The Aesthetics of Spectacle in Early Modern Drama and Modern Cinema: Robert Greene's Theatre of Attractions Jenny Sager This is a highly original study, which offers an innovative new approach towards the study of early modern drama. This book examines the work of the Elizabethan playwright, Robert Greene, arguing that his plays are innovative in their use of spectacle. This study's most striking feature is the use of the one-to-one analogies between Greene's drama and modern cinema, in order to explore the plays' stage effects. While recent Shakespearean criticism interprets his drama through the lens of performance, criticism of non-Shakespearean drama continues to disconnect the plays from even the scarce performances of them today. This book aims to bring the study of performance into the realm of non-Shakespearean drama so that the plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries might not descend further into obscurity. This innovative study advocates the rejection of a purely text-based interpretation of drama and emphasizes the powerful visual dimension of the early modern stage.

The introduction offers a succinct survey of the critical field and the issue's contribution to it. Establishing the contributors' methodological strategies and core arguments, the introduction will set out the principal aims, content and structure of the special issue.

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