Entertaining Uncertainty in the Early Modern Theater

By Lauren Robertson

Lauren Robertson, a professor of English and Comparative Literature, shows in Entertaining Uncertainty that the theater of Shakespeare and his contemporaries responded to the crises of knowledge that roiled through early modern England by rendering them spectacular. Revealing the radical, exciting instability of the early modern theater's representational practices, she uncovers the uncertainty that went to the heart of the playgoing experience during this period. Doubt was not merely the purview of Hamlet and other onstage characters, but was an essential element of spectators' imaginative participation in performance. Robertson shows that the theater in early modern England was a place for the entertainment of uncertainty—its pleasures made the very act of unknowing possible.