Experiential and Experimental Knowledge on the Early Modern English Stage

Early modern dramatists entertained audiences by staging experiential and experimental knowledge, especially consequential forms of coming to or arriving at knowledge. The contributors to this collection explore the ways in which the culture’s fascination with forms of knowledge creation – scientific, experiential, religious – shaped early modern drama. Experiential and Experimental Knowledge on the Early Modern English Stage addresses these issues from phenomenological, political and ethical perspectives and in terms of histories of science, cognitive and affective studies, and discourses of the body. Across the volume, the contributors articulate how the early modern stage served as a site where knowledge was not merely performed but produced and interrogated, imagined and transformed.