not only indicates the dimensions of embodied experience in and of drama that the project combines for the first time. As a term, ‘scape’ also provides a key concept through which the category of space (as a topographical location) is rethought as an environment with specific affordances. We define ‘scape’ as a spatial organization that enables certain uses and modes of engagement. This concept allows us to redescribe the early modern theatre and the plays it staged as ‘dramascapes’ that related activities, actors and audiences in a dense web of material practices best understood as ecologies. We thus aim to rethink the settings in plays as well as the theatre itself as environments that afford certain uses, most importantly the forging and negotiating of inter-personal relationships in imagined, affective communities.

As an ecology, setting highlights the co-presence and inter-action between humans, but also between humans and the non-human environment. Such ecologies exist not only in the play-world but also in the playhouse: characters, actors and audiences are all emplaced as embodied subjects in the ‘taskscape’ of the playhouse that demands and affords a range of cognitive, affective and perceptual activities. DramaSCAPEs will test this framework in case studies that combine several of the dimensions through which the theatre culture between the 1580s and 1660s is to be studied.

The project aims to develop a new method for studying early modern drama, the material, embodied conditions of its performance and reception, as well as their potential for organizing collective responses to socio-political issues. Outputs will consist of four monographs by doctoral students, two research articles by the PI, a volume of conference proceedings, and an online glossary that makes the vocabulary and methodology developed in this intersectional project available to the scientific community. Thereby, it will contribute to restructuring the conceptual frameworks and critical vocabulary in related fields like cultural geography, distributed cognition studies, affect studies and historical phenomenology. Moreover, its recovery of the theatre’s central role in shaping cognitive, affective and perceptual behaviours in the early modern playhouse and outside of it will provide important impulses for understanding such processes in the performance-scapes of today.

DramaSCAPEs is a project at the University of Zurich,
generously funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation
(grant project number 10000512).