Description:
Contrary to the view that Shakespeare was careless with plot details, Circumstantial Shakespeare reveals how he actually used circumstance to imply offstage actions, times, and places in terms of the motives and desires of his characters, thus creating coherent dramatic worlds and a sense of the feelings of characters inhabiting them.
Review Quotes: "Hutson examines the subtle ways in which the language of the drama inflects sensory experience to produce vivid notions of happening. Arguing against the largely accepted critical commonplace that Shakespeare was disinterested in neo-classical expectations of time and place, Hutson shows how 'circumstances' produced often very dense narratives of experience in which both time and place are clearly and carefully defined." --Charlotte Scott, Shakespeare Studies
"In this highly original study, Lorna Hutson makes a compelling case that Shakespeare fashioned the fully imagined worlds of his plays out of bits of language that Tudor grammar school students learned to insert in their orations and written compositions to render arguments coherent, probable, and vivid." --Joel B. Altman, Modern Philology"... a book that offers a genuinely new way to historicize what is at once the most distinctive and most elusive quality of Shakespeare's art: its almost uncanny ability to represent inner life ... Hutson is an expert in the art of scholarly argument." --Kevin Curran, Shakespeare Quarterly"Hutson's newest book, Circumstantial Shakespeare continues to refine her impressive insights about theatrical and legal culture in early modern England ... impressive [and] powerful." --Matthew Ritger, Los Angeles Review of Books"brilliant ... For such a slim volume, this punches above its weight in terms of the impact it will have on how we think about Shakespeare's artistry, and the rhetorical techniques that make words feel like lives." --Derek Dunne, Renaissance Studies"richly and compactly argued ... The implications of the thesis are far-reaching ... Written in an engaging, cerebral style by one of the foremost scholars of Renaissance humanism and theatre, Circumstantial Shakespeare urges a new perspective on Shakespeare's artistry." --William Weaver, Review of English Studies