Julie Sanders. <i>The Cambridge Introduction to Early Modern Drama, 1576-1642</i>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp xvii, 261.

Abstract

at Little Rock Cambridge published The Cambridge Introduction to Early English Theatre by Janette Dillon in 2006. That book approached its subject from a traditional perspective with chapters entitled 'Places of performance', 'Actors and audiences', 'Writers, controllers, and the place of the theatre', 'Genre and tradition', and 'Instruction and spectacle'. In other words, it was an introduction to theatre history in Shakespeare's time. This book by Julie Sanders, despite its duplicative title, is not that. It is, according to the Preface, 'all about making connections' (x). Those connections are between early modern drama and 'the wider performance cultures of the court, of noble households and estates, and of civic communities, including that of the burgeoning capital city of London itself' (x). Its chapters use genre-'Tragedy', 'Revenge drama', 'Histories', 'Comedy, pastoral and romantic', 'City comedies', 'Satire', and 'Tragicomedy'-as the primary organizing principle, and the book punctuates these chapters with thirteen case studies, many of which explore aspects of early modern dramaturgy. The discussions are intentionally not chronological 'in order to allow the rich lines of connection and synergy between [early and late plays] to emerge in fresh and unrestricted ways' (x). Nonetheless, in a nod toward readers seeking a linear treatment of historical events with dramatic and non-dramatic literature, Sanders appends a selective chronology. The strength of an approach by way of networks is that Sanders provides numerous engaging readings of those moments on stage from the early modern period that are very popular now and might have been so in their own time, moments such as the Porter's drunken ramblings about damnation in Macbeth and the testy exchange among the con artists that opens The Alchemist. A weakness is that readers do still need to know a lot of theatre history in order to appreciate the connections explored in those readings of stage moments. Recognizing this fact, Sanders devotes the introduction to an overview of what she calls 'deep theatre history' (3) in which she addresses the rise of outdoor playhouses in the 1570s, major theatrical participants

The nature of perception and emotion in aesthetic appreciation: A response to Makin’s challenge to empirical aesthetics.

“…Because appreciation events—assigning an affective or hedonic value to a sensory input—unfold as a function of a fundamental reward-behavior cycle (Berridge & Kringelbach, 2015; Kringelbach & Berridge, 2017), they really encompass a number of dissociable value mechanisms. For instance, parts of the appreciation event involve value mechanisms that specifically signal expected reward value, helping the organism prompt goal-directed behavior (Alcaro, Huber, & Panksepp, 2007; Berridge, Robinson, & Aldridge, 2009; Knutson & Karmakar, 2014; Knutson & Genevsky, 2018). Other value mechanisms compute and implement reward outcomes through integration of both expected reward signals and contextual information (Grabenhorst & Rolls, 2011; Knutson & Genevsky, 2018; Kringelbach, 2005; Rolls, 2016), thus producing value information tailored specifically to ongoing situational demands.…”