Shakespeare And The Institution Of Theatre: The Best In This Kind

In this innovative study, Erica Sheen applies to Shakespearean theatre a model of institutional analysis drawn from media theory and the social sciences. She argues that our interpretation of Shakespeare's plays must begin with an account of the playhouse as a form of property, and that it is in the rise of concepts of ownership as duration that we begin to understand the critical implications of their distinctive temporality. In a series of highly original close readings, she show how his plays worked dynamically to create the culture of spectatorship that sustained them.