Courses

Before the development of mass media—newspapers, television, film—who was famous and why? What did such fame entail, and what were the cultural uses to which celebrated individuals were put? This seminar examines the early modern commercial theater’s role in making people public, particularly those individuals unaffiliated with the court. How do early modern forms of popular fame resemble and differ from classical notions of fama, from the kinds of celebrity made possible in the eighteenth-century, and even from our own? We will consider these questions by turning to plays written by a number of early modern playwrights, including Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, and John Webster, in a range of different genres (comedy, tragedy, history).