Intertheatricality

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines intertheatricality in early modern drama and particularly the ways that intertheatrical moments reveal how a present mode of playing distinguishes itself from modes that precede it, but which it also preserves as a resource. Playgoing, it argues, implied the ability to pick out many different types of theatrical elements, at many different scales; what appears to us as a textual crux or lacuna may signify an especially dense point on a system of intertheatrical references that has been lost. Through an analysis of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays such as Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, the chapter considers a shift from a notion of allusion—which produces complexity of meaning by juxtaposing two or more texts—to a notion of the analogue as a resource of theatrical possibility, familiarity, and difference. It shows that the formal elements in circulation discerned by intertheatricality appear not only as forms, but also as themes of theatrical performance.

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