Abstract
Staged normality may not be a concept one readily associates with pre-modern drama, and perhaps especially not with the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. This volume demonstrates that in fact the establishing of normality and its norms was an intrinsic part of early modern drama. In the introductory chapter to the volume, Loughnane first attends to the reasons why staged normality has been widely overlooked in critical accounts of early modern drama, focusing in particular on how dramatists sustain playgoer attention. Next, Loughnane turns to theoretical work about the idea of normality, before discussing the critical turn towards the ‘everyday’ in the early twenty-first-century literary criticism. The Introduction concludes with a summary account of the chapters in the volume.
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Loughnane, R. (2019). Introduction: Stages of Normality. In: Loughnane, R., Semple, E. (eds) Staged Normality in Shakespeare's England. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00892-5_1
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